Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey is the largest and most comprehensive survey of people who code around the world. Each year, we field a survey covering everything from developers’ favorite technologies to their job preferences. This year marks the ninth year we’ve published our annual Developer Survey results, and nearly 90,000 developers took the 20-minute survey earlier this year.

Despite our survey’s broad reach and capacity for informing valuable conclusions, we acknowledge that our results don’t represent everyone in the developer community evenly. We have further work to do to make Stack Overflow the welcoming, inclusive, and diverse platform we want it to be, and this is reflected in our survey sample. We are committed to building on steps we’ve taken in 2018 and improving in this area this year and beyond. Some of these survey results directly guide those efforts.

To address the characteristics of our data, be sure to check out where we summarize results by country or gender, highlight results for underrepresented racial/ethnic groups, or use survey weighting to correct for demographic skew.

     Look for this icon, which highlights differences between developer demographics.

We looked at breakdowns by demographics throughout our analysis, and in most cases it did not have a significant effect. Look for the icon to see where we highlight results where it did have an interesting impact. Also be sure to check out a few new topics this year ranging from hours worked per week to the best music to listen to while coding!

Want to dive into the results yourself? Check back in a few weeks, when the anonymized results of the survey will be available for download under the Open Database License (ODbL). We look forward to seeing what you find!

• Python, the fastest-growing major programming language, has risen in the ranks of programming languages in our survey yet again, edging out Java this year and standing as the second most loved language (behind Rust).
• Over half of respondents had written their first line of code by the time they were sixteen, although this experience varies by country and by gender.
• DevOps specialists and site reliability engineers are among the highest paid, most experienced developers most satisfied with their jobs, and are looking for new jobs at the lowest levels.
• Of the top countries on our survey, China has developers that are the most optimistic, believing that people born today will have a better life than their parents. Developers in Western European countries like France and Germany are among the least optimistic about the future.
• When thinking about blockers to productivity, different kinds of developers report different challenges. Men are more likely to say that being tasked with non-development work is a problem for them, while gender minority respondents are more likely to say that toxic work environments are a problem.
• We asked respondents to think about the last time they solved coding problems with and without our site. The data indicates that Stack Overflow saves a developer 30 to 90 minutes of time per week!

Each month, about 50 million people visit Stack Overflow to learn, share, and build their careers. We estimate that 21 million of these people are professional developers and university-level students. The majority of our survey respondents this year were people who said they are professional developers or who code sometimes as part of their work, or are students preparing for such a career. About 4% of respondents code as a hobby but not as a profession, and just under 2% of respondents used to be professional developers but no longer are.

See our Methodology section for details on how developers around the world accessed our survey.

Developer Type

About 50% of respondents identify as full-stack developers, and about 17% consider themselves mobile developers. The median number of developer type identifications per respondent this year is 3, and the most common pairs are combinations of back-end, front-end, and full-stack developer. Pairs that are highly correlated include database administrator and system administrator, DevOps specialist and site reliability engineer, academic researcher and scientist, and designer and front-end developer.

Survey weighting is an approach used to analyze survey data when the survey sample doesn't match the underlying population well. For example, in our survey this year, 11% of US respondents identify as women, but data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that women's participation in the software developer workforce is about twice that, more like 20%. We can use survey weighting to adjust for the mismatch between our survey sample and the population of developers. We know that there is a difference in developer type representation by gender, so let's compare the overall proportions in our raw results for the United States with weighted proportions, assuming that we undersampled gender minorities at the rate indicated by the BLS report. When we use weighting, we see small increases in the representation of developer roles that have the most representation from women, like designers, and decreases in others with low representation from women, like DevOps.

We know there are more ways in which our survey sample doesn't match the underlying population of developers than only gender (including frequency of use of Stack Overflow), and the United States is not the only country for which we expect such a mismatch. The reason we're using this specific example of weighting here is that it is one where we know we have systemic sampling issues and we have an estimate about the expected population proportion. We can demonstrate the effect of our survey sample on our results, both in direction and magnitude.

Contributing to Open Source

About 65% of professional developers on Stack Overflow contribute to open source projects once a year or more. Involvement in open source varies with language. Developers who work with Rust, WebAssembly, and Elixir contribute to open source at the highest rates, while developers who work with VBA, C#, and SQL do so at about half those rates.

Coding as a Hobby

Many developers work on code outside of work. About 80% of our respondents say that they code as a hobby. Other responsibilities outside of software can reduce developers' engagement in coding as a hobby; developers who say they have children or other caretaking responsibilities are less likely to code as a hobby. Respondents who are women are also less likely to say they code as a hobby.

