Interesting Data from Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2015

Stack Overflow has just released the results of their 2015 developer survey, in which 26000+ Stack Overflow users from 150+ countries responded to various questions regarding their programming habits.

Here are the items that I found most interesting/surprising:

  • Gender Gap: Only 5.6% of the respondents were female. This is even lower than I thought. Interestingly, 15.1% of the Indians were female, while only 4.8% of US respondents were female. So, does India have 3x the percentage of female developers?
  • 40+% of the respondents do not have a formal degree in computer science.
  • Programming Languages: If you disregard Javascript and SQL, then the top 5 languages are Java (37.4%), C# (31.6%), PHP (29.7%), Python (23.6%), and C++ (20.6%). Of these, all except Python have been declining if you look at the trends from 2013 to 2014 to 2015. Python increased slightly. Ruby comes in at a lowly #10 is declining.
  • Most Loved and Most Dreaded Languages: C++11 makes the list of “most loved” languages, coming in at an impressive #2 on the list. After listening to Stroustrup talk about the latest features in C++11 and C++14 a few months back, even I feel like checking it out. The “most dreaded” languages list is topped by “Salesforce” and contains other interesting entries like: WordPress, Perl, Matlab, and Coffeescript.
  • Editors: I am a part of the just 3.8% who use emacs. Vim has 15.2 percent. Of course, Notepad++ (34.7%), and Sublime Text (25.2%) top this category.
  • Version Control Systems: The “Which VCS to use?” question seems to be settled. 69.3% use git. The 36.9% use SVN are surely legacy, and will switch to git for their next project. And if you’re using any of the others, you are on the losing side. And if you are one of the 9.3% who don’t use VCS, please quit and change careers.
  • Tabs vs Spaces: Sadly, 45% of the developers are idiots who use tabs instead of spaces. However, there is hope because as developers gain experience, they start switching to spaces – people with 10000+ reputation points on Stack Overflow are 3 times more likely to prefer spaces.
  • Job Satisfaction: 76% of the respondents either love their job, or are at least satisfied by it. I wonder if this is indicative of the industry in general, or just the selection bias in the survey respondents.

Read the full report, it is interesting.

Westernized Treatment for Depression vs Rwanda

Found this little gem on my newsfeed today.

A person in Rwanda, talking to a western writer, Andrew Solomon, about his experience with western mental health and depression, had this to say:

“We had a lot of trouble with western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide and we had to ask some of them to leave.

They came and their practice did not involve being outside in the sun where you begin to feel better. There was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again. There was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy. There was no acknowledgement of the depression as something invasive and external that could actually be cast out again.

Instead they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to ask them to leave.”

The second paragraph, especially the last line, was slightly mind-blowing, for me.

The full podcast is here.

Lack of Trust in India, and how startups should deal with it

@dkhare of Lightspeed India Venture Partners has an interesting article about the problems with the Indian startup ecosystem that makes it difficult to start and grow a startup in India, title The Silent Killers of Startup Growth.

While some of it is the usual whining about the usual problems, there are parts that I liked, especially section about lack of trust across the board in India, the problems it causes, and how to deal with it:

Lack of trust is endemic in India, whether you are driving through the streets (and perhaps Delhi is an extreme example of lack of trust!) or negotiating with corporate partners. Examples include:

  • (some) people misrepresent themselves materially without any consequences (eg overselling).
  • (some) founders focus on control at the expense of value creation.
  • potential buyers have a hard time parting with payment details or paying for off-the-shelf software.
  • (some) people negotiate all the corner cases in extreme detail, to the point where the law of diminishing returns kicks in pretty strongly.
  • trust gap between regulators, law enforcement and business.
  • trust gap between promoters (aka founders) and investors and potential misalignment on timelines and strategy.
  • (some) government and companies focus on protecting themselves from the 1% of customers who are gaming the system at the expense of the 99% remaining customers.

Relationships, not contracts, govern deals. Many brands in India are created from execution reliability at scale rather than product differentiation. Brands in India are disproportionately more valuable as they represent a trusted provider of products or services – think about the enduring value of the Tata brand in multiple unrelated categories. As one consequence, I believe more startups should think about brand-building here in India relative to if they were in the US.

I think the takeaway message is important: in India, build relationships and reputation and the contracts will take care of themselves. Read the full article here

A validation of this same idea comes to me from an entirely different source. My father-in-law, Badri Baldawa, a self-made successful entrepreneur has this blog post on Trust vs Written Agreements which says pretty much the same thing.