2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results(survey.stackoverflow.co) |
2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results(survey.stackoverflow.co) |
My guess is that pro-AI devs have abandoned the site, and anti-AI devs are upset with their collaboration with AI companies.
For all its failings, SO strived for a very high signal-to-noise ratio, and it achieved it.
A lot of comments in this thread make the assumption that the only respondents are people who actively use SO but that isn’t true. I just get notified about the survey through email every year and respond.
Also, the editors? I'm sorry I've simply never gotten vsCode when jetbrains and neovim exist, much less N++.
Regardless I think I have to acknowledge that maybe I'm not your average dev. TBH your average dev is probably very happy coding up react widgets in vsCode, and I'm the grouchy greybeard behind the times.
On a separate note, why are things like cargo/apt/homebrew being put into the same category as Docker and Terraform, which also includes entire cloud platforms themselves (Azure, GCP,etc…). Might as well throw programming languages in there for good measure xD
And I hate these big accept cookies pop ups or whatever they are called that impede use of a website unless you accept. I couldn't find an option to reject all cookies.
Not all of it, mind.
Oh my, I don't even know where to start on this one. If programming is sex, web programming is submission. Sure it sounds fun, but not for regular people. As for LLMs I can't imagine a situation where I'd want to run them on Macs and ditch my Nvidia graphics.
The real reason is that Windows users are just not very loud.
On a separate note it's sad to see that Ubuntu has fallen behind.
A survey among visitors of a tobacco shop shows that 82% of people smoke frequently.
Highly trust 3.1%
Somewhat trust 29.6%
Somewhat distrust 26.1%
Highly distrust 19.6%
========================
sum 78.4%
source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ai#2-accuracy-of-ai-too...
Maybe they think the certain generation who uses Emacs has died off or something.
Last years results had Emacs at 4.2% https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology . I would expect it to be roughly the same. Emacs seems to hover around this usage percentage.
A few notes:
- VS Code at #1 (of course) with 75%, Visual Studio at #2 with 29%
- Vim at 24% and Neovim at 14%, which seems pretty whopping to me (I wonder how much overlap is there, the survey is clearly "click all that apply")
- Cursor is 17.9%, wild
- Nano is 12.5%, lol
- Sublime Text is 10.5%, impressive given how much the IDE market has changed
- Zed is 7.3% I wonder if that's enough to be Ramen profitable for a small team? (Not familiar with what Zed is charging for these days)
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-integrated...
It's also been fairly stable over the last few years, so it's hard for me to believe that it just suddenly dropped off to 0.2%:
| 2021 | 5.30% |
| 2022 | 4.51% |
| 2023 | 4.69% |
| 2024 | 4.2% |I joke, but I think it’s depicting relative proportions of how many people who were “interested in” Gemini are now “interested in” other things and how different subgroups’ “interested in” thing changed over time. So there was a sizable group that became interested in Tailwind at one point
I liked seeing the languages that "paid more".
Job satisfaction (happy/complacent/unhappy):
- 2025: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#5-job-satisfaction (24.5/47.1/28.4)
- 2024: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/professional-developers... (20.2/47.7/32.1)
- ...
- 2015: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2015#work-satisfaction (36/51.4/11.6, complacent includes "somewhat" and "so-so")
Work environment (remote/hybrid/in-person):
- 2025: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#1-work-environment (45/37.1/17.9, but I counted "your choice" as remote)
- 2024: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/work#1-work-environment (38/42/20)
- 2023: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-employment-wor... (41.41/42.18/16.41)
- 2022: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-employment-wor... (42.98/42.44/14.58)
- ...
