How has the technology industry transformed over years?
Are the technologies that we used in 2011 still prevalent or do we need to update ourselves? Are there currently a greater number of women in our industry as compared to 2011? Which country produces the greatest number of developers?
To get an insight into the technology industry, we analyze data from a stack overflow survey from 2011 to 2020. We discover some really good and interesting insights by doing this analysis. Some of the questions that I have tried to answer here are:
Has the number of women in technology grown over these years?
What languages have been most popular each year?
Which country has the highest number of developers active on stack overflow for each year?
Which is the most loved IDE by developers over the years?
The stack overflow survey over the years has become more popular with only 2814 respondents in 2011 to 88883 respondents in 2020. The 2019 survey represented 179 countries and has questions like the technology they use, current profession, job satisfaction level, education level and many others.
Growth of Women in Technology?
One of the first questions that came to my mind was whether the percentage of women in the technology force has increased as compared to men. We can observe there has been an increase of 4.7% in 2014 to 7.5% in 2019. This growth can be attributed to including more women and improving diversity within the teams. The trends are encouraging but I had expected the growth rate of participation of women to be more than that is observed. This may be because the number of males is also increasing in the industry.
Let us also analyze the percentage of male respondents:
As we can see from the chart above, the number of male respondents have increased from 91.2% to 93.4%. More males are also joining the industry.
Most popular programming language?
This is a very important question for all developers. Out of a plethora of programming languages, which language should a developer learn to maximize his job and salary opportunities? After analyzing the data from 2011 to 2020, we figured out SQL and Javascript have been the most popular languages that developers work on. Here is a visualization to depict it.
Most popular languages
Javascript is the most popular language among developers in 2020 with 70% of the developers working on it. So, if you want to be in demand, Javascript is the way to go :)
Which country has the most developers?
According to Stackoverflow, most of the developers on its platform are from the United States each year. The chart below depicts this.
The United States is the clear winner!!
However, some features of StackOverflow might be blocked in China as the website loads Jquery from Google CDN and Google is blocked in China. So, this might have led to less usage of StackOverflow in China. In my opinion, if the website was as accessible in China as it is in the USA, China would have given a close fight for the greatest number of developers.
Most Popular Development Environment?
This data is only available from 2017 to 2020. Visual Studio is by far the most popular choice among developers.
Visual Studio — The most popular IDE
Conclusion
In this post, we try to study the trends in the technology industry from 2011 to 2020. Stackoverflow is a good representation of the technology industry as most programmers use the platform as a question-and-answer site. We observed the following trends:
There has been an increase in the percentage of women in the industry. However, the increase is not very steep and we should take more initiatives to improve diversity.
Javascript is the most popular language followed closely by SQL
Most numbers of developers are located in the United States
Visual Studio is the preferred choice for programmers as a development environment
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