In Part 1, we explored gender demographics among respondents of multiple surveys and the audiences of popular YouTubers, and saw that ratios of ove...
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Thanks @sachagreif It seems that many men don't address the gender problem (and white people don't address race issues) as they either don't care or may be afraid to say something wrong. As an ageing white male, I agree that we tend to hire and contact people who are similar to us, or we're trapped in a bubble where there are no other people left that even try to join our bubble, and then it is our task to find out if it might actually be our fault and how we could become more open minded and inclusive.
I'd go further and say there is no inherent problem with the demographic itself, but it points towards some actual problem further down the line.
An all-men team can build things perfectly fine, but should lead us to the question "how come there are no women in the team?". Maybe there is a good reason. Maybe it's a statistical anomaly. Or maybe there is something actively preventing women from getting into the team.
Your theory around the survey not being very beginner friendly I think may be a good path to go down. I would even say that it's not very intermediate friendly either. Even as someone that has been around the industry for a while and has a good amount of knowledge around existing features and frameworks, I find the survey somewhat intimidating. I can't imagine how much worse it is for someone less experienced.
Generally, the first section about the features that you know or are aware of feels like a big test of how good of a programmer you are, so it's pretty disheartening to come away from that very first section feeling like you don't know very much. And every year it adds new things and replaces older things, so even if you came to the survey again the year after now knowing more about that topic that you didn't know about before, you're greeted with more new things where you once again get to experience a feeling of imposter syndrome. It's only after the survey results come out where you get to feel like maybe you're not the only one who doesn't know about X feature.
Even though I've taken the survey throughout the years, I find myself wondering why I keep taking it and what the purpose even is for some of the questions. I would say I usually don't feel great coming out of that survey.
Perhaps some things to consider:
I think you make some great points!
This is key, the goal of the survey is anticipating future trends, which is why if we do our job right you shouldn't know about most things in the survey. In fact, once it becomes clear that most people already know/use a feature and the trend is now pretty stable (things like Flexbox or CSS Grid for example) we remove it from the survey altogether.
Great question. I think the answer might be bringing more value to people taking the survey even if they don't know the items in it. Maybe find a way to make the survey more fun or more educational?
I've found out about more than one cool upcoming feature by seeing it in one of the surveys and looking it up.
Adding some feedback for things respondents don't know about, like a "Find out what this is" popup with a brief explanation and a link might be a way to counteract this?
Anyway, this brings me to another question: Is there any data on respondents not finishing the survey? My suspicion is that a fair amount of respondents might stop the survey halfway-through as they realise how much they don't know, rather than just not participating in the first place.
What would be a way to address this, other than having microsoft paperclip go tok tok tok "by the way it's fine if you don't know most of this"? My rough ideas would be:
Great feedback, thanks!
Interesting! I think it would be helpful to make this more explicit. I also wonder then if it's worth including a little blurb about each one and see, when someone hasn't used something or know what it is, if they think they'd find it useful and/or want to learn more about it? Although I don't know if that changes the purpose of the results.
That sounds like an interesting idea! Not sure how complicated this would be, but it would be cool to have a custom resource at the end that's based on responses where someone says they haven't used X is but are interested.
The point on inclusivity of branding and design stuck with me. I am of course a data point of only one woman.
I personally find that terminal style off-putting and difficult to read. I’ve felt something similar when navigating the IndieWeb.org wiki, and several other websites like this. The common threads are that the UIs are text dense, more technical looking and difficult to skim.
There’s nothing inherently gendered here, but I’ve found this bothers me and my (few) female colleagues more than male colleagues. They might recognise the problem but don’t see it as important to fix. I’m far from a beginner so I don’t think that’s a factor.
It’s also interesting that more women responded to the CSS survey; CSS is typically seen as more visual and less technical. Is there a trend that women and other non-men in the industry are more visually motivated? Or is there some connotation of a “prettier” interface being less masculine or more feminine and therefore more welcoming to women?
I’m not sure I believe any of these things, but I think there’s something here. 🤔
Thanks for sharing your experience! I think there's also certainly some gate-keeping at play on some level. "I had to learn programming using a crappy terminal with arcane commands, and so should you!"
My own interpretation is that for a long time CSS was seen as "not real programming", and so people who didn't feel represented in the mainstream programming world might've been more likely to gravitate towards it and claim it as their own.
I had the same thought about gate-keeping. Funnily (but very not funny) the first reply to my comment was a sexist troll whose comments have thankfully been removed.
