2022 Developer Survey: tools, environments and methods for practicing software today.

It is a well-known fact that professionals in the tech industry have different educational backgrounds, use different technologies and tools, etc. Stackoverflow recently launched its annual statistics, where those aspects were explained in detail. The respondents of the study were divided into 2 groups: professional developers and those who are learning to code. We analyzed this survey and decided to post our summary on it. So, today, we would like to show you the following information briefly:

1. Developer profile: education and experience.
2. Preferred Technologies and Tools.
3. Employment Status and Work Environment.
4. Professional Developers: Productivity impacts.

Developer profile: education and experience.

In this section, we would like to pay attention to the profile of professional developers and those who only start their career path. Let’s start with the information on how people obtain knowledge on how to code.

The survey shows that learning to code online increased from 60% to 70% year over year. It is quite interesting that the majority of developers are men aged 25-34 years old. Most people older than 45 years have learned coding from books, and younger ones mastered it online. Respondents under 18 usually rely on online sources of information and attend online courses or certification programs.

What about the experience? Well, from more than 70 000 respondents, the coding experience varies from 1 year or less to 50+ years, but mainly, respondents work in the industry for 1-9 years (29.28%).

Here are the most common resources where professionals have learned how to code:

• Videos, blogs, forums (70.91%)
• Universities, Colleges (62.18%)
• Books / Physical media (54.48%)
• Online Courses or Certification (46.63%)
• On the job training (39.85%)
• Colleague (18.42%)
• Friend or family member (13.95%)
• Coding Bootcamp (10.8%)
• Hackathons (6.64%)

It is quite interesting, as there are some employees at Sciforce who learned to code on the blogs, using videos etc, online courses etc. But usually, our developers have technical background from the universities.

Regarding the roles of tech professionals, the most common types are: full-stack, back-end, front-end, and desktop developers. But, actually, the majority of respondents found that the scope of their specialization has shifted or expanded to database administrators (DBAs), site reliability engineers (SREs), and Security professionals.

The next сriterion we would like to pay attention to is the territories where most developers of the survey are located. Well, the United States, India and Germany provide the highest volume of survey responses, followed by UKI (UK and Ireland).

Preferred Technologies and Tools

There are many technologies that our professionals use, but we would like to pay attention to the most loved ones. The data about the most popular technologies were collected from both: professional developers and those that are learning to code.

Well, let's start with programming, scripting, and markup languages. For 10 years in a row, JavaScript has been considered the most commonly used programming language, and this year is not an exception. Also, in the list of the most popular languages for programming stay Python and C++, which are widely used among people who are learning to code. But, this category of specialists is less likely to report using SQL, TypeScript, Bash/Shell, etc. Regarding the markup languages, HTML/CSS takes the first place. And, we totally agree with such statements as many of our professionals use Python and C++ for their purposes.

It is essential for many developers to understand how to use databases to correctly and efficiently store and retrieve data depending on the particular tasks.

Regarding this topic, PostgreSQL and MySQL are the most commonly used databases. It is also worth mentioning that Redis, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Elasticsearch are well-known among professional developers. The next aspect we will be talking about today is cloud platforms. Well, AWS is considered to be the most popular platform among all respondents of the survey, while Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are taking the 2nd and 3rd place spot, accordingly. And, Firebase, Heroku, DigitalOcean, VMware, Managed Hosting, Linode, and other platforms are less commonly used.

It is quite interesting that people who learn to code prefer Heroku, Google Cloud, VMware, and Firebase, while such platforms as AWS and Azure are popular among professionals.

What about web frameworks and technologies? Well, Node.js and React.js are the two most frequently used technologies by both: professional developers and those who only start their career path. jQuery, Angular, ASP.NET, and ASP.NET Core are used more by Professional Developers than those learning to code. Well, it seems that Node.js and React.js are very beginner-friendly frameworks.

There are many other frameworks and libraries popular among developers. According to Stackoverflow’s survey, .NET remains the most popular platform among all respondents (34.55%). It is also interesting that TensorFlow is more widely used than PyTorch for machine learning, and, Flutter (12.64%) and React Native (12.57%) are considered the two most favorite cross-platform tools.

Professionals use Pandas and NumPy less frequently than those who learn how to code. It is quite logical as individuals learning to code commonly use Python, and both libraries are Python-based. Also, they are more likely to use TensorFlow and Scikit-learn.

Regarding other tools, Docker is gaining popularity, becoming one of the fundamental tools for Professional Developers. Now, people learning to code are more likely to use 3D tools like Unity 3D and Unreal Engine than Professional Developers to obtain 3D VR and AR skills.

Talking about the Integrated development environment, Visual Studio Code is the most broadly used IDE among all respondents. IntelliJ, Vim, and Notepad++ are usually used by professionals, while PyCharm is- is across those learning to code. Actually, many developers at Sciforce love using Visual Studio Code, and there is a number of reasons for it: it has many extensions, IntelliSense code completion for variables, methods, and imported modules, graphical debugging, linting, multi-cursor editing, parameter hints, and other powerful editing features!

When it comes to asynchronous and synchronous tools, we can see the differences in preferences between Professional Developers and people learning to code. For example, Jira, as an asynchronous tool, is really popular among professionals, while only 15% of those learning to code use it. We can observe quite similar results with Confluence, which takes second place for professional developers, but only 8% of non-professionals use it. And people who are learning to code are more likely to use asynchronous work tools like Notion and Trello. We think each tool can be an excellent match for different purposes. But, the most popular tool among our developers is Jira.

