In May 2024, over 65,000 developers responded to our annual survey about coding, the technologies and tools they use and want to learn, AI, and developer experience at work. Check out the results and see what's new for Stack Overflow users.
Consider that to go on a site specifically for programming questions and then take a survey about it, you have to be the kind of person that cares about getting their code “right”. The majority of programmers I’ve met would only go there to copy-paste a quick answer, and those people have all moved to asking chat-gpt for code now.
The memes that I remember being all over Reddit about “where did you get that code … I stole it [from stack overflow]” honestly terrified, and continue to, terrify me.
Yep, the ones who are doing some kind of input on stack overflow (even just a survey) are way beyond the “let’s keep everything the same because to get rid of tech debt sounds like a bunch of work” camp.
Why is that? I’ve read them referred to as dark matter developers (forget where I read this, maybe a book many years ago). They’re out there, they make up a majority of the field, yet they leave no trace because they do not blog, post on SO, or back in the day forums either as questioners or answerers.
Consider that to go on a site specifically for programming questions and then take a survey about it, you have to be the kind of person that cares about getting their code “right”. The majority of programmers I’ve met would only go there to copy-paste a quick answer, and those people have all moved to asking chat-gpt for code now.
The memes that I remember being all over Reddit about “where did you get that code … I stole it [from stack overflow]” honestly terrified, and continue to, terrify me.
Yep, the ones who are doing some kind of input on stack overflow (even just a survey) are way beyond the “let’s keep everything the same because to get rid of tech debt sounds like a bunch of work” camp.
Why is that? I’ve read them referred to as dark matter developers (forget where I read this, maybe a book many years ago). They’re out there, they make up a majority of the field, yet they leave no trace because they do not blog, post on SO, or back in the day forums either as questioners or answerers.