2020 Zoom Developer Survey Results
Participation was good for the inaugural Zoom Developer Survey. The information you provided helps guide questions, influence decisions, and makes a positive impact on the future for the Zoom Developer Community.
A HUGE thanks to all Zoom Developers who spent some of their precious time to contribute their insights and information!
I spent some time investigating the data and wanted to share what I learned about the Zoom Developer Community from the 2020 Developer Survey data.
Summary
We asked developers, who have built apps using the Zoom Marketplace and Developer Platform about their work, their development preferences, their uses of Zoom, about their learning preferences, and the technologies they use every day.
NOTE: The data is not representative of the entire Zoom Developer Community, in fact, the survey was closed just 7–10 days before the pandemic led to a massive spike in the number of apps and registered developers building upon our platform, but for our inaugural survey we were pleased with the participation (and expect you all to participate next year)!
We intentionally omitted demographic data such as gender, race, and so on…because it was not our driving motivation to know what our developers are as much as who they are. We’ve anonymized the results to be certain any identifiable information has been cleansed and focused on leveraging the information you provided to cross-correlate more interesting information.
Moving forward, we will learn from this experience, and promise to continue making improvements for next year’s survey, so we can get closer to the goal of obtaining a more comprehensive understanding of who you are as a member of our developer community and learn what we can do to better empower your success!
Key Takeaways
Top Programming Languages Used
- JavaScript
- PHP
- Python
- C#
- Java
Dominant Roles
- Full-Stack Developers
- Students
- Engineering Manager || Technical Team Lead
Developer Profile
At the time of the survey, the majority of respondents (~65%) indicated they were professional developers, with ~30% identifying as currently enrolled students, and ~5% planning on enrolling as students in the near future. This may explain why ~35% of respondents indicated they do not write code as part of their work.
Roles
Contributing to Open Source
Based solely on the respondents who answered the question of how much they contribute to open source projects, approximately 75% of Zoom Developers contribute to open source projects (answer !== “Never”). We only received answers from ~59% of respondents, with 41% choosing not to answer this question.
For the 59% who did respond, we learned that PHP, JavaScript, Python, and HTML/CSS developers were the most active contributors to open source projects, followed by: C#, Swift, Java, and BASH/Shell developers (kudos to all of you, now go checkout https://github.com/zoom and see if there is a project you would like to help us improve and grow)!!! :D
Experience
We asked a few different questions to try and ascertain the experience of the Zoom Developer Community:
- How many years since you wrote your 1st line of code?
- How many years have you been writing code professionally?
- Have you authored code on a production-shipped product that is generating revenue?
The results were interestingly confusing…
First I trimmed the ~33% of respondents who stated they did not write code, and those who didn’t answer all three questions (so we didn’t have mixed information). After making these adjustments, the results showed ~56% of all respondents were valid actual developers (either students, retired, or professionals).
Prior to the survey, I hypothesized that any developer with 5+ years as a professional developer, could reasonably be expected to have authored code as part of a production-shipped, revenue-generating product. But the data didn’t support this hypothesis.
~50% of developers say it has been 5+ years since writing their 1st line of code.
When compared to the 47% of developers who indicated they’ve authored code in production resulting in revenue, a ~3% drop…seems reasonable.
Only ~39% of developers claim to have 5+ years experience writing code as a professional developer (a difference of 8% from the number of developers who have code in production). Do they not consider themselves professional developers (despite having shipped to production)? Or is it something else? I don’t know, and will work on improving this in next year’s survey in hopes of finding an answer.
- Confidence
Confidence cannot be measured, only felt or witnessed. So, I decided to ask developers to perform a self-assessment of their confidence as a software engineer. Here is how our developers confidence formed a bell curve on a 1–5 scale
Where, 1 = button-pushing monkey, 5 = I dream in binary
The bell curve isn’t perfect, but does indicate a majority of Zoom Developers believe in their abilities as software engineers.
Interestingly, when crossing the self-confidence data with programming language preference our “Top 5 Most Self-Confident Zoom Developers” identified were: PHP, JavaScript, Python, C#, and HTML/CSS developers. That is a good lead into Technology…
Technology
Zoom developers closely resemble the leading trends (as compared to the StackOverflow Developer Survey) for some, but not all, technologies. Approximately 90% of all those who took the survey provided complete answers to the technology related questions.
Ironically, the most popular, most dreaded, and the language developers want to learn most…is JavaScript.
Go-To Programming Languages
Web Frameworks
Most Commonly Used Databases
Methodology
Being our inaugural Zoom Developer Survey, our methodologies were simple, largely followed leading developer survey trends.
We did not request any geographical or demographical data, so we cannot qualify responses for these aspects.
The survey ran from January 6, 2020 through February 29, 2020.
Respondents were recruited through a single email notification to all registered developers, a single round of social media posts, and a banner with links published on both the Zoom Marketplace and Zoom Developer Forum.
Many questions were only shown to respondents based upon previous answers.
We also asked questions about developer’s usage of Zoom within their organizations and how their employers managed their software development work, but after serious consideration, decided against publishing that information as part of the survey results.
The questions were organized into blocks and randomized within each block.
