What is your employment status?
Which of the following best describes your job role regardless of your position level?
1 in 14 people we polled occupy senior leadership roles, which seems like a lot. Almost all of them lead a small business.
Which of the following best describes the level of your current position?
How many people work for your company / organization?
What kind of development does your company do?
As expected, people in IT companies mostly develop software products (do product development), while those who work for non-IT companies are typically involved in in-house development.
What size is your project team?
What agile software development framework do you use in your team?
Two thirds of developers practice pair programming.
How is your team distributed?
How long have you been working in IT?
The more experienced people spent a little bit less time per week on learning new tools / technologies / programming languages.
Could you tell us your age range?
Methodology
The report is public. Its contents may be used as long as the source is appropriately credited.
We used Twitter ads, Facebook ads, Google Adwords, and JetBrains' own communication channels to invite potential survey respondents to take part. In our ad campaigns, we used two targeting waves. The first wave targeted specific countries, while the second one targeted rarely used programming languages to reduce variance in the corresponding programming languages' sections. We targeted Ruby, Scala, Rust, Swift, and Objective-C. We also asked our respondents to share the survey with their peers. To minimize bias, the reports only include responses coming from Twitter ads, Facebook ads, Google Adwords, and respondents' referrals. We took into account each respondent source individually to generate the results using weighting.
To decrease survey length and reduce response burden, some sections were shown to respondents randomly. There were seven randomized sections, of which every respondent saw three. The randomized sections include:
- DevOps
- Company communication tools
- Education
- Cross-platform development tools
- Conferences, meetups, social networks
- Misc questions (static analysis, hours of coding, relation to open source).
- Continuous integration and Issue Tracking tools
We collected sufficiently large samples from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States, to consider our sample as representative to the current Developer Ecosystem. Around 70% of all the developers in the world are based in these countries.
To minimize possible bias against non-English speaking respondents, the survey was also available in 8 additional languages: Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish.
We performed three stages of weighting to get a less biased picture of the worldwide developer population. On the first stage, we used responses collected while targeting countries and our estimations of the numbers of professional developers in each country. We forced the proportion of students and unemployed respondents to be 17% to ensure consistency with the previous year’s methodology, as that is the only estimation of their populations we have available. On the second stage, we added responses collected with targeting by programming languages. We used country, regularly used programming languages, and employment information as auxiliary variables to weight the new dataset against data collected after the first weighting stage. On the third stage, we added data from respondents’ referrals and used the same auxiliary variables as on the second stage.
Despite these measures, some bias is likely present as JetBrains users may have been more willing on average to complete the survey.