Insights about developer tools and salary trends among European Countries

Top trends and most paid tools according to Stackoverflow Annual Surveys

image source: https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/top-programming-languages-to-learn

Introduction

What do you think about which tools are the most used by developers ? or which ones are the most paid ? Which aspects are effecting your salary ?

In this post, I’ll try to explain these questions with Stackoverflow’s Annual Developer Survey results from last three years.

Every year, Stackoverflow conducts survey on it’s website covering all kind of questions related to preferences, developer styles, programming languages etc. Surveys have roughly 80.000 participants over 180 countries.

Part-1: Is there difference in preferences between EU and Rest of World ?

I focused on that if there’s any differences between EU and other developers. Here you can see four charts below shows that what percentage of people prefers language, database, platform and web-frame in 2021. We can see that there is no big differences in general and order of tools are same.
Only minor differences we can see that PostgreSQL usage in EU as database, Google Cloud and Azure as platform, Vue.js and .NET Core as web framework.

Figure-1: EU vs RoW Tool preferences in 2021

Part-2: How are the preferences changing over time in EU ?

I also wanted to know that if there’s a change over time for these tools. In the chart below, you can see percentage of preferences for each tool last three years. 2019, 2020 and 2021 years are indicated as Blue, Orange and Green bars respectively.
Only Python and Typescript as language are increasing significantly while others decreasing year by year in percent.
As database, there is a huge jump on PostgreSQL usage in 2021.
Platform preferences are a little bit confusing because 2021 survey question choices are only focused on cloud platform so there were no “Linux” or “Microsoft” choices.
There is big drop in jQuery and ASP.NET usage. We can assume that JS developers are shifted to React.js and .NET developers to .NET Core

Figure-2: Tool preferences over time

Part-3: What are top paid tools ?

In subsequent charts, we’ll analyse median salaries of some selected categories as box plots. If you don’t know and want to learn how to read box plots please read this informative post in Medium.

When I checked the median salary of the developers who uses specific tools, Figure-3 is telling us that even Go and Ruby are not top preferred languages, they are the most paid programming languages among others

Figure-3: Most paid Languages by year

In Figure-4, we can see that top three most paid database platforms are DynamoDB, Cassandra and ElasticSearch. Most used databases are mostly middle or even end of the chart such as PostgreSQL and MySQL.

Figure-4: Most paid Databases by year

In the chart below, you can see that Kubernetes is the highest paid platform in all years. AWS as a cloud and MacOS as a OS vendor are the most paid platforms in their sub-category.

Figure-5: Most paid Platforms by year

Ruby on Rails is by far most paid and the only web-framework that median salary is increasing over time.

Figure-6: Most paid Web-Frameworks by year

Part-4: How do the different aspects relate to salary ?

Let’s check which aspects are more related to salary. In Figure-7, you can see median salary of developer by country over years. Not %100 correct but we can draw a line on map of Europe from north west to south east and it will be highly correlated with median salary. Most paid developers are in Scandinavian countries such as Denmark, Finland and Sweden while least paid developers are in East Europe / Mediterranean countries such as Greece and Turkey.

Figure-7: Salary by country over years

In Figure-8, we can simply see that Age and Years of Coding are highly correlated to each other and they are positively correlated to salary which means the more you are coding the more salary you’ll likely have.

Figure-8: Median Salary by Age and Years of Code over years

In Figure-9, even they are more or less close to each other, developers who have higher degrees tend to have higher salaries. But there’s lots of outlier salaries that proves the opposite way.

Figure-9: Median salary by degree over years

In the chart below, I analyse which job titles are gaining more than others. Looks like Engineering Managers are by far earning more money than others. Other interesting point that 3 of top 5 jobs are data related.

Figure-10: Median salary by job over years

Conclusion

In this article, we saw what are the top trends in tool usages and which tools and aspects are effecting the salary.

1. Language, Database, Platform and Web framework differences are not significant between EU and Rest of World although there are some little differences
2. We realized that there some tools are less used over time and developers shifted to relatively new tools
3. Then we looked which tools are most and least paid over time.
4. Lastly, we checked which aspects are mostly related to salary such as years of code, degree and developer type. Years of Code and Degree are positively related to salary. Engineering Manager and data related jobs are highly paid jobs compared to others.

If you want to see details about this analysis, please check my Github available here

So there’s last question, but for you:

Are these findings familiar to your experiences ?

Please share your findings and comments about this analysis.