A Look at Today’s Developer Job Market, Programming Tool Trends

Recently released data from Stack Overflow sheds new light on the programmer workforce and offers insight on developer hiring and tech trends.

Of the 12.6 percent of Stack Overflow respondents that identify themselves as students, ages range from 16 to 65 years.

Nearly seven in 10 (69 percent) developers surveyed told Stack Overflow they are at least partly self-taught.

According to the survey, full-stack developers who know JavaScript and develop for the cloud, or work with React or Redis typically earn $105,000, which is anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000 more than counterparts who do not use these languages.

Other high-paying developers? Math developers in the United States—data scientists, machine learning developers and those with statistics and math backgrounds—report earning the most overall. Those who know Scala, Spark and Hadoop earn more than their peers.

This year, 26 percent of developers reported using Mac OS, which is up from 18.7 percent in 2013. Alternately, Windows has steadily declined in adoption since 2013.

Unsurprisingly, students continue to be the largest percentage of respondents (25.9 percent) looking for jobs.

Those happy with their jobs? Designers, who make up nearly half (49.4 percent) of respondents, said they are happiest with their jobs.

Developers don’t want to be stuck in a rut—globally, 64.3 percent said they want to build something new in their jobs.

Developers who work in gaming—which represents 2.4 percent of respondents—are more likely to love their jobs than anyone else, according to the survey.

Based on team size and number of women on each team, analysts and data scientists are more likely to work with a high percentage of women on their team, the survey indicated.