Years Since Learning to Code

There is a wide range of experience levels among developers, and a full 45% of professional developers on Stack Overflow learned to code less than 10 years ago. See more on how experience is related to gender.

Years Coding Professionally

_{74,331 responses}

Over 40% of respondents have less than five years of professional coding experience. Developers who work with languages such as VBA, F#, and Clojure have the most years of professional coding experience, while developers who work with languages like Python, PHP, and Kotlin have the fewest.

Years of Professional Coding Experience by Developer Type

_{Mean of 72,069 responses}

Developers who work in different areas of software development have different average amounts of experience. Aside from technical executives and managers, SREs and developers who build for embedded devices have the most experience, while academic researchers and data scientists have the fewest years of experience. The related roles and disciplines of site reliability engineering and DevOps are somewhat new, but the people working in this field are highly experienced.

Writing That First Line of Code

We asked respondents how old they were the first time they wrote a line of code or program, whether that was to make a webpage or say hello to the world. Overall, over half of respondents had written code by the time they were sixteen, but experience varies widely. There is two years' or more difference in the mean first age from countries like Australia and the UK compared to India and Brazil. If we control for developer age today, we see an even more dramatic disparity between India (where developers who are older today started coding later in life) and the UK (where developers who are older today started coding earlier in life). We also see differences with gender, with women writing their first code later than men and non-binary respondents writing code earlier than men.

How Many Developers are Students?

_{87,014 responses}

About one-quarter of respondents are enrolled in a formal college or university program full-time or part-time.

Educational Attainment

Worldwide, about three-fourths of professional developer respondents have the equivalent of a bachelor's degree or higher, consistent with what we've found in previous years. However, it is not that rare to find accomplished professional developers who have not completed a degree.

Undergraduate Major

Of professional developers who studied at the university level, over 60% said they majored in computer science, computer engineering, or software engineering. This proportion is somewhat higher in currently enrolled students, and the proportion of respondents majoring in other engineering disciplines like electrical and mechanical engineering is lower among current students than among professionals.

Other Types of Education

Developers are lifelong learners; almost 90% of all developers say they have taught themselves a new language, framework, or tool outside of their formal education. Among professional developers, about 60% say they took an online course like a MOOC (up significantly from last year), and about a quarter have participated in a hackathon.

Race and Ethnicity

We asked our respondents about their racial/ethnic identities and see evidence that people of color continue to be underrepresented among developers, especially among professional developers. We see higher proportions of people of color in students than professional developers. We have seen incremental improvement in this area year over year. In the United States this year, 22% of respondents are people of color (meaning they chose one or more non-white options on this question); last year 19% of United States respondents were people of color. Like with gender representation, this gradual change is encouraging, but the overall participation levels indicate we still have work to do, both on Stack Overflow and as the tech industry more broadly.

Gender

We asked our respondents about their gender identity, and found that about globally 90% of our respondents are men. In regions including the United States, India, and the UK, women are represented at higher levels among students than among professional developers.

This year 11% of US survey respondents are women, up from 9% on last year's survey. This represents incremental improvement in this area, but the continued low proportion points to problems with inclusion in the tech industry in general and on Stack Overflow in particular.

This year, 1.2% of respondents identified as transgender, about double from last year. The gender identification question allowed respondents to select all that apply, and the question about transgender identity was separate from the question about gender identity.

Developer Role and Gender

_{The dashed line shows the average ratio of men's to women's participation}

We see varying representation from men and women in different developer roles on our survey. All categories have dramatically more developers who identify as men than women but the ratio of men to women varies. Developer types above the line have respondents that are more likely than average to be men, and those below the line have respondents who are more likely than average to be women. Developers who are data scientists or academic researchers are about 10 times more likely to be men than women, while developers who are system admins or DevOps specialists are 25-30 times more likely to be men than women. Women have the highest representation as front-end developers, designers, data scientists, data analysts, QA or test developers, scientists, and educators.

Experience and Gender

When we look at differences in years since learning to code by gender, we see evidence for the shifting demographics of coding as a profession, as well as retention problems in the tech industry for underrepresented groups. Research shows, for example, that women leave jobs in tech at higher rates than men. Among our respondents, both in the United States and internationally, women are about twice as likely as men to have three years of coding experience or less. Companies interested in building a diverse developer workforce that is more reflective of society should focus on retention of their senior developers from underrepresented groups, along with thoughtful hiring from the population of more junior developers.

Sexual Orientation

This is the second year we asked our respondents about their sexual orientation, and the proportions of respondents are mostly consistent since last year.

Disability Status

Individuals with many forms of disability and difference are part of the developer community, including those with mental health challenges and physical disabilities. Mental health issues like depression and anxiety are particularly common among our respondents. In the United States, almost 30% of respondents said they deal with a mental health challenge, a higher proportion than other large countries such as the UK, Canada, Germany, or India.

