Every 8 seconds or so, a developer asks a question on Stack Overflow. This year, 56,033 coders in 173 countries answered the call.

We asked them 45 questions. Key highlights include the following:

Developers love Rust. Even back-end developers know JavaScript. Only 7% of developers identify as "rockstars". Most developers prefer dogs to cats. (But not developers in Germany.)

Surveys aren’t perfect. While our large sample size helps offset some biases, it’s still biased against devs who don't speak English, or who don't like taking English-language surveys. In some sections we've augmented the results with insights gleaned from the activity of Stack Overflow's 40 million monthly visitors. If you’re an employer, we’d be happy to help you reach those developers. If you're a developer (you're probably a developer), we hope you sign up.

Throughout these results we'll be using the terms "developers", "devs", and "respondents" interchangeably. We’ll also be keeping commas outside quotation marks, because that’s what developers do.

In January, 46 million people visited Stack Overflow to get help or give help to a fellow developer. We estimate 16 million of those people are professional developers.

Our estimate on professional developers comes from the things people read and do when they visit Stack Overflow. We collect data on user activity to help surface jobs we think you might find interesting and questions we think you can answer. You can download and clear this data at any time.

_{49,525 responses}

More respondents consider themselves Full-stack Developers than any other role. On average, Full-stack developers are comfortable coding with 5 to 6 major languages or frameworks (vs. 4 for everyone else). Executives are comfortable using more languages and frameworks than any other developer occupation, which is most likely a result of having more experience.

There are roughly just as many developers who call themselves Mobile Developers as there are Android Mobile Developers (3% for each). About 2.5% of all developers are iOS Mobile Developers. We received 59 responses from Windows Phone Mobile Developers (.1%).

Most Popular Technologies per Dev Type

JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language on earth. Even Back-End developers are more likely to use it than any other language.

_{55,735 responses}

This year we asked respondents if they are Engineers, Experts, Hackers or any of the other descriptors we’ve frequently seen in job listings, business cards, and Twitter bios.

95% of developers identify as either a Developer, Programmer, Engineer, Senior Developer or Full-Stack Developer. Embedded Application Developers are most likely to identify as Engineers. Graphics Programmers are most likely to identify as Programmers.

But Developer is the runaway choice here. It’s our top choice, too.

Rockstars & Ninjas

10% of respondents self-identified as Ninjas. Real ninjas don’t tell you they’re ninjas. They just sneak up on you and slit your throat, which we're pretty sure constitutes a "hostile workplace environment".

_{55,338 responses}

The average developer is 29.6 years old. The median is 27.

Average Age per Country

_{Among countries with more than 1,000 responses}

The average developer in India is 6 years younger than the average developer in the United States. Looking for the future of developer growth? Look no further than India, Russia, Poland, and Brazil.

_{49,521 responses}

The average developer has about 6.5 years IT or programming experience. This isn’t necessarily professional experience (the average student tells us they have 3.4 years experience). Developers gain experience by building things, even if they’re doing it unpaid or part-time. We've found this experience distribution to closely match that of more than 230,000 developers who make their CVs available on Stack Overflow.

Worldwide, the median Front-End Web Developer has 3.5 years experience. The median Full-Stack Developer has 8 years experience. And the median Engineering Manager has 13 years experience.

Star Wars vs. Star Trek

_{42,503 responses}

We asked developers if they preferred Star Wars or Star Trek. Clearly, sci-fi mega-franchise of choice varies by age. Devs in their 40s prefer Star Wars. Devs in their 50s are Trekkies. Firefly was the top write-in, followed by Stargate, Doctor Who, and Babylon 5.

_{55,128 responses}

Our survey results demonstrate a dramatic disparity in tech among men and women. In fact, we know women make up a more significant proportion of the developer workforce than this suggests. According to Quantcast, about 12% of Stack Overflow's readers are women. (We don't actively track gender internally.) We also know this survey underrepresents people in countries where developers have an increased likelihood of being women such as Asian countries like South Korea, India, and China.

Developer Occupations & Women

Women are more likely to be Designers than any other developer type. They are far more likely to be Machine Learning Developers than men. Additionally, women are more likely to be Quality Assurance developers. Men and women appear to be about equally as likely to be either an Executive or Engineering Manager.

Experience by Gender

Experience varies regionally. And it varies by gender, too.

Gender Distribution per Age Cohort

While women make up about 6% of total respondents, they make up an even smaller percentage of respondents in their 30s and 40s. The gender disparity in tech is shamefully imbalanced across the age spectrum.

We can't claim to know the answer to bridging the gender gap in tech, but we think sharing data with the public is a productive step in advancing more dialogue across the industry. That's why in about a month we'll be releasing a full dataset of survey results for you to analyze yourself. Follow us on Twitter to stay updated.

