Down the rabbit hole we go: Do professionals trust AI?

The reality is that developers are already using AI. 44% of them use AI tools in their development process now, and 26% plan to soon. Even more of those learning to code (55%) are currently using AI tools, and these early adopters will become established AI users once they settle into a professional developer position. 

While a growing number of developers are using AI tools, they aren’t using a wide variety. We asked developers which tools they were using, and out of the 21 options we listed this year, a vast majority are just using the two popular products: ChatGPT (83%) and GitHub Copilot (56%). Professional developers may need time to adjust existing workflows, and will most likely be motivated by their junior colleagues who are using AI tools while learning to code.

It’s early days in the hype cycle for these newer AI technologies. We expect that a little more time may need to pass before we see developers using more AI tools more broadly. Another factor that may be contributing to the slow adoption of AI tools into the development process is that professional developers don’t highly trust the accuracy of AI tools. Of those using or planning to use AI tools, only 3% highly trust the accuracy they provide, and twice as many (6%) highly distrust them. While the majority (39%) are somewhat trusting of AI tools, this response tells us that AI tools still need to prove their usefulness. 

When it comes to important matters like school or work, these new tools are not an easy button, and the axiom “trust but verify” is most likely the best approach to integrating new tools in the development process. On the AI Stack Exchange site, one of the most-visited questions so far this year is “Why is ChatGPT bad at math?” The question deals with the inability of AI tools, specifically those trained on large language models, to understand complex questions. But people get these sorts of problems wrong regularly, as well. 

Where you are currently working also has an impact on whether or not you are using AI tools. Professional developers from India, Brazil, and Poland are most likely to use or plan on using AI tools as part of their development workflow—all responding at 70% or higher. UK, French, US, and German developers are more likely to say they don’t plan on using AI tools (responding at 36% or higher). A lot of new tech talent is being sourced from India and Brazil, a trend inferred from the large number of young developers in high salary-growth positions as reported in past developer surveys, so more prevalent use of AI tools in these regions makes sense. 

Why would the EU countries and the US be more likely to report resistance to AI tools? Recent news has highlighted the possibility of imminent EU regulations for AI via pre-existing GDPR laws, and France has already begun investigating complaints against ChatGPT. In the US, no regulations currently exist, but companies are beginning to publicize their policies for banning ChatGPT at work, while Stack Overflow and Reddit have also publicly stated that they will start charging for data access to protect the attribution and contributions of their communities. Accuracy concerns and rules, whether legal or in the workplace, are keeping developers from rapidly adopting some AI tools.

Curiouser and curiouser: Why use AI tools at all?

Regardless of current use and intentions to use later, developers are positive about the possibilities.  Most feel favorable (77%) towards using AI tools as part of their development workflow—but we do see some differences between groups. Blockchain developers, data scientists, and front-end or fullstack developers are more likely to be using AI tools now. Embedded application developers, desktop/enterprise developers, and hardware engineers are less likely to be using these tools and less inclined to use them in the future.

AI has a complexity cliff. Much like Helmsman’s complexity cliff, a concept found in project management, after a certain point, the ability for AI to handle all the nuances and interdependencies of a solution drops off. That’s when humans, their adaptability to apply judgment and have original thought, saves the day.   

Out of all the developer roles who have a favorable view of AI tools, senior executives top the list (63%) alongside data scientists and blockchain developers.  Developers working in data science and blockchain using AI makes sense: they are well-versed in this type of technology. It makes even more sense when we see the response to our question about what use cases developers have for AI tools they’re using today. The overwhelming majority use AI tools to write code (83%) or debug code (49%). We’d expect hardware engineers not to use AI for now, given their low confidence in these tools’ accuracy and the hands-on aspects of their job.  When we asked developers about the benefits of AI tools, 33% believe increasing productivity is the most important benefit.  Senior executives that do not have direct experience with these use cases may be in positions to see their colleagues’ explorations with productivity around writing and/or debugging code and want to try it out within their team or share amongst other people managers.  

