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colingw
No Emacs entry under editors, and no Clojure in the languages section? Somebody on the survey team had a bone to pick.
chistev
How is it that Windows always dominate these Stack Overflow developer surveys, but people talk like Mac is the one that's ubiquitous among devs?

And I hate these big accept cookies pop ups or whatever they are called that impede use of a website unless you accept. I couldn't find an option to reject all cookies.

rofrol
Total for Linux when distros combined dominates Windows
ChrisRR
Meh, as usual this survey gives completely skewed view of the industry by being dominated by students and junior devs.
armchairhacker
Some comparisons:

Job satisfaction (happy/complacent/unhappy):

- 2025: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#5-job-satisfaction (24.5/47.1/28.4)

- 2024: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/professional-developers... (20.2/47.7/32.1)

- ...

- 2015: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2015#work-satisfaction (36/51.4/11.6, complacent includes "somewhat" and "so-so")

Work environment (remote/hybrid/in-person):

- 2025: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#1-work-environment (45/37.1/17.9, but I counted "your choice" as remote)

- 2024: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/work#1-work-environment (38/42/20)

- 2023: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-employment-wor... (41.41/42.18/16.41)

- 2022: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-employment-wor... (42.98/42.44/14.58)

- ...

- 2017: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2017#remote-work (11.1/52.8/31.8, hybrid includes all answers of "sometimes", the 4.2 who said "it's complicated" not included)

Salary (engineering manager/full-stack/academic, not adjusted for inflation):

- 2025: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#salary (130k/73k/57k)

- 2024: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/work#salary (124k/63k/49k)

- 2023: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-salary-salary-... (124k/71k/54k)

- 2022: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-... (112k/66k/55k)

- 2021: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2021#section-salary-salary-b... (96k/56k/49k)

- 2020: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2020#work-salary-by-develope... (92k/54k/41k)

- 2019: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2019#work-_-salary-by-develo... (95k/57k/38k)

Employment status (employed/contractor/unemployed, not counting students/retired/unknown):

- 2025:

biggestfan
"49,000+" makes this the least responses the survey has gotten since 2016 ("over fifty thousand"), every year in between has been in the 65-100k range. Seems as though enthusiasm around SO has diminished significantly over the past year.

My guess is that pro-AI devs have abandoned the site, and anti-AI devs are upset with their collaboration with AI companies.

phendrenad2
I think people are abandoning SO because AI often gives better answers. And also SO search results on Google just got so much worse a few years ago, you search Google for "how to do X in framework Y" and get SO results about doing X in framework Z.
wing-_-nuts
C# as popular and commonly used as java? Hmm either I'm woefully behind the times, most java devs aren't answering SO surveys, or the data is wrong. Then again the fact that C# is used in indie game dev probably gives it a serious boost in the 'evangelical user' category. It is a nice language, I just find java to be far more used in industry.

Also, the editors? I'm sorry I've simply never gotten vsCode when jetbrains and neovim exist, much less N++.

Regardless I think I have to acknowledge that maybe I'm not your average dev. TBH your average dev is probably very happy coding up react widgets in vsCode, and I'm the grouchy greybeard behind the times.

open592
For some context on demographics of this survey: I signed up for SO in about ~2011 and haven’t participated in SO since about 2015. But I have generally positive sentiment towards the survey so I do it every year.

A lot of comments in this thread make the assumption that the only respondents are people who actively use SO but that isn’t true. I just get notified about the survey through email every year and respond.

robenkleene
I always jump straight to the IDE section because that's the most intersting to me https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#1-dev-id-es

A few notes:

- VS Code at #1 (of course) with 75%, Visual Studio at #2 with 29%

- Vim at 24% and Neovim at 14%, which seems pretty whopping to me (I wonder how much overlap is there, the survey is clearly "click all that apply")

- Cursor is 17.9%, wild

- Nano is 12.5%, lol

- Sublime Text is 10.5%, impressive given how much the IDE market has changed

- Zed is 7.3% I wonder if that's enough to be Ramen profitable for a small team? (Not familiar with what Zed is charging for these days)

a_e_k
And Emacs was banished to a write-in this year, when it was near the middle of the pack at 4.2% (Emacs) and 0.4% (Spacemacs) last year.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-integrated...

It's also been fairly stable over the last few years, so it's hard for me to believe that it just suddenly dropped off to 0.2%:

    | 2021 | 5.30% |
    | 2022 | 4.51% |
    | 2023 | 4.69% |
    | 2024 | 4.2%  |
ollien
Can anyone make sense of the sankey chart under "Developers at all levels are exploring the evolving AI landscape through Stack Overflow"? How does "Large Language Model" flow into "Tailwind CSS 4"?
flufluflufluffy
I usually participate, this year I don’t remember being notified about it, but I guess that probably goes to show I haven’t been using SO nearly as much as I used to due to AI tools.

On a separate note, why are things like cargo/apt/homebrew being put into the same category as Docker and Terraform, which also includes entire cloud platforms themselves (Azure, GCP,etc…). Might as well throw programming languages in there for good measure xD

rdlts
Pretty cool to see Redis as the most used Database for AI Agents!
yahoozoo
Why is Cargo the top cloud infrastructure tool? I thought it was just Rust’s package manager?
philonoist
Did anyone observe that .NET core is far ahead of Spring in popularity and beats other backend frameworks in other measures as well?
xigoi
> Stack Overflow is a frequent destination for information. A strong majority (82%) visit at least a few times per month, with 25% visiting daily or more often.

A survey among visitors of a tobacco shop shows that 82% of people smoke frequently.

sebstefan
They got rid of the salary by languages used category?

I liked seeing the languages that "paid more".