Developer Skills Report

Re:Developer Skills Report by scarface74 on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @05:05AM (#16221591)

I was wondering why some of the languages listed as being popular in the graph by employers seemed so out in left field with my understanding of the market, then I read this part:

A total of 39,441 professional and student developers completed the online survey from October 16 to November 1, 2017. The survey was hosted by SurveyMonkey and HackerRank recruited respondents via email from their community of 3.2 million members and through social media sites.

It's a self selected sample and probably skews a lot toward what the "cool kids" are doing and not what most corporations are actually doing. There is no conceivable way that Lua, Kotlin, and Go should be more highly represented than Swift/Objective C and C#

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Developer Skills Report by SlySherZ on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @08:53AM (#16222602)

The graphs about languages seem very weird. Let's take a look at the "Which languages do developers prefer by age?":

Python: 84.6%

C: 54.0%

C++: 48.2%

Java: 48.2%

JavaScript: 47.6%

...

Ruby: 21.0%

Why is Python so far ahead of everything else? Why is Ruby, which is all about programmer happiness so far down?

It seems people actually like JavaScript. Wait, people do actually like C++?!?

Also if you take a look at Go by age, for example, it goes from 53.6% (35-44) up to 67.8% (45-54) and back down to 7.6% (55+). I don't see a reason for such a huge preference variation. There's also a few 0.0% with 55+ years.

It seems there weren't enough answers for this to be anywhere near conclusive.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Developer Skills Report by christophilus on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @12:07PM (#16224269)

You're almost certainly right that their sample sizes are too small, especially in the upper age brackets. I suspect it's hard to find a lot of 55+ year old programmers who are willing to do silly things like take a HackerRank poll. Given the industry stats, it's fairly hard to find 55+ year old programmers, period.

> people actually like JavaScript. Wait, people do actually like C++?!?

Yep to both. I actually don't mind the latest versions of JavaScript. I don't like C++ at all, but have done professional work in it alongside people who thought it was a great language.

> Why is Ruby, which is all about programmer happiness so far down?

Programmer happiness is subjective (as evidenced by my previous remark and by the love/hate you see expressed for JavaScript, Go, Clojure, etc). Personally, I'm not a Ruby fan. I don't like the syntax. I vastly prefer composable functions to Ruby's "blocks". I find that most Ruby code I've worked with is too heavy on OOP abstractions and would be much clearer if expressed functionally. I could go on, but the point is, it's subjective.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Developer Skills Report by nschampions2004 on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @09:26AM (#16222871)

I also had issues with this graph. Reading the top, it's the percent approval of that language minus the percent disapproval of that language within that age group. Then, it's split on age group with the tabs up top.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Developer Skills Report by harrisjt on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @11:07AM (#16223744)

Look at how rust changes when you select age. The younger people are the more they dislike it, and it even goes negative at the lowest bracket (and in total)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Developer Skills Report by miranda_rights on Thursday January 25, 2018 @02:22AM (#16229366)

> It's a self selected sample

Yeah, the majority of the people I know who use HackerRank are college-aged looking for jobs. It's hard to place any confidence in this study.

[ Parent | on HN ]