We asked developers how they thought AI tools would evolve their workflow over the next year, and 77% feel that the next year will look somewhat or very different for writing code with AI, and 75% feel the same about debugging code with AI. Updating the tools and evolving the learning curve will likely benefit those currently using AI tools or planning to soon. 

The age of AI-integrated development is still in its infancy, but developers around the world have let us know that they are actively engaged, curious, and not looking away. Make sure to check out all the wonderful details at Stack Overflow Labs!

The post Hype or not? AI’s benefits for developers explored in the 2023 Developer Survey appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

We also took a look at the real sentiments behind this year’s surge in AI popularity. Is it making a real impact in the way developers work or is it all hype? Head over to the blog post for a recap of the top insights, but check out Stack Overflow Labs for the deep dive details.

The times, they are a-changin’ 

For those that are very early or very late in their coding careers, or just prefer other methods of online learning besides Stack Overflow, it’s safe to assume we may be under-indexing those folks.  Our top five key territories are the same as previous years with a slight shift in which countries are offering the top number of responses: the U.S. is consistently the number one country for responses, but this year we saw India drop from the second highest response rate to third place behind Germany.  Over two years, we have seen the responses from India drop 50% while responses from Germany have grown by 30%.  Indian developers taking the survey this year are skewing a little younger (89% under 34) compared to the age distribution of all respondents (62% under 34) so we may be missing responses from a segment of more experienced developers in India.  Overall, the age distribution has moved slightly older this year with 37% of respondents aged 35 or older compared to 31% last year.  

Among the top ten programming languages this year, we see three popular languages increase their standing: Python, Bash/Shell (all shells), and C.  

We know from tracking tags on Stack Overflow that Python has been growing in popularity for the last three years, and this year it’s moved up one spot to take number three. Along with the rise in Python’s popularity, we consistently see Python libraries rank highly in our popular “Other technologies and frameworks” section—NumPy and Pandas have been in the top ten for the last three years.  

C is an interesting language to see rise in popularity: it has not been in the top ten for programming languages in the Developer Survey before despite being around since the 1970’s.  The TIOBE index has C as the second most popular programming language as of June 2023 and has engagement numbers close to their number one language, Python.  Given that C is one of the most popular low-level languages, it’s the language of choice in embedded programming within IoT devices,  and it “powers almost every technological experience we have” according to Codecademy, it makes sense that developers are using C more than ever this year. 

The more popular a programming language is, the less experience on average we see reported from developers this year (around ten years for our top three languages, and closer to 14 years for those languages reporting less than 1% usage).  Less experienced developers reporting higher usage of some programming languages possibly strengthens the argument that a lower barrier of entry into the job force increases their popularity among coders.

Overall, the baseline for salary growth in 2023 was 10% over last year.  When controlling for comparable years of experience, we see a wide range of growth and decline amongst the programming languages (as much as 42% growth and 69% contraction year-over-year).  If we take a language’s popularity as a proxy for prevalence of developers in the labor market, then we could assume that salaries for popular languages will fall and less popular ones will rise. Our top three most popular languages—JavaScript, HTML/CSS and Python—all saw negative growth in median salary (ranging from 5-10% contraction) while the three least popular languages we can match to comparable experience—APL, Crystal and SAS—we see even less salary growth (ranging from 8 to 80% contraction).  But if we look at the same languages but adjust for less than average experience (for example, 5 years less experience than average per programming language), we see marginal growth for our top three and double-digit growth for APL and Crystal (SAS was filtered from the results for not having enough responses).  What we surmise is that developers’ negotiating power has been affected this year and those with a few less years of experience and working in more niche languages have more salary upside this year than developers with more experience in more popular programming languages. 

Get inspired by technologies admired and desired 

This year, we added a new section to the survey results for technology trends for those who have used or want to use programming languages, tools, environments, libraries, etc., that we have dubbed “Admired and Desired”.  Developers discover new technologies via Stack Overflow or their network, blogs, online forums, etc., and based on preliminary research, would like to try them out.  Once a developer has had a chance to try said technology out, how many of them would still want to use it?  

