Developer Dissatisfaction Doubles – InApps Technology 2022

According to StackOverflow’s 2020 survey, developer job dissatisfaction more than doubled, going from 10.6% being at least slightly dissatisfied in 2019 to 24.1% in the latest results. And since the survey was conducted in February before the full onset of the pandemic crisis, developer unhappiness is probably higher now.

This hidden nugget of data may be an early warning of developer discontent. If so, then remember what makes developers happy. Compensation, location and benefits still matter a lot, but beyond these factors, the languages, frameworks, and other technologies that will be used is most often cited (51.3%) as an important factor when choosing a new job. Women are about ten percentage points less likely to cite this as a factor.

The ability to use open source and learn new skills, oftentimes within an open source community, manifests itself in 72% of developers learning at least one new technique or language each year. Developers repeatedly opt to learn one language over another and want ways to evaluate this decision.

In this context, there continues to be controversy interpretations of programming language popularity soon ensued. Just like in previous years, many people misinterpret the most loved, dreaded and wanted charts from the StackOverflow survey. The results are based on two simple questions: what languages and technologies were used in the last year and which do developers want to use in the upcoming year. In recent years, additional questions were added about databases, frameworks, and platforms. Actual adoption rates are slow to change. For example, TypeScript’s rise among professional developers, going from 25.8% in 2019 to 28.3% in 2020, can be considered a big jump. As we have written previously, hopes about leaving legacy technologies are often just pipe dreams. If all the survey respondents’ wishes were to come true, developers using Java would drop from 38.4% in 2020 to 22.4% in 2021. That is not going to happen. 

A few weeks ago, we spoke to Bruno Borges, Principal Product Manager for Java at Microsoft, about the limitations of developer surveys. He thinks the capacity utilized by workloads using a runtime can be used to measure the importance of languages. He speculated that language popularity would look different based on the CPUs, memory and storage being utilized to run JVM (which runs Kotlin, Scala and many other Java permutations) workloads.

In a perfect world, how would you gauge the adoption level of programming languages and platforms?

More Tweeted Analysis

Docker, Kubernetes, Linux and IOS among “platforms” asked about in the same question. Kubernetes use rose 34% to a modest 12.9%. In comparison, Docker rose 12% to 39.2% doing dev work in the last year with the platform https://t.co/DKdXF9KNgA

— Lawrence Hecht (@LawrenceHecht) May 28, 2020

52% of developers work overtime at least once a month, but only half of these hard workers are doing so at least once a week. https://t.co/zJIvEjvfgZ pic.twitter.com/BNqIdEDRo2

— Lawrence Hecht (@LawrenceHecht) May 27, 2020

83% developers have at least a bachelor’s degree, usually in comp science, but only 34% of survey say a formal education is critical or very important. Sure only 16% say it is not at all important. Look forward to getting raw data for more analysis. https://t.co/cP4nluak5J pic.twitter.com/G0DZipwU0u

— Lawrence Hecht (@LawrenceHecht) May 28, 2020

Feature image via Pixabay.

InApps Technology is a wholly owned subsidiary of Insight Partners, an investor in the following companies mentioned in this article: Docker.