CodinGame Developer Survey 2019

Developers can’t wait to start coding! A huge 73% of programmers started coding before they hit their twenties.

In fact, just like Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey (who started coding when he was just eight years old), close to a third of respondents (30.8%) started coding before they even turned 14. Less than 11% (10.5%) started coding after they turned 25.

Although a lot of developers still learn to code at school (18.43%) or at university (39.38%), over a third consider themselves to be self-taught (36.24%).

Homemade programmers rely on resources such as online tutorials, books, or code challenges to hone their skills.

Tech blogs are developers’ absolute favorite way to keep up with tech news and trends. 70% of developers say they read tech blogs.

Medium, another text-based media, is up next (27.8%).

Developers think it’s important to keep up with new technologies and programming trends. They do so by reading up: 59.2% turn to online written tutorials.

Indeed, despite the recent video content and interactive learning trends, developers favor written content over other interactive learning means such as YouTube or MOOCS.

We asked our developer community about the programming languages they use.

Developers LOVE Python! For the second year running, Python came out on top: 33.6% of respondents stated Python as one of their favorite programming languages.

Javascript and Java seem to divide programmers, cited both as two of the most loved and most hated languages.

No surprises. This year yet again, PHP came up as the most dreaded programming language!

For the vast majority of programmers, coding isn’t just something they do at work.

87% of our respondents said they code outside of work (or school), either regularly (39.7%) or from time to time (47.3%).

51.4% of developers work up to an hour a day on personal projects, whereas 43.2% spend an impressive 2 to 5 hours per day on personal coding projects.

Coding to the beat. We asked developers about how they liked to get their code on. Turns out, they like to code to the beat! 72.8% of programmers listen to music when coding.

All the monitors. Developers think that more than one monitor is definitely the best way to go to equip a developer’s workstation. 2 monitors seems to be the perfect setup: 61.1% of developers think 2 monitors is ideal to work with.

We asked our community of developers about the operating systems they use. It appears Windows and Linux are battling it out as developers’ favorite operating systems, leaving Mac OS behind.

49.4% of our respondents chose Windows and 34.7% chose Linux as their favorite operating system. Only 13.6% sided with Mac OS.

The majority (56.5%) of developers feel particularly positive about their programmer peers.

38.6% feel a sense of community and a connection to other developers and 17.9% feel encouraged and supported by other developers.

Developers are largely happy at work. Close to 70% of respondents answered between 7 and 10 to the question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, do you enjoy your current job?”.

Get organized. What would make developers even happier at work? Clarity and organization. For 44.8% of respondents, a clearer roadmap is the key to happy work, along with better internal processes. Organization matters to developers – even more so than remote working possibilities or training opportunities.

Programmers are globally happy at work, but where are they the happiest?

It would seem that the smaller the company, the higher the percentage of “very happy”* developers. It’s also interesting to note that a relatively high percentage of developers who don’t work at a company (freelance developers for example) are also very happy in their work.

* Developers who answered 9 or 10 to the question “On a scale of 0 to 10, do you enjoy your current job?”

In 2019, pretty much every industry out there needs developers. We looked at which industries developers feel happiest working in.

Education is the industry where developers are happiest, 32% said they were “very happy”*. Education is followed by Technology and Media.

* Developers who answered 9 or 10 to the question “On a scale of 0 to 10, do you enjoy your current job?”

Developers from all over the world took part in this year’s survey. We took a closer look at where the happiest* developers are living and coding.

It would seem that the happiest programmers are located in Brazil – very closely followed by Canada and The United States as the best places to work according to our developer community. Germany is on their heels as the top European country.

* Developers who answered 9 or 10 to the question “On a scale of 0 to 10, do you enjoy your current job?”

Contrary to common beliefs, developers are not lone wolves!

Indeed, developers generally get along at work, rating the collaboration and communication within their team at 7.19/10 on average. What’s more, over 70% of developers say they’d rather work as part of a team.

When it comes to their team, close to 70% of developers think solidarity is highly important – even more so than being surrounded by top-notch colleagues.

The good news is that developers get on well with their colleagues! Respondents rate the level of communication and collaboration with coworkers at 7.19/10 on average.

We asked developers which programming languages they used at work. This year, once again, Javascript came out as the most in demand language (51.7% of respondents), confirming the rise of web development needs.

Java came in at a not-so-close second: 31.9% use Java at work. Back-end object-oriented programming has been outpaced by front-end programming needs within the tech industry.

We asked developers which frameworks they use at work.

Node.js came out on top, as the most-used framework for programmers (21.1%).

Spring continues to evolve (alongside Java) and gain traction. The framework has moved up two spots compared to our 2018 results.

For the second year running “Machine Learning/AI” is hot! Close to half of our respondents (48.7%) said they’d like to learn about Machine Learning in 2019.

“Game development” and “Mobile development” have replaced “Big data” and “Functional programming” this year in second and third place.

Developers embrace the open source philosophy. However, less than a third (30.9%) actually contribute to open source projects – despite 52.4% saying that they’d like to start! Will we see a rise in open source project contributions in 2019?

Developers consider it’s their responsibility to turn down work on programming projects that go against their principles. 79% of respondents say they’d refuse if they were asked to code something they considered unethical.

47.9% of developers have already taken part in a hackathon and 30.7% say they’d like to give it a go.

Why? Because it’s a blast!

Young adults. The majority of our respondents (63.8%) are between 20 and 34 years old.

From around the world. Over 9,000 developers from all over the globe took part in our survey. The main represented countries are: France, The United States, Russia, Germany, India, United Kingdom, Poland, Canada, Brazil, Ukraine and Spain.

Mostly males. Over 90% of our respondents identified as “male”. However, the proportion of women who took part has progressed from 6% to 8.69% compared to last year’s survey.

54.6% of respondents hold a higher education degree: 27.8% hold a Master’s degree and 26.8% hold a Bachelor’s degree – in computer science for 74.4% of respondents.

However, respondents with no formal qualifications interestingly represent 21.3% of participants.

Job title. Our developer community is made up of different kinds of developers, who do different kinds of programming things across different industries. The most frequent position among respondents was “Full-stack developer” (24%), followed by “Software developer” (20.7%) and “Back-end developer” (14.3%). Front-end developers represent only 5.7% of respondents.

Industry. 23.3% of respondents work in the “IT services” industry, followed by “Finance” (10%) and “Technology” (9.9%).

Company size. 28.2% of respondents work in a company with over 1000 employees, but middle-sized companies come next, representing 21.8% of respondents. Small companies and startups with less than 10 employees represent 12.2% of respondents.

Full-time developers. 58.9% of respondents are employed full-time. Students represent 22.7% of participants, whereas job seekers only represent 6.4%. Overall, active developers make up close to 70% of our community.

Experienced developers. Senior developers (over 5 years of experience) represent 41.5% of respondents, whereas Junior developers (less than 3 years of professional experience) represent 44.4%.