According to the survey, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Slack are the most commonly used synchronous tools among all developers. Less popular tools used in 2022 are Google Chat (20.2%), Cisco Webex Teams (9.68%), and Mattermost (4.04%). It is an interesting fact that people learn to code usу Zoom more than Microsoft Teams (67% use Zoom, and 48% Microsoft Teams), while only 30% use Slack.

And, last but not least, here – the operating system. Windows is considered the most popular operating system for developers in both cases: personal (62.33%) and professional use (48.82%). MacOS is less used (31%) compared to a Linux-based OS (40%). Only 15% of developers work with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), while BSD is almost not used.

The survey states that the list of most loved and wanted technologies includes:

• Rust in the section of programming, scripting, and markup languages (87%);
• PostgreSQL in the section of databases (72.08%);
• AWS in the section of cloud platforms (66.32%);
• Phoenix and React.js in the section of web frameworks and technologies (83.51% and 68.19%);
• Hugging Face Transformers and Tensorflow in the section of other frameworks and libraries (72.22% and 69.08% );
• Docker and Kubernetes in the section of other tools (76.93% and 74.75%);
• Neovim and Visual Studio Code in the section of integrated development environments (82.92% and 81%);
• Notion, Jira, and Confluence in the section of asynchronous collaboration tools (66.82%);
• Slack in the section of synchronous tools (71.53%).

Well, here the results of the survey definitely represent the thoughts of our professionals. Our devs really love to work with those technologies and definitely agree with the survey.

Employment Status and Work Environment

For all respondents, full-time employment increased by 4 percentage points. In the past year, there was a significant increase in the number of professional developers who are "Independent contractors, freelancers, or self-employed" (up by 5%). It is important to note that full-time employment has gone down in the top 5 countries (United Kingdom, Canada, United States, and Germany) while Independent contractor, freelancer, or self-employed has gone up.

Most of our developers are full-time employed and are located in Ukraine, but some of our employees are abroad.

About 53% of respondents work for an organization that has more than 100 employees, 13% work for companies that have 10,000 or more employees, and 5.32% work as freelancers.

Talking about the work environment, 85% of developers state that their companies are at least partially remote. Smaller organizations are most likely to work fully in-person, but many of them have the opportunity to be fully remote or hybrid. And the largest organizations, with 10k+ employees, are most likely to be hybrid or remote.

We think that the opportunity to work remotely should be a must for any company today. That is why at Sciforce, we offer our employees to work remotely, hybrid, or at the office.

Regarding the change in salaries between 2021 and 2022, the median salaries increased by about 23% between 2021 and 2022.

The next topic we would like to share with you– is salary by developer type. It is quite obvious that people who occupy a position in senior roles like executives (C-suite, VP, etc.) and engineering managers have the highest salaries. But, in some countries like the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada, Blockchain developers have really high salaries, even taking into account the fact that they can have a low number of years of experience.

What about work experience? Well, we can definitely observe a correlation between years of experience and a higher salary. The highest-paid positions usually require 11 years of experience or more. Also, we would like to show you an interesting fact: 88% of Professional Developers code outside of work, and 73% of them write code as a hobby.

Professional Developers: Productivity impacts

The majority of respondents are independent contributors (84.31%), while 15.69% of them are people managers. As the survey shows, over half of all respondents claim that knowledge silos prevent them from receiving ideas from across the organization and that waiting for answers to questions frequently creates interruptions and disturbs their workflow. Furthermore, about 57% of people managers claim that they frequently find that they have already answered the questions asked. A quarter of all respondents claim they are unable to rapidly discover answers to their inquiries using available tools and resources and that they are unable to find relevant information within their company to help them perform their jobs. In our opinion, companies should find ways to minimize such things by providing employees with training or handbooks.

Regarding the daily time spent searching for answers/solutions, 62% of all respondents spend more than 30 minutes a day searching for answers or solutions to problems. 37.71% of them devote 30-60 minutes a day, 17.6% – 60-120 minutes, and 6.98% over 120 minutes a day. Stackoverflow provides us with an interesting fact: The amount of time spent searching for answers/solutions adds up to between 333-651 hours per week across the entire team of 50 developers.

All the respondents spend some time answering the questions. Usually, it takes about 15-30 minutes daily (32.95%). But, in some cases, it takes 60-120 minutes a day (12.18%) or even over 120 minutes a day (4.23%). Also, about 48% of developers think that onboarding takes a very long time or a somewhat long time at their organization. In comparison, 35.11% believe that the time spent on onboarding is just right, and about 16% of respondents think that onboarding is very short.

This was our analysis of the survey. To conclude, we would like to briefly summarize everything mentioned above:

• In 2022 people tend to learn code from online resources like forums and blogs;
• JavaScript is considered to be the most used programming language, and PostgreSQL and MySQL are the most commonly used databases;
• Windows is considered to be the most popular operating system;
• About 68.61% of respondents are full-time employed, and 85% of developers state that their companies are at least partially remote;
• The highest salaries in the industry are paid to people who occupy a position in senior roles like executives (C-suite, VP, etc.);
• 62% of all respondents spend more than 30 minutes a day searching for answers or solutions to problems.