To better gauge hype versus reality, we created a visualization that shows the distance between the proportion of respondents who want to use a technology (“desired”) and the proportion of users that have used the same technology in the past year and want to continue using it (“admired”).  For those with wide distances between them (and the admired metric remaining on the larger end of the scale), we can infer that momentum generated by the hype grows with hands-on use. With shorter distances, we can infer that the hype is doing much of the heavy lifting as far as general popularity is concerned.  For example, we can see JavaScript, ranked as most popular programming language since 2011, has a relatively short distance between admired and desired (<10 percentage points), while Rust, a top choice for developers who want to use a new technology for the past eight years, shows a wide distance (>60 percentage points); Rust is a language that generates more desire to use it once you get to know it than JavaScript.  Seeing this growth in admiration for certain technologies gives us insight into what has staying power and what needs help in order to generate coveted evangelists to convert new users into ones that will stick around. 

Do admired technologies equate to financial security, as well?  The top admired programming languages (>70% who have used them in the past year want to continue using them)—Rust, Elixir, and Zig—all have 20% or more higher salaries than the overall median developers in 2023 (roughly $75K annually). There is certainly not a direct correlation between salaries and the admiration factor since we see Python, TypeScript, and HTML/CSS all have admiration scores above 60% but only make marginally better annual salaries than the overall median.  Perhaps part of the devotion to some of these popular and admired programming languages is the confidence developers attain by having that lower barrier to entry mentioned earlier; programmers can become sufficient and hired with less experience and get the benefit of so many online resources and Stack Overflow answers to help continue their learning process.

We have a video where we take you through our favorite highlights from the 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey. We started out trying to make this a 10-minute video, but we had so much to share…check it out here.

The post 2023 Developer Survey results are in: the latest trends in technology and work from the Stack Overflow community appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

The Developer Survey asked respondents to supply country information so we can understand trends in salary roles while controlling for factors like experience and location. India and Brazil saw salary growth of 22.7% and 16.9% respectively across all tech roles, compared to 8% in the U.S. and 3.4% in Germany. India and Brazil’s large pool of educated and skilled workers may have been undervalued prior to the pandemic, and the increased demand for tech was good timing for these two countries in different ways. An increased willingness to hire remote for full-time roles in critical positions may also have driven this change.

The world had high demand for technology in 2022, and India was successfully positioned with the supply of talent to meet it. India’s revenue growth in the tech sector increased 10% year-over-year during the time our 2022 survey was collecting data, compared to 8.6% for the same year in the U.S. 

While Brazil doesn’t have the population that India does, it is certainly supplying an abundance of new talent: data from Brasscom posits that even with  ~250K new IT graduates per year and growing, the demand is still exceeding the supply of new talent available to work in a U.S. time zone. This new tech talent isn’t poised to reap the same salary benefits as experienced developers, but increasing demand and rising inflation  will help drive up their salaries. A lot of the growth is also local.  Venture capital investment into Brazilian companies in 2021 tripled from its pre-pandemic levels. Brazilian tech schools are growing to meet this demand. 

The three-year growth results also show the velocity in developer role value (in USD) and trends where specific technology specializations may start to become localized. Data scientists and machine learning specialists in India have seen about a 32% increase per year in median pay, the highest rate of growth among our top responding developer roles. 

Will data science/machine learning developers in India remain the top role for salary growth in 2023? Will we see continued improvement in prospects for back-end or embedded app developers in Brazil? Brazil and India’s competitive growth in developer salaries will certainly be a trend to look for in our 2023 survey findings. If you haven’t taken part yet, share your experience and add to this year’s Developer Survey.

The post Stories from our survey: Salary in the time of pandemic appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Over the years, we’ve learned so much from this survey. The last three years have been pivotal in the tech sector, and the responses of the Stack Overflow community have uniquely told that story.  In 2020, before the pandemic truly began, the community told us that the SRE/DevOps contributors among you were the highest-paid developers, even before the internet was our sole source of comfort during lockdowns. In 2021, we saw fluctuations in the job status and more developers turning to school full-time, especially in India, where there was a nine percentage point increase from 2020. Last year, 46% of our respondents said they spend at least 30 minutes a day answering questions, quantifying with time the value our community takes pride in: knowledge-sharing!  

