Does your location affect your income? — Stack Overflow developer survey 2019 analysis

Stack Overflow is an online community for developers to learn and share knowledge. This community has been growing tremendously in the recent past. And, every year, Stack Overflow conducts a developer survey where it asks developers using Stack Overflow a couple of questions. These results are shared with the public after masking the user-specific data.

Usually, Stack Overflow data gets put on Kaggle and data science enthusiasts give a shot at analyzing and bubbling up unique trends that are of use for the general public. Similar to every year, Stack Overflow has again published its survey data of more than 90,000 developers on Kaggle. And, this article contains insights gained from the survey data which might be of use for 2020!

There were a few questions that I asked while analyzing the data. Here are the questions and their answers:

Is open source development linked with increased income?

The answer is Yes! Increased contribution to open-source, resulted in increased income.

The reasons for increased developer income might be:

1. Open-source contributors adhere to the community rules of code and follow the best practices laid out by communities.
2. They make friends with fellow contributors who can help with referrals.
3. They’re helping this world become a better place. They need to be paid more. 😛

Does your undergrad major affect your income?

This one came off as a surprise for me. The average income of people with undergrad majors of web development was the least while the average income of people with undergrad majors which wasn’t directly connected with Computer Science was the highest. Mathematics and statistics majors fall in the 4th place.

The programming languages of choice for 2020

These are programming languages that the developers want to work with, in 2020.
The top 5 languages are:

1. JavaScript
2. Python
3. HTML/CSS
4. SQL
5. TypeScript

Similarly, the bottom 5 languages are:

1. F#
2. Objective-C
3. Clojure
4. Erlang
5. VBA

Does location, dependents influence income?

The analysis of data revealed that location is one of the major contributing factors to the developers' income. Developers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, and Canada had a better average income compared to other parts of the world. While developers in Iran, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, and India had a lesser average income. The country-wise average income results might also be a result of the countries economic conditions, the value of the countries currency w.r.t US dollar. During analysis, all income values were converted to the US dollar.

Also, it was observed that having dependants resulted in increased average income.

Desired databases for 2020

The top 5 databases that developers want to work with, in 2020:

1. PostgreSQL
2. MySQL
3. MongoDB
4. Redis
5. SQLite

Desired platforms for 2020

The top 5 platforms that developers want to work with, in 2020:

1. Linux 💪
2. Docker
3. Windows
4. AWS
5. Android

And, finally, the battle of IDEs has a result hidden in the Stack Overflow survey!

Top 10 most used IDEs of 2019

1. Visual Studio Code ❤️
2. Visual Studio
3. Notepad++
4. IntelliJ
5. Vim
6. Sublime Text
7. Android Studio
8. Eclipse
9. PyCharm
10. Atom

All the above results are derived from the Stack Overflow developer survey 2019 data. We need to consider the fact that this is a majority opinion of Stack Overflow users, you and I might have different beliefs, opinions, and results. The results for this post are derived from the ipynb notebook here.

Stack Overflow developer survey 2019 data can be found at the link.

Thank you for reading 😊