Who Values Diversity?

_{42,156 responses}

Overall, about 73% of developers tell us they think diversity is at least somewhat important in the workplace. 41% of developers say diversity is very important. And developers who most often influence hiring decisions are more likely to believe in the value of diversity than other developer types.

We received some feedback this year that in addition to gender and diversity in general, we should have asked about ethnicity. It's definitely something we'll consider. What else should we ask about next year? Tell us.

_{40,183 responses from non-student developers}

69% of all developers tell us they are at least partly self-taught. (13% of respondents across the globe tell us they are only self-taught.) 43% of developers have either a BA or BS in computer science or a related field. 2% of developers have a PhD.

Education Varies By Developer Type

Machine Learning Developers are most likely to have taken an online class (Graphics programmers are least likely to do so). Enterprise Level Services Developers are most likely to have completed an Industry certification program (iOS Mobile Developer are least likely). Machine Learning Developers are also most likely to have completed a Masters or PhD in CS.

More people use JavaScript than use any other programming language. PHP appears to be falling out of favor as Node and Angular emerge.

Most Popular Technologies - Other

Delphi was the most commonly used write-in language or technology, and Typescript is the write-in that more developers want to use. (Hey, we see you OCaml.)

For the second year in a row Rust, Swift and Go make the top 5 most loved programming languages. VB tops the list of the most dreaded technologies – developers wouldn’t miss it if it went extinct. Developers who don’t currently develop with Android, Node and Angular want to do so.

_{Feedback counts include real votes plus vote attempts by anonymous users and users with low rep. Feedback counts for January 2016 shown above.}

50,000 survey respondents is big. 40 million respondents is bigger. Every month, 40 million people visit Stack Overflow. In January, those visitors submitted 2.2 million feedback events (1.7 million votes plus 540 thousand anonymous votes). In June 2015, JavaScript overtook Java as most popular tag on Stack Overflow. In December, Swift overtook Objective-C. You can do your own analysis on feedback events at our public data explorer.

Newer web-development technologies like React, Node.js, and AngularJS are growing in use. So is Swift, which is stealing market share from Objective C. Developers appear to be dropping CoffeeScript, Haskell, and Windows Phone. And though the survey showed many developers want out of Visual Basic and Wordpress, those technologies don't seem to be shrinking quite yet.

Make it rain! Cloud technology pays big bucks. So does tech frequently used in finance. Spark, Scala, Cassandra, and F# top the list of the top paying technologies. (This year’s list looks a lot like last year's list.)

Have you considered looking for a Spark job?

Top Paying Tech per Occupation

Full-Stack Developers who know JavaScript and develop for the Cloud, or work with React or Redis are paid better than their peers.

Front-End Developers who know JavaScript and React, Node, or Angular get paid more than other Front-End Developers.

Developers with mathematics backgrounds (including Data Scientists and Machine Learning Developers) who know Scala, Spark or Hadoop get paid more than their peers. Python and R pay about the same, though there are twice as many Math Developers who know Python.

Mobile Developers who know the iOS ecosystem seem to earn about $10,000 more on average than Android Developers.

The average developer regularly uses between 4 and 5 major programming languages, frameworks and technologies. The most common 2-technology combination is JavaScript & SQL. The most common 3-tech combination is JavaScript, PHP, and SQL.

Top Tech Stacks per Occupation

See the stacks? More Full-Stack Developers work with PHP than with any other Back-End language (closely followed by C# and Java).

JavaScript is so pervasive that it’s in all top 3-tech combinations used by Back-End Developers. This suggests a lot of these Back-End Developers are probably Full-Stack Developers in disguise. Our internal stats suggest about 60% of professional developers actually work with a Full-Stack.

63% of Data Scientists use Python, 44% use R, and 27% use both (14% use Python, R, and SQL).

_{46,613 responses}

Last year we asked you about text editors. This year we expanded the question to include IDEs, text editors, and other coding tools. The average developer uses between 2 and 3 of these development environments. The top write-ins were WebStorm (1.6%), brackets (.8%), QT Creator (.7%) and Delphi (.4%).

Development Environments per Occupation

Data Scientists use Vim & Notepad++. Full-Stack Developers use Visual Studio and Sublime. Students use Notepad++ and Visual Studio.

Last year, Mac edged ahead of the Linuxes as the number 2 operating system among developers. This year it became clear that trend is real. If OS adoption rates hold steady, by next year's survey fewer than 50% of developers may be using Windows.

Speaking of the Linuxes, Ubuntu is tops among them with 12.3% of the entire OS market for developers. Fedora, Mint, and Debian accounted for 1.4%, 1.7%, and 1.9% of all responses, respectively.

