Developers
Survey 2015

The Community

Stack Overflow is an online community where programmers can learn and share their knowledge. Each year they conduct a survey trying to reveal trends, likes and the perspective of different matters between developers around the world.

This year more than 25,000 developers from the Stack Overflow users answered the survey giving us a good look inside their community.

But like everything surveys are not perfect. The segment of the developers’ population who don’t speaks English or where developers have an increased likelihood of being women such as Asian countries like South Korea and India are underrepresented.

In this map we skip developers who prefer not to disclose their employment status.

Industries

Most of the developers who answered this survey are from the United States, so it's a little hard to visualize the behavior and characteristics in the countries with few developers.

But we can appreciate what types of industries are favorable for developers in each country and whether they love or hate their jobs.

We are just showing the top countries in each industry.

Compensation

Here we are showing how much the developers are earning in each country. We can also appreciate the top ten countries that are earning above $160,000 or less than $20,000 dollars. If we discard places like the United States, India and the United Kingdom the results are pretty interesting.

One thing that we must appreciate are the spikes in the different sets of bars, like India and his incredible amount of people who earn less than $20,0000 dollars, and relate it with the fact that India was the country with more software products developers in the industries’ scatter plot.

This chart reveals in what countries the developers are having a significant compensation through their services and what other countries are receiving a short amount of money within the developers’ community.

Countries like India, Poland, Russia, Spain and Brazil have a large amount of developers who are getting a low payment rate, and countries like Australia, Switzerland, Canada and Germany have the highest payment rate between developers.

Language

There are different types of languages that a developer can choose from. So it’s always a very important matter to know which are the most used and popular among them. And because of the fast changing nature of this environment it’s necessary to know which of them are going to have a strong presence in the
near future.

Languages like JavaScript, Php, Sql, Java and Python are the most used by the developers in this survey. Most of them are suffering by a loss of users in the near future with the exception of Python. There are also some languages that are gaining popularity among this community of developers like Node.js, Go, IOS
and Ruby.

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Conclusion

Through all the visualizations of this data, we could learn a lot about this developers’ community. We learned that the countries that use more this medium to communicate and help each other are United States, India, United Kingdom and Germany. And how this countries overachieve in different industries like India in software developing, Germany in manufacturing and United Kingdom in Finance/Banking and Gaming.

We could notice that in places like Australia, Switzerland, Canada and Denmark are in the top ten countries with the highest pay rate and Poland, Russia, Spain and Brazil are between the ones with the lowest.

And if you’re a developer who is looking for a new language to learn there are some clear favorites in this community like JavaScript, Sql, Php, and Java that even with lost of followers in the near future they keep with a strong amount of users with the exception of python that is one of the favorites in this community with a gain of popularity in the near future.

If you want to take a closer look to this data you can find it here.

José Manuel Guzman Fierro