Thread by @QuinnyPig

I have been summoned by none other than @RealGeneKim to comment on the @StackOverflow developer insights survey results.

"Huh, where did I put that spare Lightning cable--maybe in here?" asks Gene, proceeding to unknowingly fling open Pandora's box.

https://twitter.com/RealGeneKim/status/1265806484891295746

First, this lives at insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020 should you wish to read it yourself.

Second, I wish this had been out when I spoke to @pchandrasekar on the podcast a month ago.

Third, this data was gathered in February, right before we all had way different things to worry about.

"We took significant steps to increase the diversity of the respondent pool. Unfortunately the results weren't as good as we had hoped. We will continue to focus on this."

That's a hell of a statement by @stackoverflow. Well done. "We tried. It didn't work. We'll try harder."

"What kind of developer are you? Select all that apply." Had I filled out the survey I'd have made a beeline for "shitty."

Results add up to more than 100%--specifically they go to 1000% because we are all 10x engineers in our own ways.

I don't love this result. It spreads the unspoken message that this can't just be a career, it needs to be a driving passion.

No, it doesn't. Not for everyone. And that's okay.

Respect to the folks with 50+ years of coding experience.

The only thing I've ever done for over 50 years was wait for a CloudFront distribution update to finish.

"Years of professional coding experience." This does kinda highlight that senior management is seen as a promotion, as I read the data. Management is, in fact, a lateral transition that demands an orthogonal skillset.

Highlighting that a degree is very much not required in this space.

I don't have one.

88% of respondents identify themselves as male, 1% identify themselves as trans in response to the survey.

"Developers who are data scientists or academic researchers are about 10 times more likely to be men than women, while developers who are system admins or DevOps specialists are 25-30 times more likely to be men than women." Oof.

Skipping ahead; you're not here to see White Guy Opine on Diversity of Varying Forms, presumably.

Let's talk technology.

The incorrect "it's" in this paragraph strikes me as amusing for a survey about a field that's so INCREDIBLY GODDAMNED PICKY ABOUT PUNCTUATION AND SYNTAX.

Hitting the number 1 results for popularity, you're probably a JavaScript developer working in jQuery and node.js with MySQL on Linux. If that's you, contentedly pet your half of a dog.

Next is most loved / hated.

Before I tear into this, I just want to call out that I'm not dunking on languages or the people who wield them here. I can write shitty code in all of them!

Rust is the most beloved language because of course it is. The Rust Evangelism Strike Force remains in top form.

As a tiny data point, I have never seen Rust code in the wild.

The most dreaded language is VBA because an awful lot of folks responding to this survey apparently don't clearly grasp how the business world works.

If I break npm your website goes wonky; if I break @msexcel nobody's getting paid.

HTML/CSS are indeed on the list of languagse, proving that the sniveling assholes whining that "they're not real languages" on Twitter aren't doing meaningful work in survey design this go-round.

ASP.net beats out React, which is fascinating to me. There's an entire MS ecosystem of developers out there that I don't talk to very much.

With regard to databases, developers most want to learn @mongoDB.

That's such an egregious out of left field "what the HELL" answer that I can only assume that the survey results themselves were stored in MongoDB.

Everyone hates their database, because not enough people wrote in Route 53.

"Most dreaded and wanted platforms."

I'm going to derail for a minute here and point out that @slackhq is in no way, shape, or form a platform.

Slack is not "where work happens." It's a noisy carnival of office drama. The "apps" that people use basically all distill down to "other things send notifications to @SlackHQ." In the advanced mode, you can click a button and make a thing happen in response. That's about it.

Remember Twitter's days of "being a platform?" And then one day haha just kidding fuck you; the API rules changed, an entire third party client ecosystem got gutted, and now Twitter DevRel is a pale shadow of its former self?

This can happen to Slack incredibly easily.

24.5% of respondents want to learn Docker. I assure you, to "learn docker" for most common developer use cases, it is not a massive undertaking.

It is half of a day.

20.2% of respondents want to learn AWS.

Me too.
Me too.

And just as many people want to learn Wordpress as they do @IBMcloud.

I think that's unfair. Wordpress is incredibly capable! lastweekinaws.com is a Wordpress site!

"Developers' Primary Operating System."

This is hard for me to identify with. All of my coding takes place in an EC2 instance, to which I connect from MacOS or iOS.

Collaboration tools!

Everyone uses GitHub, most people use Slack, Microsoft Teams doesn't justify its reported user numbers, and Amazon Chime is hahahahahah WTF is Amazon Chime.

Amazon Chime is getting its ass kicked by *Facebook Workplace* for god's sake.

Um... HELLO DEVELOPERS. It's like you're not even reading Gartner's exhaustively researched analyses that cost as much as a house!

This finding speaks to my pet theory "Developers are terrible goddamned customers." Permit me a 2 tweet diversion.

Developers don't value their time, in the aggregate. Why would they pay $400 for something when they can build it themselves in two weeks?

If you finally win this skeptical market over you'll discover that their signing authority caps out at $50, and they're often ineffective champions / internal advocates for a solution.

You can argue with this all you'd like, but it's treated as gospel in enterprise sales.

And we're back.

Globally, the highest paid developers write Perl.

Let that sink in for a second. There's an entire code universe that many of us in the US don't see.

Bounding it to the US, we see many more HackerNews Approved languages on the list.

But Perl is still up there!

This map of the AWS-correlated ecosystem is fascinating. If we discount the upper right machine learning nonsense, we're left with a misspelled Terraform, and then the usual "screw this thing I quit" suspects: ElasticSearch, Redis, Kubernetes.

MongoDB shows up with the FrontEnd developer types, which makes a lot of sense. The more infrastructure oriented specialties have booted its lying ass out into the snow in too many shops for it to gain traction there.

I suspect that this being the @StackOverflow survey may have biased this result slightly.

Notably missing: shitpost on Twitter until someone helps you.

Oh this is cute @StackOverflow.

Which answer is "incensed because it was closed as Off Topic but you still leave it up to pollute search results like malevolent rat-assed goat smugglers."

"If we control for benefits, compensation, and location, what matters to you the most when choosing a job" and the answer is so white-guy it makes Amazon's board of directors look like the bar scene in Star Wars.

I'll write in anything before I work with assholes.

The salary numbers are basically useless; "The US" is so broad that you're smashing together SF tech with small town Maine.

Go the hell home!

The "Community" section of this report is solely comprised of @StackOverflow doing a remarkably thorough job of jerking itself off, so we'll skip it.

The entire culture problem of StackOverflow, and by extension much of tech, is summed up in this single image.

Okay, that's my read through of the report. Lot of stuff there! What do people want me to opine on that I may have glossed over?

Oh, and one more thing: @RealGeneKim has permitted me back into @DOESsummit as a speaker next month.

I'm giving a cloud cost optimization talk that's the exact opposite of basically every other cloud cost optimization talk in existence.