- 2017: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2017#remote-work (11.1/52.8/31.8, hybrid includes all answers of "sometimes", the 4.2 who said "it's complicated" not included)
Salary (engineering manager/full-stack/academic, not adjusted for inflation):
- 2025: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#salary (130k/73k/57k)
- 2024: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/work#salary (124k/63k/49k)
- 2023: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-salary-salary-... (124k/71k/54k)
- 2022: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-... (112k/66k/55k)
- 2021: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2021#section-salary-salary-b... (96k/56k/49k)
- 2020: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2020#work-salary-by-develope... (92k/54k/41k)
- 2019: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2019#work-_-salary-by-develo... (95k/57k/38k)
Employment status (employed/contractor/unemployed, not counting students/retired/unknown):
- 2025: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#1-employment-statu... (69.8/13.9/4.6, all are less for some reason)
- 2024: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/work#1-employment-statu... (75.3/16.4/7.8)
- 2023: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-employment-emp... (75/15.91/6.32)
- 2022: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-employment-emp... (74.4/14.95/6.44)
- 2021: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2021#section-employment-empl... (67.26/9.65/5.02, like 2025)
- 2020: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2020#work-employment-status (74.4/8.9/4.2)
- 2019: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2019#work-_-employment-statu... (79/9.8/10.8)
One thing I did find funny though was this survey found that devs overwhelmingly visit stackoverflow aka the site that puts the survey out found that so many people that use the site, use the site.
This doesn't mean they aren't Juniors though
Since I started using ChatGPT, I rarely visit stack. If I need some code ChatGPT will tailor it to my example and I can get up and running quickly to figure out how it works.
24.8% of respondents have been programming for less than 5 years
Europe especially is basically MS's backyard.
I agree it'll pop up more with "evangelical users" though, 100%.
I've often thought that when you see Mac and Linux more strongly represented than you'd expect, I do wonder when people dual boot Windows 95% and Linux 5%, are they ticking the box for Linux? Does the VB.net hostage even bother to fill in the survey?
Agree on VS Code, it's OK if you can't find support elsewhere, but the JetBrains stuff is just in a different class.
My beard is only partially grey, but I agree with you.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/01/language-wars/
.NET is widely used for videogames (games made with Unity, Godot, Unigine engines, also internal tools and game servers), desktop software, embedded software. Java is rarely used for these things, hence the results of that survey.
You should work on your reading comprehension
SO is filled with all sorts of questions from 10-15 years ago that aren't up-to-date with the languages and tooling of today. If you develop in a language that is substantially different from what it used to be (JavaScript, Python, etc.) that is problematic.
It is clear that the guy responsible for this PR outsourced thinking. I would call it "misuse of LLMs". LLMs get a bad rep because of individuals who completely outsource thinking.
I think Distrobox gives you the same basic experience but it's even a bit nicer as it's even lower overhead and doesn't have the weird memory management issues that WSL2 has. But this is really interesting to me; Microsoft clearly struck a nerve with the WSL2 workflow. It's more than just a workaround for the fact that some stuff doesn't run or doesn't run well on Windows, which is counterintuitive.
You can also get the same basic experience on macOS using Orbstack, which I highly recommend in general. (Though there are alternatives that are not subscriptions, but I only use macOS under duress at work, so I don't personally pay for it.)
“Which rising technology of the added as new tag or tag subject area on Stack Overflow in the last three years have you used regularly in the past year, and which do you want to work with over the next year? Please check all that apply.”
The chart is displaying every pair of (worked with => want to work with) that had at least 500 respondents. So it’s not really a sankey diagram, each ribbon just signifies a self-contained pair. So yeah many people who worked with Gemini indicated that they want to work with Tailwind (among other things). It’s not suggesting that Gemini itself recommended those technologies.
It is weird. The biggest thing for me is that when you click through to the details you can filter to those who indicated that they are learning to code, and and Gemini had by far the largest “worked with” amount for that group. Which is interesting — suggesting the next generation of coders are going to have all learned with the “help” of AI (yikes)
And why's that?
And so on. I assume everyone else with PCs does the same. So when I go to web forums I don't usually talk about that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4627373
> Some people have 10 years of experience. Others have 1 year of experience 10 times.