_{49,577 total respondents}

The vast majority of developers have jobs. 91% of developers in the workforce are “gainfully employed” (employed full-time, self-employed, or freelance).

Only 15% of developers are actively looking for a job. But 78% of developers are interested in hearing about new job opportunities.

If you're an employer, we want to know what you're doing to make sure you reach the devs who aren't actively job searching.

Who’s Looking for a New Job?

In the United States, Students, Analysts and Quality Assurance Developers are most likely to be actively looking for a new job. Designers, Execs and Machine Learning Developers are least likely to want to hear from employers.

In most countries, referrals from friends are the most common way developers find new jobs. Not in India though.

Salary is the one thing most developers say they care about when evaluating a new job opportunity. But it isn’t necessarily the thing they care about most. 37% of developers didn’t even include salary on their list of priorities.

Interestingly, German developers seem to be less concerned with salary than developers from other countries. US and French developers are less likely to prioritize opportunity for advancement, British developers are more concerned with location, and Indian developers are more likely to prioritize flexible work hours, building something innovative, working remote, and job title.

Job Priorities per Occupation

Different developer types prioritize different things. Full-Stack developers are more likely than anyone else to prioritize the tech that’s in the stack. Machine learning developers want to build something innovative. Quality assurance developers are more concerned with quality of colleagues and company culture than any other developer type.

Executives care less about work-life balance. They care more about building something that’s important, the ability to influence decisions, and more than any other developer type: equity.

Machine Learning Developers want to build something innovative.

Quality Assurance Developers are more concerned with quality of colleagues and company culture than any other developer type.

Priorities Change with Experience

_{49,521 responders with at least 1 job priority}

As developers gain experience, decision-making and technology stack become a bigger priority, as does working remote. (Have we told you lately how much we love remote?) But more experienced developers care less about job title.

Money Matters More in Certain Countries

_{Among developers with more than 5 years experience, and countries with at least 200 responses.}

Developers tend to value salary in countries where the mean developer salary is relatively low. Developers in Nordic countries are less interested in money than this trend implies.

Once developers are situated in a job, they want to learn things and build. Getting promoted is a higher priority for developers in India than it is for developers in other countries.

Unrealistic expectations, poor documentation, and unspecific requirements are the most common workplace gripes for developers. Sound familiar?

Challenges Change with Experience

_{49,521 responders with at least 1 challenge and an experience range}

Experienced developers face different challenges than junior developers. More experienced developers tend to be more bothered by unrealistic expectations, unspecific requirements, and fragile code. Also, experienced developers have less of an issue “trying to be nice”.

Salary per Developer Occupations

Average salary among developers with 5+ years experience is one way to compare compensation for different developer types. But quarters and pounds stretch further in some countries than others...

Purchasing Power per Country

Country	Salary (mean)	Salary (median)	Local Big Mac Price	Big Macs per Year (mean)
South Africa	$45,383	$35,000	$1.77	25,713
United States	$106,120	$105,000	$4.93	21,530
Ukraine	$33,023	$35,000	$1.54	21,444
Australia	$80,093	$75,000	$3.74	21,426
China	$54,667	$45,000	$2.72	20,072
Denmark	$81,778	$85,000	$4.32	18,930
New Zealand	$70,727	$65,000	$3.91	18,089
Ireland	$76,747	$75,000	$4.25	18,058
United Kingdom	$75,654	$65,000	$4.22	17,925
Israel	$74,400	$75,000	$4.29	17,447

_{Among developers with 5+ years experience. Based on The Economist’s Jan 2016 Big Mac Index.}

The Big Mac Index is a good way to compare purchasing power for developers living in different countries. In South Africa beef is cheap (other consumer goods are, too), and the average developer there can afford more than 25,000 Big Macs per year. Developers with 5+ years experience in the US and Ukraine eat pretty well, too.

Salaries and Rent per City

City	Apartment Price	Salary (median)	Pct. of Salary spent on Rent
Montreal, Canada	$712	$65,000	13%
Berlin, Germany	$740	$55,000	16%
Pune, India	$201	$15,000	16%
Bangalore, India	$205	$15,000	16%
Austin, TX, United States	$1,454	$105,000	17%
Seattle, WA, United States	$1,764	$125,000	17%
Portland, OR, United States	$1,401	$95,000	18%
Bucharest, Romania	$372	$25,000	18%
Kiev, Ukraine	$380	$25,000	18%
Los Angeles, CA, United States	$1,780	$115,000	19%

_{Among developers with 5+ years experience. Apartment Price = price in USD of 1-bedroom apartment in city center. Data from Numbeo.}

The rent is too damn high in Moscow (the average developer would have to spend more than 50% of their income on rent if they lived in the city center). Developers are better off living in Montreal, Berlin, Pune, and Bangalore – the last of which delivers more Stack Overflow traffic than any other city. Austin, Texas is the top city in the US for devs who don’t want to spend all their money on rent.

