Stack Overflow and Open source
Stack Overflow 2019 survey analysis
Stack overflow is where everyone goes to get help. It is driven by the community of developers to help the community back.They conduct a survey every year and record all the information about the community.
In 2019, they did it again and this post summarises what I found answering few questions. There are many questions that you may ask out of a survey. Stack overflow had their own questions and they have published their insights here and I encourage you to read it. I have my own set of 3 questions centred around the open source world and Stack overflow also from here on I am going to state Stack overflow as (SO).
Question 1. Who are the users of Stack overflow in 2019 ?
Question 2. How soon can you start contributing to open source ?
Question 3. Will contributing to open source help you earn more ?
Where is the data and notebook ?
The data used for this analysis can be found here . Is there a notebook to follow along the analysis ? certainly yes…
What does the data contain ?
Stack overflow is proud of their community and they say the following about their survey.
‘ with nearly 90,000 responses fielded from over 170 countries and dependent territories, our 2019 Annual Developer Survey examines all aspects of the developer experience from career satisfaction and job search to education and opinions on open source software.’
Diving into the analysis
Question 1. Who are the users of Stack overflow in 2019 ?
Let us start by looking at some interesting statistics about this data, I believe this should help us to understand and appreciate the diversity of users that come to SO to seek and give help.
Beware, the dataset contains some spurious information, such as age it looks like infants are also visiting SO for filling the survey, thus for age I have excluded the users below and at the age of 5.
AGE
Overall, out of the ~80,000 users, the average user age is 30 years using SO, with maximum age as high as 99 (not sure if this is for real :)).
The message is “its never too late to start coding!!”
GENDER
Male are the majority in the respondents. However, female users have increased over the years. With efforts like RLadies and DjangoGirls, the future looks bright.
Education
45% are bachelors, 23% are masters and only 3% are PHDs, thus combined together ~70% of users have education ≥= Bachelors, whilst others have some sort of professional education.
Professional Coder
The average years of experience as professional coder is 8 years, while the median 6 years, look above for the distribution.
Data Scientist or not
Only 7% of data scientist responded to the survey, while 93% percent were other developers and engineers.
Salaries
Salaries are highly skewed to the right as there are really high salaries to some individuals. The average salary overall is ~127,000 USD, while median salaries are around 60,000 USD. We will revisit salaries and look at them in detail, while answering the third question.
Country
Here is the visualisation of the countries who responded to the survey. The top respondents came from either USA , Canada, UK, Germany or India.
Programming Languages
Javascript and HTML/CSS which are the building blocks of any web technology top the list. SQL and Python which are heavily used in data science/analytics quickly follows. Java comes after Python and surprisingly R is around 18th in position. Look here for ranking.
First lines of code
The average age by which an individual has written their first line of code is 15 years. have a look at the distribution there are people writing their first lines of code even past their 60s. It’s incredible to see such motivation and contribution.
Coding Experience
The users have coding experience ranging from as little as just 1 year to around 50 years with an average of 12 years of experience.
Visit Duration(SO)
64% of users spend at least 30 minutes on SO
Visit Frequency(SO)
61% of people visit SO daily, while around a percent had never visited SO before they filled this survey i.e. around 800 people.
Question 2. How soon one can start contributing to open source ?
To answer this question we need to ask 2 more questions.
- What is the age group of people who contribute to open source ?
- How much time open source contributors devote to coding ?
Before we go asking the question, let’s just see the usual statistics. We see that around 36% of users never contributed to open source
Age + Open source
I will encode the above categories(OpenSourcer) into simple ones and call them highly_engaged, slightly_engaged, almost_not_engaged and not_engaged. The percentage (12%) of highly engage is same across the years 20–50, I am not going to read too much into this but It would be interesting to investigate if users who are highly engaged in open source in their 20s continue to be highly engaged in their 50s and beyond.
Thus the early you start contributing to open source the better.
Question 3. If one contributes to open source will one earn more ?
Let us as the most simple question whats the difference in salaries between an opensourcer vs non-opensourcer. There is a difference of around 9000 USD, so it looks like if I contribute I end up earning more ? but open source doesn't pay directly!!
Salaries + Open source + Region
Interestingly, median salaries in Africa doesn’t vary much, while thats not true for all the other regions. The figures(USD) also highlight the difference in salaries across regions. It looks like if you are contributing to open source you are earning better at the same time.
Salaries + Open source + Country
I would encourage you to go to the notebook link to really play around with these collab notebooks to visually interact with the below maps. There places in Africa, south America, Middle east and very few parts in Europe where respondents have never contributed to open source.
You can also see the size of the dots, the largest is USA where the median salary is around 120,000(USD) if you contribute to open source otherwise its 100,000(USD).
Summary
Stack overflow is a great community where people come from different age groups, countries, education etc. Age is not the barrier to start coding.
We also saw in this analysis that although open source is practiced with more experienced individuals the difference is not very large but the returns are. The Salaries are higher if you contribute to open source. The big driver for this salary difference are the skills you will gain by contributing to the open source. So while I prepare myself to become a contributor so should you.
Happy Coding!