This year, we want to know how these things have changed and will be exploring further the shift towards artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in software development. We want to know how developers are using these technologies, what challenges they face, and what opportunities they see.

As always, we will be using Qualtrics as our survey platform. If you use a third-party ad-blocking plugin, you may see error messages during the survey period, so we ask that you specifically unblock Qualtrics in your plugins or pause the plugin while you take the survey.

Unfortunately, Qualtrics blocks certain countries from accessing their site and data, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea region of Ukraine (including Sevastopol). We acknowledge that some users in China may have issues due to restrictions imposed by local internet service providers. 

As always, we need your help to make this survey representative. Share this far and wide! Drop it in company chat channels. Post it on LinkedIn and other social networks. Do a dance about it on TikTok. 

We are grateful to those who take the time to participate and share their feedback on the tools and trends that are shaping software development. Your contributions allow us to help everyone understand how the industry is changing and make everyone feel like a community here at Stack Overflow.

Special thank you to all the folks on Meta who helped with the tech lists this year—from new suggestions to capitalization/name corrections—you were instrumental in crafting the most robust technology lists we’ve had in years.

Take the survey now.

The post The 2023 Developer Survey is now live! appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

We wanted to see how developers feel about the tech making headlines, so our latest pulse survey asked developers to think about nascent trends in technology and tell us how they felt about them. Despite many of these technologies having been around for quite some time, the conversations about them and their applications are evergreen and always evolving. With AI-assisted technologies in the news, this survey’s aim was to get a baseline for perceived utility and impact of a range of buzzworthy technologies in order to better understand the overall ecosystem. 

The survey results’ matrix below shows four quadrants of sentiment where technologies are grouped into areas of “Positive-Emergent”, “Positive-Proven”, “Negative-Proven”, “Negative-Emergent” and in the opposing “Negative-Emergent” and “Positive-Proven” quadrants is where this analysis has placed a lot of focus due to the strength of sentiment shown in this survey’s results. Open source is clearly positioned as the north star to all other technologies, lighting the way to the chosen land of future technology prosperity.

Experimental to proven: Who’s ready for prime time?

Technologies such as blockchain or AI may dominate tech media headlines, but are they truly trusted in the eyes of developers and technologists? On a scale of zero (Experimental) to 10 (Proven), the top proven technologies by mean score are open source with 6.9, cloud computing with 6.5, and machine learning with 5.9. The lowest scoring were quantum computing with 3.7, nanotechnology with 4.5, and low code/no code with 4.6. 

By grouping frequency of scores into three sentiments and looking specifically at a handful of interesting standouts elsewhere in the survey, a pattern emerges: those without strong feelings about whether a specific technology is definitely experimental or proven take a larger share of the responses for those technologies that also have larger proportions of emergent ratings.

One hypothesis for this pattern is that technologies considered experimental may also be technologies that developers have less experience with and therefore absence of strong feelings. Those neutral feelings appear to be correlated with the question asked in the survey about whether respondents agreed on which technology would never be widely used in the future: blockchain and low code/no code both received more than 10% making them the top two choices in that category. It makes sense that you may grade a technology lower on the experimental-to-proven scale if you don’t believe it will be used much in the future. 

Conversely and against expectations, those technologies that scored high proven scores were not necessarily the same that were chosen from our list of technologies as those that developers believed would be widely used in the future, however they were very close with one main exception. AI comes in at the top of the list by a large margin, but our three top proven selections (open source, machine learning, cloud computing) follow after. Technologists are willing to concede that AI isn’t a proven technology as of today but seem to be very positive about the direction it’s going.

The hero we need: the Positive Impact Score

It’s one thing to believe a technology has a prosperous future, it’s another to believe a technology deserves a prosperous future. Alongside the emergent sentiment, respondents also scored the same technologies on a zero (Negative Impact) to 10 (Positive Impact) scale for impact on the world. The top positive mean scoring technologies were open source with 7.2, sustainable technologies with 6.6 and machine learning with 6.5; the top negative mean scoring technologies were low code/no code, InnerSource, and blockchain all with 5.3. Seeing low code/no code and blockchain score so low here makes sense because both could be associated with questionable job security in certain developer careers; however it’s surprising that AI is not there with them on the negative end of the spectrum. AI-assisted technology had an above average mean score for positive impact (6.2) and the percent positive score is not that far off from those machine learning and cloud computing (28% vs. 33% or 32%). 

