Developer Survey 2026(survey.stackoverflow.co) |
Developer Survey 2026(survey.stackoverflow.co) |
The visualisations should make it easy to understand the data in one glance without reading the numbers and texts. But I had to check the text and count the number of cubes.
Whoever approved the design if that page should go back to school and learn the principles of data visualisation
Well no shit. In the last several years I got laid off, couldn't find work for a year, took a 30% paycut between inflation and the new jobs numbers and have been thrown in on some Kubernetes role that I dont care for.
What's worse is it doesn't get better from here. There is no light on the horizon. The field is dying. Companies still aren't hiring much and all the "interesting" jobs have become 1000x more selective. I figured when I was younger I would have time to drive my career in a direction I wanted. Now it's clear there's no real future outside maybe corporate climing, which I have little interest in. Many teams leads at my current company have been made managers and they're all miserable.
Glad I'm not the only one at least.
- Scroll
- Read either the left OR right (but we're going to switch)
- Mouse-over 3D shapes(???) to actually read percentages
- Click "Dig Deeper" to see the most useful part of the survey which is a slide-in only taking up 2/3 of the screen...
- Most of the "deep dive" page though is niche exporting tools instead of, you know, content.
- Then there are sub-pages that seemingly have more data, but I have to click "Dig Deeper" -> Subpage -> Full Data over and over again?
- No navigational anchors, no real layout overview of this thing...
Like this whole thing should win all the awards for one of the worst and most hostile visual designs I've seen. It should genuinely be taught in web-development classes because it so well represents all the antipatterns of UI, UX, navigation, and data presentation. Honestly, the only antipattern they managed NOT to shove in here is scrolljacking.
I gave up trying to read it after about my third trip through the rabbit hole of trying to see a data area. And, I know, site layout/design should NOT be on-topic for this. But it is actually a legitimate blocker in this case, people aren't going to read this because of how horrible this is.
I'd blame AI, but both Codex and Claude produce better experiences than this today.