Age

About three-fourths of professional developers who took our survey are younger than 35.

Age and Experience by Country

Developers on Stack Overflow are older with more experience in Australia, Western Europe, and North America and younger with less experience in regions like India and Eastern Europe.

All of the Developers Are Above Average?

_{71,779 responses}

We asked respondents to evaluate their own competence, for the specific work they do and years of experience they have, and almost 70% of respondents say they are above average while less than 10% think they are below average. This is statistically unlikely with a sample of over 70,000 developers who answered this question, to put it mildly.

Feelings of Competence By Gender

_{Mean of 70,411 responses; percent who consider themselves far or a little above average; gender is select all that apply}

When asked to evaluate their own competence for the kind of work they do and their years of experience, men are much more likely to say they are far or a little above average than gender minorities in tech.

Competence and Experience

We specifically asked respondents to evaluate themselves for their years of experience, but we see differences in opinion with experience. New developers are much less likely to evaluate themselves as above average for their experience, and this effect does not flatten out until about 10 years of experience. We see evidence here among the most junior developers for impostor syndrome, pervasive patterns of self-doubt, insecurity, and fear of being exposed as a fraud. Among our respondents, men grew more confident much more quickly than gender minorities.

Children and Other Dependents

For the second year, we asked respondents if they have children or other dependents that they care for, and almost 40% of respondents say that they do, up from last year.

The developers who said they do not have dependents to care for are younger on average with less experience than those who do. Over 60% of developers with 10 or more years of professional coding experience have children or other dependents. Respondents in the United States are more likely to say they have dependents than the rest of the world, but within the US, women are less likely to report having caretaking responsibilities. This fits in with other evidence we see for retention problems specific to underrepresented groups in tech.

Families and IT Support

We've all been there, either giving or receiving help.

Will People Born Today Have a Better Life Than Their Parents?

This question mirrors a question that’s asked by Gallup every year. The 2018 Gallup results saw 61% of the American population believing today's youth will live better than their parents; that percentage was the highest since Gallup’s 2010 survey. If we filter our survey for American respondents, the percentage is also 61%, mirroring Gallup’s results. Either way, it seems that developers don’t overwhelmingly believe we’re headed toward dystopia.

Respondents in China are the most optimistic, and those in regions like Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East are especially hopeful compared to those in Western Europe. This is especially notable in countries like Germany and France, which are the 4th and 7th largest economies in the world, respectively.

Social Media Use

We asked our respondents this year what social media site they use the most, and Reddit and YouTube were the most common answers. Developers' preferences aren't reflective of the most popular social media platforms in the world where Facebook ranks first and Reddit doesn’t even crack the top 10. (Reddit has about 330 million active users compared to Facebook’s 2.32 billion monthly users.)

When we look in the United States, the situation is a little different. Twitter and Facebook are ranked higher. Notice that the United States result weighted by gender exhibits some interesting differences from the unweighted result; Instagram even gains a full rank.

What's Your Handle?

_{80,486 responses}

There have been many iterations on the names we use in chat apps or online communities to identify ourselves. The most common choice for our respondents was username by a landslide. Respondents who chose userId are the oldest, and respondents who chose username are the youngest.

IRL or online chat?

_{87,305 responses}

Developers may have a reputation for introversion, but a firm majority of our respondents said they prefer face-to-face conversations to online chat. We're happy to report that only 11% of our respondents said they didn't want to communicate with their fellow human beings via either method.

What Individual Person Will Have the Most Influence In Tech This Year?

_{30,398 responses}

We asked respondents what person they thought would be most influential in 2019 in a free-text field. Besides CEOs of companies including Tesla, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple, respondents mentioned developers building and maintaining React.js and Vue.js (the most loved web frameworks this year), along with leaders from the Linux world and other tech domains. A few world leaders received mentions from respondents, along with a fair number of humble respondents nominating...themselves! Some individuals mentioned here are likely not viewed favorably by those who listed them, such as the current chairman of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Only one woman made it to the top 25 of this list: Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD.

Programming, Scripting, and Markup Languages

For the seventh year in a row, JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language, but Python has risen in the ranks again. This year, Python just edged out Java in overall ranking, much like it surpassed C# last year and PHP the year before. Python is the fastest-growing major programming language today.

Web Frameworks

This year, we asked about frameworks for the web separately from other frameworks and libraries. jQuery is the most broadly used of these web frameworks, and this year more developers say they use React.js than Angular, a switch from last year.