Possibly what we are seeing here as far as why developers would not rate AI more negatively than technologies like low code/no code or blockchain but do give it a higher emergent score is that they understand the technology better than a typical journalist or think tank analyst. AI-assisted tech is the second highest chosen technology on the list for wanting more hands-on training among respondents, just below machine learning. Developers understand the distinction between media buzz around AI replacing humans in well-paying jobs and the possibility of humans in better quality jobs when AI and machine learning technologies mature. Low code/no code for the same reason probably doesn’t deserve to be rated so low, but it’s clear that developers are not interested in learning more about it.

What can tech of the future learn from the journey of open source?

Open source software is the overall choice for most positive and most proven scores in sentiment compared to the set of technologies we polled our users about. That’s a win any way you slice it. Open source is not new, but this survey is and one has to consider that open source was not always on top. The top tags for open source for non-commercially backed technologies on Stack Overflow are Python, Java, and Ruby, while the larger network has many sites dedicated to specific open source technologies: Ask Ubuntu, Unix & Linux, Blender, Drupal, Raspberry Pi, and more. 

How did open source defy the assumed necessity of paid support in order to become regarded as the proven technology it is today? A big part of the history of open source that overlaps with the user base for our survey is the love of collaboration: open source and Stack Overflow’s public platform and Stack Overflow for Teams product don’t exist without it! 

Collaboration isn’t just an unpaid internship type of gig, it’s important at the office. In our last pulse survey about jobs, almost one in four developers say collaboration is what retains employees and there is reason to believe that spirit of collaboration comes from experience with open source; in the same survey, 27% of developers said contributing to open source at work made a job more appealing. 

Open source isn’t just about collaboration, and neither is the developer experience. Another reason to believe open source has persevered as a proven technology today is that it is a platform for learning. Proprietary software and programming languages are not going to be the first choice for educational institutions with low thresholds for cost, and definitely not for self-taught programmers completing online courses. Learning is the backbone of coding, something we can see on Stack Overflow, as well. Python, an open-source licensed programming language, has been one of the top tags for questions as of late and all of those questions being answered equate to tangible learnings. New tech talent going through traditional education paths or self-moderated online learning modules are coming into the workforce with skills in open-source tech and sometimes through open-source platforms. From our 2022 Developer Survey, Python is almost tied as the most popular language for people learning to code. Open-source removes friction in the learning process for developers, and what’s not to love about that.

Perhaps one of the biggest contributors to the growth and goodwill behind any of the technologies listed here is salary. Over half of respondents in our December survey agreed a better salary is still the largest motivator when considering a new opportunity (54%). The potential to grow one’s personal capital by learning and using open source most certainly is a large contributor to the positive and proven sentiment we see in this survey. Software engineering is projected to have the largest average growth in salary in the next 10 years by the BLS. This is likely due to the large return on the relatively low investment of time when it comes to entering the developer industry. 

One of the main takeaways from our last developer survey found that blockchain developers garnered a comparable salary to people managers but with less experience. Given the sentiment scores in this survey, it’s very interesting to watch the progression of blockchain over time. While small, question share on Stack Overflow almost tripled from 2021 to 2022 (0.05% to 0.14%) despite nearly a quarter of respondents to our Web3 pulse survey believing blockchain was all hype or a scam. Post-FTX scandal, it’s clear that most developers do not feel blockchain is positive or proven, however there is still desire to learn as more respondents want training with blockchain than cloud computing. There’s a reason to believe in the direct positive impact of a given technology when it pays the bills. 

AI-assisted technology should take notes from the way open-source technology has cultivated collaboration, learning, and take-home pay if it wants to make gains in sentiment around positive impact and be regarded as a proven technology. We can see the possibility of this already with machine learning, which overlaps and is a component of AI; machine learning is the third-highest scoring for both proven technologies and positive impact tech. Machine learning is already utilizing open-source programming languages and libraries, and the median salaries of data scientists/machine learning engineers worldwide are mid-range according to the developer survey. The trajectory of machine learning shows that there is a path for AI to become more proven and positive and the core characteristics of open source lay the foundation for AI to achieve that goal.

