Highlights from the 2024 Stack Overflow Dev Survey
Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey is out. This year, over 65,000 devs from all over the world participated. Here’s what you need to know — rapid-fire style.
Most developers aren’t scared of AI
Over 90% of devs say AI tools aren’t great at handling complex coding tasks, and 70% said AI isn’t a threat to their jobs (which may indicate that at least 20% of human devs aren’t so sure they’re great at handling complex coding tasks either…).
But that doesn’t mean they think AI isn’t useful. Over 80% of devs think using AI tools is a productivity booster.
Knowledge silos are probably slowing your team down
45% of managers and 44% of devs blame knowledge silos for shutting down idea sharing.
Even more (53% of managers and devs) agree that “Waiting on answers to questions often causes interruptions and disrupts my workflow.”
The top tech and the latest on React Native vs. Flutter
Among professionals, the top programming language was, unsurprisingly, JavaScript. Nearly 65% of them used it this year, and Amazon Web Services was by far the most popular cloud platform — 52% of cloud devs used AWS. React and NodeJS remain the leading web frameworks. Standouts in the “other frameworks” and “tools” categories include .Net, Python, Pandas, npm, and Docker.
9% of professional devs used React Native, while slightly more (9.4%) used Flutter.
For those “learning to code,” 11% used Flutter, and just under 7% used React Native. Is this indicative of Flutter starting to win the years-long mobile framework wars? Maybe not! Or, at least, this doesn’t look all that different from last year.
One-time progressive web app (PWA) darling Ionic dropped slightly on the list of the most used frameworks, and so did its closely related native bridge, Capacitor.
Everyone’s in (technical) debt
62% of managers and devs are more frustrated by the technical debt they’re paying down than by anything else.
After the tech debt, there are a lot of annoyances vying for second place. Here’s a sample: 31% of managers complained about the reliability of tools and systems. Just a touch over a quarter of them (25.1%) said code security was a top stressor.
Among developers, about 33% said their tech stack’s complexity was one of the biggest problems. 25% said maintaining core components is a constant aggravation.
See how these results compare
Check out Onymos’ 2023 Application Development Survey for more insights into what app dev leaders think about the space and its challenges, or go deep into all of Stack Overflow’s latest results.