Most Popular Developer Tools Per 2023 Stack Overflow Survey

By FOSSlife Team, 28 June, 2023

JavaScript is the most used programming language (for the 11th straight year) among Stack Overflow survey respondents, while Rust is the most admired language.

The most popular choices in other categories are:

Cloud platform: AWS
Database: PostgreSQL
IDE: Visual Studio Code
Operating system: Windows (for both personal and professional use)
Linux-based system: Ubuntu
Web framework: Node.js
Other tools: Docker

In this article, we’ll share more survey highlights that provide a brief glimpse into what Stack Overflow users are doing.

Demographics

For this year’s Stack Overflow Developer Survey, by far the most responses came from the United States (21.21%), followed by Germany (8.34%), then India (6.4%), and the United Kingdom (6.32%).

Interestingly, the survey reduced the number of demographic questions this year, asking about age and omitting questions related to gender. As one might expect, the Stack Overflow community skews toward youth, with 62 percent of respondents under the age of 35:

Under 18 years of age: 4.63%
18-24 years: 20.11%
25-34: 37.28%
35-44: 23.02%
45-54: 9.34%
55-64: 3.8%
65 years or more: 1.31%

Salary and Work Status

The highest-paying roles, as reported by survey respondents, are:

Senior executive (C-Suite, VP, etc.): $124,753.5
Engineering manager: $124,138
Marketing or sales professional: $116,000
Engineer, site reliability: $115,657
Developer experience: $107,090
Cloud infrastructure engineer: $105,000
Blockchain: $103,743
Developer advocate: $100,312.5
Security professional: $99,311
Scientist: $92,321

Most respondents (69%) report being employed full time, while 15 percent say they are independent contractors, freelancers, or self-employed. Another 13 percent of respondents are full-time students, and four percent are not employed but looking for work.

Additionally, the majority of respondents (83.59% combined) classify their position as either hybrid (some remote, some in-person) or fully remote, while only 16.41% report working in person full time.

Approaches to Learning

The survey included questions about how participants learn to code, with the following responses:

Online resources (videos, blogs, forums, etc.): 80.13%
Books/physical media: 51.8%
School (university, college, etc.): 50.14%
Online courses or certification: 49.28%
On-the-job training: 46.06%

Specifically, the most-used online resources used are:

Technical documentation: 90.36%
Stack Overflow: 82.56%
Blogs: 76.69%
How-to videos: 60.14%
Written tutorials: 59.95%

AI Adoption and Use

The 2023 survey also asked a series of AI/ML-related questions to gauge how developers are using the technology.

According to the results, “70 percent of all respondents are using or are planning to use AI tools in their development process this year. Those learning to code are more likely than professional developers to be using or planning to use AI tools (82% vs. 70%).”

Developers are split in regard to their trust in the accuracy of AI output from tools, says the report, with more developers highly distrusting than highly trusting the technology:

Highly trust: 2.85%
Somewhat trust: 39.3%
Neither trust nor distrust: 30.68%
Somewhat distrust: 21.71%
Highly distrust: 5.46%

The most popular AI developer tools include: GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, AWS CodeWhisperer, and Snyk Code.

Check out the resources below to learn more about technologies, skills, and trends in the global developer landscape.