Other Frameworks, Libraries, and Tools

This is the first year we've asked about many of the technologies in this category, and Node.js is the most commonly used. More developers say they use .NET than .NET Core, and the deep learning framework TensorFlow is many times more popular than the deep learning framework Torch/PyTorch.

Databases

Like last year, MySQL is the most commonly used database. PostgreSQL has taken the second spot this year, edging ahead of Microsoft SQL Server.

Platforms

Linux and Windows are the most common platforms that our respondents say they have done development work for this year. We asked about container technologies like Docker for the first time this year, and Docker was the third most broadly used platform.

Most Loved, Dreaded, and Wanted Languages

For the fourth year in a row, Rust is the most loved programming language among our respondents, followed close behind by Python, the fastest-growing major language today. This means that proportionally, more developers want to continue working with these than other languages.

VBA and Objective-C rank as the most dreaded languages this year. Most dreaded means that a high percentage of developers who are currently using these technologies express no interest in continuing to do so.

Python is the most wanted language for the third year in a row, meaning that developers who do not yet use it say they want to learn it.

Most Loved, Dreaded, and Wanted Web Frameworks

React.js and Vue.js are both the most loved and most wanted web frameworks by developers, while Drupal and jQuery are most dreaded.

Most Loved, Dreaded, and Wanted Other Frameworks, Libraries, and Tools

.NET Core and Torch/PyTorch are both used less than other counterparts in their respective ecosystems (.NET and Tensorflow, respectively) but are loved by developers more. Chef and Cordova rank as the most dreaded in this category of frameworks, libraries, and tools.

Most Loved, Dreaded, and Wanted Databases

For the third year in a row, Redis is the most loved database, meaning that proportionally more developers want to continue working with it than any other database. Couchbase and Oracle rank as the most dreaded databases, and for the third year in a row, MongoDB is the most wanted database.

Most Loved, Dreaded, and Wanted Platforms

Linux is once again the most loved platform for development, with both Docker and Kubernetes also highly loved this year. WordPress is the most dreaded development platform, and many developers say they want to start developing using Docker and AWS.

Most Popular Development Environments

Visual Studio Code is a dominant player among developer environment tools this year. There are differences in tool choices by developer type and role, but Visual Studio Code was a top choice across the board. Developers who write code for mobile apps are more likely to choose Android Studio and Xcode. A popular choice for DevOps and SREs is Vim, and data scientists are more likely to work in IPython/Jupyter, PyCharm, and RStudio.

Developers' Primary Operating Systems

We asked our respondents what operating systems they use for work. About half said they mainly use Windows, and the remainder were about evenly split between MacOS and Linux.

Using Containers

_{85,366 responses; select all that apply}

When asked how they are using container technology such as Docker or Open Container Initiative, about half of our respondents said they are not using any such technology today. Those who are using containers most commonly put them to work in development.

How Are Organizations Using Blockchain Technology?

_{48,175 responses}

Most respondents on our survey say their organizations are not using or implementing blockchain technology, and the most common use reported is outside of currency. Developers in India are the most likely to say their organizations are using blockchain technology.

Developer Opinions on Blockchain Technology

_{60,165 responses}

When asked what they primarily believe about blockchain technology, respondents on our survey are largely optimistic about its broad usefulness. This optimism is largely concentrated among young, less experienced developers, however. The more experienced a respondent is, the more likely they are to say blockchain technology is an irresponsible use of resources.

What Languages Are Associated with the Highest Salaries Worldwide?

Globally, respondents who use Clojure, F#, Elixir, and Rust earn the highest salaries, with median salaries above $70,000 USD. There are regional variations in which languages are associated with the highest pay. Scala developers in the US are among the highest paid, while Clojure and Rust developers earn the most in India.

How Technologies Are Connected

Technologies cluster together into related ecosystems that tend to be used by the same developers. This network graph demonstrates this by showing which technologies are most highly correlated with each other. We see a large cluster on the left for web development (with JavaScript, HTML/CSS, TypeScript, and React.js) connected via SQL to one for Microsoft technologies (with C#, Visual Studio, and .NET Core). Along the lower left we see a mobile constellation connecting Java, Kotlin, Android, and SQLite to iOS and Xcode. This year we observe a cluster of operations technologies with Docker, AWS, and PostgreSQL connected to the Python ecosystem network through Linux. Other smaller correlated clusters include Scala/Spark/Hadoop, C/C++/Assembly, and smaller technologies like language-specific IDEs or frameworks.

Employment Status

Over 90% of professional developers are employed at least part-time.

Employment Status by Geography

Germany has an unusually high proportion of developers working part-time. Developers in the United States are somewhat less likely to work as independent contractors or freelancers. In all of these locations, more than 70% of developers are employed full-time.

Industry