2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey: Key Findings on Technologies, Roles, Salaries, and Demographics

The 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, conducted in February during the pandemic, provides the largest worldwide snapshot of developer demographics, preferences, and work conditions. Key highlights include shifts in technology popularity, with Rust retaining the top spot, TypeScript overtaking Python, and Python falling to third place behind Rust and TypeScript.

DevOps engineers and Site Reliability Engineers remain the highest‑paid individual contributors, and 80% of respondents consider DevOps at least somewhat important. Over 75% of developers work occasional overtime, while 25% work overtime one to two days per week or more.

Regarding roles, about 55% identify as full‑stack developers, 20% as mobile developers, and the median number of roles per respondent is three, with common combinations of backend, frontend, and full‑stack. Gender analysis shows men dominate most roles, especially in data science and DevOps, while women are more represented in front‑end, design, and QA.

Experience data shows 65% of professionals have less than ten years of coding experience; senior technical leads and engineering managers have the most experience, whereas web developers, academic researchers, and data scientists tend to have less. The average age of developers is under 35, with 70% under that age and only 5% over 50.

Education levels are high: roughly 75% hold at least a bachelor’s degree, with over 62% having degrees in computer science, computer engineering, or software engineering. About 85% consider formal education at least somewhat important, though 16% see it as unnecessary.

Salary analysis shows engineering managers, SREs, DevOps experts, and data engineers earn the highest pay, with notable differences across languages—Python and R users command higher salaries than expected, reflecting their use in high‑paying data‑science roles.

Employment findings indicate that more than 92% of developers are employed (most part‑time), 12% are students, and over 70% are full‑time across most regions. Job‑search activity is low, with 83% not actively looking, but academic researchers, data scientists, and designers show higher job‑seeking rates.

Work‑hour data shows over 75% of developers work fewer than 45 hours per week, while senior managers and product managers tend to work longer hours.