Organizations and business leaders everywhere should heed these lessons. Open source shows that collaboration and learning around emerging tech is key to wider adoption. If you’re part of an organization trying to implement new technology, Stack Overflow for Teams can help by encouraging the healthy cycle of knowledge sharing, collaboration, learning, and ultimately, knowledge reuse. While the topics, technologies, and sentiments discussed in this survey will shift over time, we’re confident that the role of collaboration and learning will not. We look forward to seeing more discussion and more learning take place on our platform in the years to come. 

The post After the buzz fades: What our data tells us about emerging technology sentiment appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

I didn’t know, so I dug into two of Stack Overflow’s exceptional data sources: the annual Developer Survey results and stackoverflow.com’s website data. For research, marrying qualitative and quantitative sources is key in order to validate assumptions and explore the story in the gray area between explicit and implicit behavior. 

The 2022 Developer Survey collected responses from Stack Overflow users around the world to find out what programming languages and software development tools are the most popular. And because we’ve been doing this survey for 10+ years, we can see trends in growing (or declining) popularity. We can then use our website data to validate the survey sentiment by looking at what users ask about most. 

In this article, we will take a look at what the recent past tells us about what developers will be loving and/or questioning in 2023. 

First, I’ll look at what proxies we could use to quantify programming language popularity. Then, I’ll compare this to trends for questions posted about programming languages, using a simple regression analysis in order to elucidate and explain possible relationships between stated popularity and questions asked on Stack Overflow.

Most popular and according to whom

No source of information is better at tapping into developer sentiment than our own Developer Survey. What languages did the developer community tell us they loved in 2022? 

In the survey results for Most Loved, we categorize everything so it’s easier to compare like-to-like (i.e. languages vs. frameworks vs. libraries, etc.). I’m going to take a cue from the survey and focus on programming languages for this question; drawing comparisons within types makes sense and avoids introducing another layer of complexity. 

Rust, Elixir, Clojure, Typescript, and Julia are at the top of the list of Most Loved Programming Languages. However, in looking at the last three years, we see a bit of movement.

Most Loved Rank in Developer Survey

In 2022, we added a drill-down to specifically show popularity amongst those learning to code. Because Stack Overflow is a learning resource, I would expect that popularity amongst those specifically learning would be a good indicator of current and future programming language popularity. 

There is an interesting pattern in comparing Most Loved and Learning to Code Popularity: people learning to code aren’t using the most loved languages. The difference between these two measures of popularity will be important in distinguishing both as possible explanatory variables for trends in question posts. Less than 1% of those learning responded they were using either Clojure or Elixir:

• 1.2% are using Julia 
• 7.1% are using Rust
• and 15.1% are using Typescript. 

How else might we set up expectations for trends amongst the many programming languages being asked about on Stack Overflow? I found two good sources that are worthy proxies for popularity: Google and GitHub. 

For web searches, I’m using the already established PYPL index, which is an aggregated source for Google Trends data specifically for programming language tutorial search history. From this dataset, we will focus on annual trends in programming languages share of search. 

GitHub publishes statistics on public repositories for anyone to use as a handy public dataset within Google BigQuery, and although we lose the information from private repositories, we can assume the public accounts speak more directly to popularity as they are tied to learning initiatives, portfolios, and open-source collaboration, which are mostly self-directed rather than mandated by existing business rules. From this dataset, we will focus on the annual trend in public repo pull requests by language.

Looking at the basic relationship between Most Loved percent and annual rank in questions asked, we see a slight relationship over the years, but not a strong one. The simple regression here shows 2022 has the strongest correlation in the last three years and that only 7% of the variation in ranking for 2022 questions asked can be explained by 2022 Dev Survey results for most loved programming languages.

