2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey: Key Findings on Technologies, Salaries, and Demographics
The 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, with nearly 65,000 respondents, reveals trends in developer occupations, experience, education, most used programming languages, web frameworks, databases, platforms, favorite versus dreaded technologies, and salary insights across roles and regions.
Stack Overflow released its 2020 Developer Survey, the tenth annual study, gathering responses from almost 65,000 developers worldwide.
The survey covers developers' basic information, technology usage, work, and community aspects. Key demographics show that backend, full‑stack, frontend, desktop/enterprise, and mobile are the top five occupations, with over 10% each for ops, DBAs, designers, and sysadmins. Most developers have 5‑9 years of experience, and 69% hold bachelor’s or master’s degrees.
JavaScript remains the most used language for the eighth consecutive year, followed by HTML/CSS, SQL, Python, and Java. Python slipped to third place behind TypeScript. Rust tops the most loved language list, while VBA is the most dreaded. In web frameworks, jQuery, React.js, Angular, ASP.NET, and Express lead usage; ASP.NET Core, React.js, Vue.js, Express, and Gatsby are the most loved, with Angular.js being the most hated.
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite, and MongoDB are the top databases, with Redis, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and Firebase most loved; IBM DB2 is the most disliked. Linux and Windows dominate platform usage, with Docker and Kubernetes rising in popularity; WordPress is the most frustrating platform for many.
Salary analysis shows Perl, Scala, and Go developers earn the highest median salaries globally (around $75k), while Java is no longer the lowest. In the US, Scala, Go, and Objective‑C lead. Engineers, SREs, ops specialists, and data engineers earn the most, and salaries generally increase with experience, though designers, mobile developers, and educators earn comparatively less.
Technology clusters reveal strong correlations: web development technologies link with SQL and Microsoft tools, while ops technologies connect Linux with Python. The report highlights the interconnected ecosystem of modern development.
For full details, refer to the original Stack Overflow survey report.
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