But if you don't pay your own rent, then consider moving to California. 7 of the top 10 cities by average developer salary are all in California. Palo Alto is number 1, with average developers earning $153,000 per year. The top paying city outside the United States is Zürich, where median pay for developers with 5+ years experience is $105,000.

Salary per Company Size

_{Relative Mean Salary calculated as salary vs. salaries for all other developers within a developer’s country}

Average salary increases as companies get bigger, though tiny companies seem to pay pretty well, too.

Money Buys Happiness Buys Money

_{46,122 respondents who provided a salary}

Overall, there is a strong correlation between compensation and job satisfaction. Does money buy happiness? Maybe in some places. But it’s also likely highly paid developers have more choices and they can work where they know they’ll be happy.

Salary per Employment Status

Full-time employees make up the bulk of the developer workforce (about 85%), and they get paid better on average than developers who are freelance or self-employed. But self-employed developers are most likely to love their job. What’s the difference between Self-employed and Freelance / Contract? About $10,000.

Salary by Gender

• Age
• Experience

There is no detectable gender pay gap for young developers in the US, but there does appear to be a significant pay gap among developers 30+, suggesting developers who are men of that age make up to $20,000 more on average. The gap is less apparent when looking across years of experience.

Salary by Education

Worldwide, participating in mentorship programs correlates with higher than average pay. Masters degrees and PhDs pay pretty well, too. Stay in school, kids.

Industry

More developers work in Software Products than any other industry. But code is everywhere, including a few thousand “other” industries (of which Insurance, Research, Travel, and Energy were tops).

Developers who work in Gaming are more likely to love their job than anyone else. Developers in Manufacturing and Finance tell us they are most likely to work with legacy code. Developers in Defense are likely to love their boss. Their boss is probably listening.

Company Size

_{39,139 responses}

The developer workforce is split in half between developers who work for companies with fewer than 100 employees and companies with more than 100 employees. About 25% of developers work at companies with more than 1,000 employees.

The lone-wolf developer is a myth, or at least extremely rare. 96% of developers say they work on a team. Developers who aren't a traditional developer type are most likely to be lone wolves (Quality Assurance developers are least likely to work alone).

Women on Teams

We asked respondents for the size of their team and how many women are on their team. The above chart shows responses from men. Analysts and Data scientists are most likely to work with a high percentage of women on their team. Embedded application developers and Desktop developers are least likely to work with a high percentage of women on their team. (Not shown: Quality assurance developers have the highest median count of women per team at 2.)

_{39,271 responses (no students)}

About 12% of developers work remote full-time. 30% work remote part-time or full-time.

Remote Developers are More Experienced

Developers with 11+ years experience are nearly twice as likely to work remote as developers with less than 5 years experience.

Global Remote

_{Among countries with 200 or more responses}

Developers in Argentina are far more likely to work remote than developers in any other country.

Remote Developers Love Their Jobs

_{Percent of developers who say they love their job}

Remote developers are more likely to love their job than other developers. Do you work from home? Do you want to? We’ve got plenty of job opportunities for you to check out if so.

_{46,599 responses}

57% of developers tell us they check-in or commit code multiple times per day.

Developers Who Code are Happy Developers

_{Percent of developers who love their job. 37,588 responses}

Overall, there's a strong correlation between job satisfaction and pushing code into production. 65% of developers who never check in code are satisfied at their jobs vs. 77% satisfaction rate among developers who commit code multiple times per day. Developers want to code! (Or maybe happy developers just commit more than everyone else.)

_{46,165 responses}

Over half of developers say they visit Stack Overflow multiple times a day, and 78% of developers tell us they visit Stack Overflow daily.

_{42,134 responses}

The vast majority of developers use Stack Overflow to get help for their job. Most also use Stack Overflow because they love to learn.

12.3 million questions have been asked, and 18.4 million answers submitted since Stack Overflow was founded in 2009. In 2015, 2.7 million questions were asked on Stack Overflow. 3.2 million answers were submitted.

More than 27,000 respondents gave us their user profile information. We looked it up: they’ve asked 383,445 questions and submitted 2,804,051 answers. Those questions and answers have helped millions of developers. You might be one of them.

Reputation

Rep isn't just fake internet points - it's a proxy for how many people you've helped.

If you're part of the 96% of developers who get help here at least once a month and want to pay it forward, start by signing up.