This graph shows that being loved (via the Developer Survey) is not related to generating more questions on Stack Overflow. And this makes sense: posting questions most likely speaks to friction with coding, a friction that may lead to loving a programming language less. 

When we add in our additional proxy variables for language popularity, usage percentage among those learning to code in the 2022 Developer Survey, the trend in PYPL from 2021 to 2022, and the trend in Github pull requests from 2021 to 2022, we get better regression results. Using just Learning to Code Popularity gets us a better regression that explains 67% of the variation in ranking for 2022 questions. A logical conclusion here is that Stack Overflow questions are more susceptible to the preferences of those using the site as a learning tool rather than those of more advanced developers.

Adding in the other popularity proxies and loved percentage gains us additional regression power (75% variation explained!) and we have landed on our final answer: trends in the number of questions posted about a programming language on Stack Overflow can be explained by what more developers learning to code are using (most significantly of all factors) along with Google search trends, GitHub public pull requests, and the Developer Survey Most Loved percentage (less significantly of all factors). Our latest Developer Survey showed us that ~32% of programmers have been professionally coding for four years or less, a significant amount of people who are most likely involved in learning programming languages.  That is, beginner-friendly languages get the most questions and popularity, but the Most Loved languages make veteran developers happy.  

A peek into the last three years

Let’s look at the top tags from questions asked in 2022 and how they line up with what we would expect from the regression model above.

We counted the number of questions associated with each unique tag; each can have up to five tags, so questions will get counted more than once. Python and JavaScript are solidly positioned in their respective top spots, Reactjs and Java show competing question counts starting towards the end of 2021, and ultimately Reactjs takes the lead with consistently more questions tagged in 2022. HTML and C# switch spots monthly in 2021, though C# moves ahead in 2022 with consistently more questions. In the lower ranks, Pandas sees three years of growth, R increases rank in 2021 and holds, nodejs breaks into the top 10 in 2021 and holds, while both PHP and C++ decline.

Compared to our learning to code popularity metric, Python, JavaScript, and Java are inline with expectations being at the top of both lists. According to the same metric, we would expect more questions about SQL and PHP. This shows that there is more to the trend than just measurable popularity. The factors that lead up to searching for tutorial on Google or GitHub pull requests from public repositories, for example, could be influenced by content creation in the academic and online learning spaces, which in turn could be influenced by nuances in tech evolution (e.g. Python-3.x as a short-lived top-ranked tag before it became the standard version). The next Developer Survey will be the canary in the coalmine illuminating any changes in expectations for the types of questions being asked on Stack Overflow.

The post Comparing tag trends with our Most Loved programming languages appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Most technologists would take a new job, especially young tech talent

While not everyone is actively searching for a new job, most are open to considering new roles. 74% of technologists are actively looking for a job now or are open to new opportunities, which is consistent with last year’s survey (also 74%). 

Younger developers are more likely to be actively looking for their next role. We see the highest percentage of active job seekers with the 20-24 year-old cohort (27%), 21% for 25-34 year olds, 17% for 35-44 year olds, and only 12% for 45-54 year olds. Additionally, the percentage of young developers actively searching for their next role increased nine points year over year (22% in 2022 versus 13% in 2021). This rise in young job applicants, combined with two-thirds of 20-24 year olds indicating they were either working in their first job or have not started their professional career yet, suggests a wave of new tech talent is ready to enter the workforce. What’s more, the 20-24 age group is succeeding at finding new jobs: 27% have obtained as many roles as the average person in the 25-34 age group (3 or 4 professional jobs under their belt). Younger people are accepting new jobs more frequently, and the data shows they are hungry for more.

Money can’t buy you love, but it’s a good reason to job hop

There are many reasons developers may be actively looking or open to new job opportunities, and there can also be compelling reasons to stay in their current role (cue “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by The Clash). Over half of respondents agreed a better salary is still the largest motivator when considering a new opportunity (54%). Our data also shows that experienced developers are more concerned with better pay than growth and leadership opportunities (57% vs. 37% of 35-44 year olds and 62% vs. 38% of 25-34 year olds). Across different team roles, better salary is a top motivator, as well (61% for individual contributors and 58% of people managers).

