State of Devs 2025 Preview

[SachaG]

State of Devs

This next survey will be about all the non-technical aspects of being a developer: career, workplace, health, worldview, etc. Given the current shifting political climate in some parts of the tech world, I especially want to make an effort to include questions that could surface any obstacles or issues relevant to minorities in the developer community.

Preview

You can now preview the survey:

https://survey.devographics.com/en-US/survey/state-of-devs/2025

[SachaG]

Here are a few questions I've considered but are not yet in the survey, usually either because I'm not sure how to word them, they seem too subjective or ambiguous, or because they don't seem that critical. But maybe we can improve them?

Career

• What impact have the following factors had on your career? (from "very negative" to "very positive"):
  • race, gender, disabilities, country of origin, sexual orientation, etc.

Workplace

• How well do you fit in your company's culture/how much can you "be yourself" at work?
• How much vacation time do you get?
• Do you feel like your job is threatened by AI?

Worldview

• How religious are you?
• How do you feel about the following political ideologies? (from "very negative" to "very positive"):
  • communism/socialism/fascism/etc.
• How do you feel about the following companies? (from "very negative" to "very positive"):
  • apple/meta/google/etc.
• How optimistic are you about the future of the world?

Hobbies

• Which musical genres do you listen to?

Technology

• Which front end frameworks do you use?
• Which back end frameworks do you use?

[s-h-a-d-o-w]

Given the recent job market situation, I think it would be interesting to ask a few questions for those who are unemployed at the moment.

Something like: How many months have you been unemployed and actively looking? How many applications have you sent? How many interviews have you had? What other ways of earning a living are you pursuing? [Not necessarily just other fields. Founding one's own company could also count.]

And some related: How has your salary changed over the last two years? [Maybe percentage brackets?] How have you gotten your current job? (Friends or family, regular applications, conferences/meetups, ...) [Although this wouldn't be helpful if people have started their current job before the market got bad.] Do you feel like you're able to save enough money for retirement?

Aside from that whole topic, these are some that came to my mind while going through the survey...

Might be good to include in workplace issues:

• Discrimination due to political opinions
• Oppressive culture [I've seen some people complain about lack of culture at some companies but others find the doctrines many tech companies have these days alienating or creepy. I suppose this is related to your "being yourself" question. I find this very interesting and hope you'll find some way of including it. But contrary to just "being yourself", I think the most interesting thing about this would be seeing how many and what people find one or the other problematic.]

Missing in career:

• What best describes your overall skill set? (Full stack, frontend, etc.)

Missing in sleeping:

• Use dim/warm lighting and night light features before bedtime
• Don't lie in bed unless it is bedtime

Missing in sports:

• Brisk walking [I know it's obscure. But as far as I'm aware it's possibly the healthiest kind of sport, so if only for the sake of raising awareness, it seems good to include. 😄 ]

[SachaG]

https://www.politicalcompass.org/

[SachaG]

• Ask about open-source involvement

[s-h-a-d-o-w]

Today, another topic came to mind that might be interesting to evaluate: on call duty

Because it used to be that only certain people who were working on services that could experience an outage would have to do it. Or maybe there would even be dedicated staff. But these days, it seems to have become common for software engineers to be responsible for "everything". And so I for one would be curious how many actually have to do it and how they feel about it.

[SachaG]

getting close to a final version: https://survey.devographics.com/en-US/survey/state-of-devs/2025

[s-h-a-d-o-w]

The first question seems to clash with both the name of the survey and the question "Which programming languages do you code in?" in "Technology".

[SachaG]

The first question seems to clash with both the name of the survey and the question "Which programming languages do you code in?" in "Technology".

I'm not sure I understand? the question about years of experience?

[s-h-a-d-o-w]

Looks like you figured it out already. 🙂 (At least, unless I was way too sleepy yesterday evening, that first question asked about web development, not development in general. I should have been more specific, sorry.)

[SachaG]

Oh ok, yeah someone else made the same observation so I had already changed it. Thanks!

[zffocussss]

I am curious how I can take part in the survey. I want to open my mouth.