There are many different kinds of developer communities online. Some, like C# Corner ,combine both in-person physical meetups and community and cater to both fast questions and answer boards and also long-form articles. Others, like Stack Overflow, are more geared towards short question and answer formats. It can also be said that Stack is different from other solely technically focused communities as it also covers many other topics. Every year, Stack carries out a large survey of members of its community and it usually yields some interesting statistics, trends and results. Here are some of the interesting ones, which I came across:
US developers make up the majority of professional developers, using the site with India; the second largest accounting for 12.64 percent. It's not surprising therefore to see Indian developers being the second most frequent visitors each month.
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While not being surprised to see that Web Developer was the most prominent role, I was very surprised to see that mobile wasn't next - no, as this position is reserved for the old school desktop development area! .... so much for mobile first over desktop development.
One of the questions asked from the respondents was how important education was to their work. I was surprised by the majority answer, which swayed in favor of the not that important end of the scale. Indeed, the official analysis of this said:
'This is not entirely surprising given that 90% of developers overall consider themselves at least somewhat self-taught: a formal degree is only one aspect of their education, and so much of their practical day-to-day work depends on their company’s individual tech stack decisions.'
I would however put in a comment here that going to the sites like Stack, C# Corner and CodeProject etc. to find answers and learn is in itself an education! I'm not sure how the original question was phrased - its one of the pitfalls in gathering statistics and creating surveys like this.
The spread of the languages is not surprising, and C# and Java are almost head to head. Python is increasingly becoming a popular language, being adopted in many areas for its ease of use, solid community support and accessibility to the new developers.
I was surprised to see that .NET Core is already quite far up the framework popularity scale! ... it takes 33% overall while only being a relative newcomer to the scene.
Another relative newcomer to the scene is Visual Studio Code, which makes a surprising rush to the top of the pile for the most favoured development environments for the Web developers. Its really great to see such an uptake on these new true cross platform technologies.
In general, it seems that most folk are reasonably satisfied in their jobs, but interestingly, those working in finance, retail and logistics will be less satisfied . I wonder is that to do with the pressure in those industries?
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Overall, the survey makes very interesting reading - if you have a few minutes. It's worth taking a look through! You can
view the survey here.