While salary remains a primary motivator for developers in the United Kingdom, European Union, and Latin America, the desire to work with new technologies came in second as a reason to leave a role. In fact, the number of Latin American respondents ranking working with new technologies as a motivator increased from 44% to 59%, while less respondents from the EU and UK listed new technology as a motivator, dropping from 55% in 2021 to 43% this year. Additionally, 38% of EU/UK respondents are not interested in new job opportunities this year, which is an increase from last year (27%). This uptick could be related to the economic downturn much of the world and Europe is experiencing and may indicate a growing desire on the part of European workers for stability and familiarity. 

Developers do their (job) research

For those looking, finding new job opportunities and researching potential employers can be a daunting task. With more jobs and job-seekers than ever before, how are companies standing out amongst the competition for tech talent? 

Developers most frequently discover companies they may want to work for in the future through word of mouth, with 46% of all respondents using their personal network. Across all age groups and among independent contributors vs. people managers, this number is consistently high. For the cohort with the highest ratio of job seekers—25-34 year olds—the most popular resources to find out about future employers behind their personal network are company reviews (41%), other media (34%), and company media (33%). 

Finding a job is not a linear process, so it makes sense that job seekers check review sites (like Glassdoor or Blind) because they are evaluating a company’s reputation before they put effort into applications and cover letters. When the rubber hits the road and it’s time to start submitting applications, all age groups highly rate using company reviews from third-party sites (55%), which is higher than those who did so while considering future employers (34%).

While employers would be wise to note these trends amongst job-seekers, let’s not forget the interview process. Respondents revealed that many stop pursuing a job when they get another offer (31%), when there is a lengthy hiring process (25%), or the interview is disorganized (34%). 19% of respondents cited not being able to find enough information about what it is like to work for a company as their reason to stop pursuing a job, and our highly-active 25-34 age group cited this reason most (22%). Perhaps the reason why review sites are so popular for researching an employer when actively searching is due to the fact that the information applicants want is hard to find.

What keeps tech professionals from looking?

We’ve looked a lot at the technologists who are considering leaving their jobs—what factors convince them to stay in their current role? Flexibility (58%), salary (54%), and learning opportunities (54%) prevent developers from checking job boards. Not surprisingly these qualities are all rated higher by independent contributors than people managers, with people managers valuing leadership opportunities moreso (37% vs. 27%). Regionally, respondents in the USA & Canada rate salary the highest (62%), and EU/UK respondents rate flexibility the highest (68%) in their current jobs but rate salary the highest for new jobs (72%) among all cohorts.

Respondents cite a focus on the developer experience (42%), the product or solution the company is selling (35%), and learning from individuals outside of their team (34%) as the top factors that make a company more appealing to work for now or in the future. The 25-34 year old age group, whom we know are more likely to be looking for new roles, rate developer experience (47%) and the product the company is selling (39%) higher than their older and younger peers. This is particularly noteworthy given that this group turns to company-owned or news media to research employers, supporting the idea that attracting talent goes beyond a job posting and into deeper questions of the business and employee experience as a whole. 

We specifically asked our users about their experience at work. More respondents (53%) agree/strongly agree that “waiting on answers to questions often causes interruptions and disrupts my workflow.” Most disagree that knowledge silos are preventing them from getting their work done (26%) but also agree that they often answer the same questions repeatedly (46%). Interruptions and waiting for answers add up over time, creating a dissatisfying work experience for developers.

Complementing the benefits and perks of a job, technologists say starting/ending the day at a precise time (46%), being expected to work from an office (44%), and lacking the resources to be confident in their work (43%) are the top drawbacks from their current roles. Flexibility and lack thereof has been a consistent theme in this survey’s results, and a lack of resources and accurate answers is a notable addition to the tools developers cite as important. 

The workplace continues to change with the influx of new and experienced tech talent and companies adjusting to trends we’ve noted here about on-the-job experience. Young tech talent, in particular, will be reshaping the way companies attract and retain employees in the new year. Organizations will need to focus on how to adequately inform developers about their products and workplace culture not only in the job description but in the ever-evolving technology conversation happening in the news, on review sites and in other media.  

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