Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2018 is out

In its eighth year of conducting the developer survey, Stack Overflow has published the results for 2018. Over 100,000 developers completed the 30-minute online survey, making it the largest number of respondents to participate in their flagship survey ever.

The monthly traffic of Stack Overflow amounts to nearly 50 million visitors with 21 million being professional developers and university students. Out of these numbers, Pakistan generates a monthly traffic of 0.8166% with 0.7975% professional developers. Moreover, 1.0675% of the survey respondents were Pakistanis.

Below are some key indicators from the survey giving an insight into developer profiles, popular languages and tools, and contribution to the open-source community.

Developer Profiles

• Only 6.8% of the survey respondents were females.
• 57.9% of the respondents identified themselves as back-end developers. This number was followed by full-stack developers and front-end developers at 48.2% and 37.8% respectively.
• Only 20.4% of the respondents were mobile developers.
• A correlation was found between the following pairs of developer roles: DevOps specialist & system administrator, designer & front-end developer, and database administrator & system administrator.
• 43.6% of the respondents contribute to open-source.
• 80.8% of the developers, code as a hobby. Their interest in coding is not affected by work responsibilities and they find time to pursue projects that interest them.
• Only one-quarter of the respondents were enrolled in a college or university program either as a part-time or full-time students.
• 46.1% of the developers had completed a bachelor’s degree or higher with over 60% of them enrolled in computer science, computer engineering or software engineering program.
• 52.7% of the developers spend between 9 – 12 hours of their time on a computer and 60% indicated they do not exercise.

Popular Technology & Tools

• JavaScript tops the table, sixth year in a row to be the most commonly used programming language. Node.JS and Angular JS continue to be the most popular technologies.
• Python beats C#, PHP and C++ to rise in the table, while React and .NetCore still remaining important to many developers.
• MySQL and SQL Server continue to be the most commonly used databases.
• Linux is the most popular platform that the respondents have developed for, followed by Windows Desktop & Server.
• Visual Studio Code beats Visual Studio to be the most popular development environments.

The complete survey results can be viewed here.