2022 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Observations

With the latest results for 2022, we examine a number of results that stood out in the report.

Every year, I try to keep up with developer trends and the StackOverflow Developer Survey is one of those reports I eagerly await.

I like to have an idea of what the development community believes is the most important technologies. It also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the industry.

Being a lifelong ASP.NET web developer, I like to not only focus on ASP .NET and Microsoft technologies, but on web technologies which are closely related and leverage the .NET ecosystem (npm, sass, task runners, etc).

Some of you may ask "why are these results important to developers?"

• Based on the 70,000 responses from developer feedback, this is what I would consider an industry-standard report.
• Developers who focus on teaching can examine the results for a possible training course in the future ("Kubernetes and Docker is on the rise!")
• It provides insight into a majority of what developers are using and allows new developers to focus on the latest technologies to be successful in their career.

There is a ton of data in these results and I wanted to share what I thought were interesting finds in relation to the .NET/Web community.

So let's get started.

• Developers are learning how to code through online resources. Period. (reference)
• However, if you segment the learning by age, more developers are learning by books as they get older as opposed to online resources. Maybe we all want to slow down a bit in our learning? (reference)
• With those online resources, technical documentation (huzzah to docs.microsoft.com!), StackOverflow, Blogs, How-to's, and written tutorials are the top 5...so keep blogging and writing those tutorials. (reference)
• Udemy is THE resource for online learning followed by Coursera, Codecademy, and Pluralsight. (reference)
• "Developer, Full Stack" is the most common title developers call themselves with "Developer, Back-end" and "Developer, Front-end" in the 2 and 3 spots, respectively. Everyone likes all of it or half of it (reference)
• For the 10th year in a row, developers still loooove their JavaScript. (reference)
• Almost 37% of professional developers use the ASP.NET platform (ASP.NET Core, 20.71% and ASP.NET, 16.15%) (reference)
• Angular.js (the first iterations of Angular) is considered to be the most dreaded framework to work with (almost 80% dread working with it) for the third year in a row. (reference)
• Professional developers still consider AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud as the top cloud providers. (reference)
• However, more people are wanting to learn Heroku and Google Cloud. (reference)
• After looking over the list of IDEs, I'm confused as to the popularity of some of these environments. Visual Studio Code was the second choice for developers. For general web and .NET developers, this makes sense. While number one and three (Neovim and RAD Studio) mystified me, number four did not: JetBrain's Rider. As you can see Rider is way above Visual Studio (#13) and I've mentioned Rider in the past. I feel it's matured enough over the years and would consider it a great IDE alternative if you are a Visual Studio user. (reference)
  Sidenote: If you're looking for performance between Visual Studio 2022 and JetBrain's Rider, NDepend's author, Patrick Smacchia analyzes both IDEs and comes to some interesting conclusions.
• Let's chat quickly about a database result that I thought was intriguing. It was unanimous that every professional developer who worked with Microsoft SQL Server didn't want to work in any other database. They would rather stay with MS SQL Server. Kind of interesting (reference)
• This was interesting. When I saw the web frameworks and technologies, I was amazed at how many professionals were using ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core (reference), but no one was interested in learning it. At all. (reference)
• When it came to salaries, it looks like almost all of the technologies have risen since last year. Everybody should've received a raise last year based on these figures (I did say SHOULD'VE!). I would even gamble to say COBOL is making a comeback <smirk>. (reference)
• When it comes to Web3, developers are still torn between whether to adopt or wait. It's almost all equal across the board as to how unsure, or sure, everyone is (within 10 percentage points). (reference)
• As for the work environments, it's mostly half are working remotely and half are working in a hybrid manner (working at home half the time and then going to work for the other half). (reference)
• Finally, about 73% of developers code outside of work as a hobby. I'm guessing to keep their skills sharp. (reference)

There was a lot to digest.

Out of 70,000 developers? This should give everyone a good gauge as to where the industry is at and where it's going.

Conclusion

Even though this was a short post, I hope I packed it full of useful information to get your thinking about your career and give you an idea of what the industry is telling you based on developer feedback.

I did notice there wasn't an abundance of AI-specific questions. Is AI/Machine Learning plateau-ing as a technology? Is it still popular...or did I miss it somewhere in the results?

If you are looking for more trends, check out How to Keep Up With Technology Trends.

Did I miss something in the survey results? Did I read something wrong? What was your one result that stood out? Post your comments below and let's discuss.