The Why?

  Key Insights from the 2020 Stack Overflow Survey.

We all have heard or come across the wonderful job being carried out by this platform known as Stack Overflow. Well, if you haven't, I am sure if not anyone else, the beginners in the programming world, would have a word or more of thanks for the Stack Overflow developers.

So, for those who don't know, what is Stack Overflow? It is a question and answer website for professionals and enthusiastic programmers. This website provides a platform for questions and answers on a wide range of topics relating to computer programming. Users of Stack Overflow can earn recognition when they provide answers to questions or provide a valid contribution. 

What does this mean for a beginner? It means that if you have a problem with a code you are currently running, you know where to run to for answers. All you need is to type in your question and a wide range of responses await you.

Here, I will be sharing insights from the survey concluded in the year 2020 on the website. This annual survey provides a snapshot of the programming community all over the world.

The raw dataset consisted of 64461 responses all over the world, and this insight will be centered around 11008 cleaned responses on– WHERE they were from, WHO the programmers were, and WHAT they do.

WHERE THEY COME FROM

The top 5 countries in terms of responses received include; the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, India and Brazil, with the United States leading at 24.75%.

WHO ARE THE PROGRAMMERS?

1.The youngest developer in 2020 was around 17 years old while the oldest developer was about 60 years of age. However, the majority of the programmers fell within the age bracket of 15 – 44 years.

  

2. 71.6% of the respondents are White or of European descent, while Black or people of African descent accounted for just around 3.27% of the programmers.

3. An interesting observation from the survey showed that of the respondents, 94% declared themselves as Male, while Females represented only 6% of the population. Thus, this indicates a wide gender gap among the programmers.

4. 95% of the respondents claimed to be full-time developers, while 5% only wrote code as part-time work. However, 81% of the population described coding as their hobby, while 19% did not see it as one.

5.  88.5% of the developers are fully employed, 8.7% are either independent contractors or self-employed, while the remaining 2.8% are employed on a part-time basis.

WHAT THEY DO.

1. For the year 2020 survey, the top developer respondents were either full-stack, front-end or back-end developers.

2. More than 50% of the developers had a Bachelor's degree, a little above 14% attended a college/university without earning a degree, and only 1.6% of the population earned a professional degree.

3. It's not surprising to see that more than 60% of the respondents had Computer Science or Engineering as their primary fields of study, compared to other developers whose primary fields were either Arts or Health Sciences, and these accounted for 1.6% and 0.29% of the population respectively.

4. Github, Slack, and Jira represented the three most commonly used collaborative tools in 2020. These were still the top three collaborative tools the respondents chose as the desired tools to work with in the coming years.

5. The top three  platforms which the developers have worked with include Linux, Windows and Docker. A major surprise came when the developers were asked what platforms they would like to work with in the next year. Docker had the highest percentage, taking over the other two, while Windows dropped to the fifth position.

6. The Exploratory Data Analysis EDA showed that the developers worked on an average of 30 – 50 hours a week.

 

In conclusion, the Stack Overflow survey for the year 2020 evaluated the developers in several areas– from their countries, to who they were and how they contributed to the community. Certain interesting trends like gender gap, age at first code and their working hours were also explored in this post. 

Thank you for taking your time to read through. You can also share your insights from the survey.