StackOverflow survey 2024

StackOverflow survey 2024 just dropped.

At a glance, more people head to the office (20% vs 16% last year), AI search is admired (75%) and plan to use more next year, and AI is not a treat to developer's job (70%).

More interesting things beyond what is on the surface:

• 🇺🇦 Ukrainian developers constitute 4.6% of respondents. Shows you that despite the effort of ruzza to depopulate the country, Ukrainians keep on coding!
• Younger people (>24 y.o., 85%+) use online resources to learn much more than older (<65 y.o. 67%). Not a surprise in itself, but I did not expect that applies to developers as much.
• On the same subject as previous, 84% use "Technical Documentation" to learn how to code, and in that 90% is "API document and/or SDK document." Who would think that documenting your API can be useful... Seriously though, this is the thing that will be filled by GenAI more and more, since summarization, is its forte (summarizing code and other assets as documentation).
• The bell curve of years of codding moving to the centre. Not a surprise, but it may be that the number of developers might start reaching a plateau in my lifetime. To clarify, it used to be that the chart was leaning more heavily to the less number of years, meaning, there are more developers with fewer years of experience than with more. I.e. humanity produces more developers per year than previous years.
• Also, years of coding professionally decreases the longer you respondents coded, meaning coding used to be a hobby a lot more than now.
• Full-stack developers (30.7%) are the largest population by a huge margin compared to the next type, Back-end, just 16.7%. My guess is, a lot of companies do not want/can't afford specialization for their engineers, so you become a "jack of all trades."
• Despite skepticism, usage of AI tooling increased (62%) compared to the last year (44%), and respondents think AI tooling will be more integrated in their work.
• Professional developers feel that AI tools increase productivity (83%) more than people who are learning to code (73%). But pros also trust AI tools less (42%) than folks who learn to code (49%, "highly trust" + "somewhat trust")

There is so much more in there, I would recommend everyone who has anything to do with this industry, take a good look!