I don’t think a UI design alone deters women/NB folks more than men. But we already experience so many cultures and practices in this industry that do deter us (like sexist comments). These old school techy designs feel like a dog whistle for gatekeep-y tech bro culture, which we learn through unpleasant experiences should be avoided. We do that even though judging a community on web design alone is unfair - it’s for our own protection.
It can lead to a disconnect in well-intentioned conversations. “Why does this deter you? We’re nice here” versus “How can you not see how unwelcoming this is because it looks like other toxic spaces?”. There’s this seedy underbelly culture of tech that only under-represented folks experience. It’s really difficult to spot cultural signifiers of a culture you’re unfamiliar with. It’s also really difficult to explain cultural signifiers to a person who is unfamiliar with that culture.
The only way to bridge this gap is to keep talking about this, and keep making spaces safer for folks to share their experiences. So thank you for this series. 😊
I find idea of exploring the inclusivity of branding and design very interesting also, and wouldn't have thought of it till reading about the interaction with Josh Comeau in Part 2 here. Another sample size of one female - but I do find Josh's 3D avatar image appealing/personal, as well as his general style of connecting with people via email. I keep up-to-date with Kevin Powell's emails also, but not the videos so much - echoing what a commenter said in Part 1 about different ways of consuming content - the videos are fantastic and I'd learn something every time, but don't have the time for that so just file the video titles away in my brain for reference.
I've done the State of CSS once or twice before, and may have done State of JS once... or not. My feeling hasn't been that warm towards doing it myself again, although I find the results somewhat interesting when someone analyses them, whether I took part or not.
My reasons for not being keen on doing it again do correspond a lot with what others have mentioned in the comments here, but maybe they boil down to the idea of personal satisfaction. My time and energy are precious. If I don't get personal satisfaction from something the first or second time I do it, I am less likely to spend time on it in the future - unless a really solid reason (or incentive) is presented to me.
So my recollection from the time(s) I did the survey is that despite feeling confident in the CSS I use (as a fullstack dev), I was more left with an impression of how much I didn't know, emphasised with a "low" knowledge score (and would score even lower on JS, hence not feeling at all inclined to do that). Even if the second option was, "Heard of but not used" (I don't recall if it was), which would have been my case for many things, having one final knowledge score doesn't celebrate that I've kept up with hearing about new features (I consider that to be an achievement, considering I don't focus on frontend). So maybe a consideration of how that "final result" is presented - would a pie chart (that is print-screenable and shareable - it is the lasting impression that makes it to discord servers after doing the survey) instead of a single percentage feel less like a pass/fail exam result? Or if you kept the percentages, would I "feel better" (and therefore like the survey more) if individual scores were given for each response level? It's not so bad only getting 25% on "very comfortable" if I am also getting 75% for "have heard of but not used."
Along the same vein, someone else mentioned the changing features that are surveyed on each year, often the newer features. So yes, that doesn't give much sense of personal improvement if the features from the last survey(s) don't make a reappearance, with the expectation that year on year your "score" would increase. Does this part of the survey get longer? Sure. Is that a problem? I don't know - some will only be interested in this part of the survey anyway.
Generally, there may also be more uptake if there is more publicity related to why collecting a broad set of data is useful, regardless of perceived level of experience. Maybe include sharing some of the results/analyses from a previous year (as an intro to the survey, or link before they get to it) and why just giving honest answers that you don't know something is just as important as trying to push yourself into a higher knowledge classification.
As a side note, I would have preferred to login to post using an email address, but that didn't seem to be an option - I had to use a linked account, of which I only had one of the four options, and which I would have preferred not to use. That kind of thing may also be a barrier to some participating in things like this.
This kind of feedback makes researching and writing this whole thing worth it! Thanks for taking the time to write it and being so thoughtful about what we can do to improve, it's giving me a lot of ideas already :)
Fantastic, glad to be able to contribute. Thanks for your considered research and presenting your findings also. Even if I hadn't felt the need to comment, I appreciated reading it, so I'm sure others do too :) I'll look out for the next survey ;)
As mentioned on the previous post, this is also the experience I've made. "State of X" might sound a bit too much like it's supposed to be for people with an actual overview of the thing. Like you should only participate if you, yourself, have a grasp on the overall state of CSS/JS/whatever.
Signalling to beginners that, even if they only started learning JS a week ago, their feedback is just as important as that of a 10+ year veteran, specially because hearing from beginners is the only way to keep the platforms beginner-friendly.
In all honesty, I do feel some attachment to the "State of X" naming of these surveys. But maybe it would be for the best to choose a more open-ended name for the surveys. Something that specifically says "Outsiders are welcome!"