In early 2018, we conducted our annual
JetBrains Developer Ecosystem 2018 survey to find out how the programming world lives and how it has changed compared to 2017. Here we will share the most interesting results.
We collected and analyzed the views of more than 6,000 developers from 17 countries. About 300 of them come from Russia, and this allows us to draw conclusions about how the Russian development market differs from the rest of the world.
Top 5 most frequently used programming languages for the world and for Russia looks like this:
- Javascript
- Java
- Python
- Php
- C #
(Respondents answered the question “Which programming language / languages do you use regularly?” And could choose more than one language.)
However, Russian developers write C twice less often - 8% of respondents indicated it as a regularly used language, on average around 16% of programmers use it in the world. Another difference is the more frequent use of Kotlin, almost 15% of developers write on it, which is significantly higher than the world total (9%). Of course, we are pleased with such recognition of Russian colleagues.
Top 3 main programming languages in Russia coincides with the world:
- Java
- Javascript
- Python
(Respondents answered the question “Which programming language is your main language?” And could choose up to three languages by ranking them.)
We also asked our respondents if they planned to switch to another programming language in the coming year. In the world, the most promising language, the transition to which is planned by the largest number of developers, has become Go. In Russia, he was slightly ahead of Kotlin. In C, C #, C ++, JavaScript, Ruby, Russian programmers migrate less willingly than developers in the whole world.
During the past year, more than 90% of developers in Russia and the world have studied at least one new language. At the same time, Russian programmers were much less interested in the popular languages JavaScript, Python, PHP.
We were also interested in how approaches to hosting change. We asked developers where they hosted databases and / or services and / or applications that they develop themselves or in a company (it was possible to choose more than one option). In the world, we see a steady trend towards the transition from our own servers and local infrastructure to cloud services: Amazon Web Services (30%), Google Cloud Platform (10%), Microsoft Azure (10%), etc. In Russia, the use of cloud services significantly lower, and storing data locally or on private servers is much more popular than in the world. About 63% of Russian respondents reported about local data storage (for the world this figure was 55%), 68% of developers from Russia indicated private servers (54% in the world).
Another interesting comparison:
- Programmers from Russia write unit-tests in their projects much more often - 69% of respondents said this, which is almost 10% more than in the world.
- Russians are much more likely to develop desktop applications than their foreign counterparts. As for the other types of applications, we have not identified any differences.
- Developers in Russia spend more time directly on programming: 74% of them write code 17 or more hours per week, while on average around the world 61% do.
- Among Russian respondents, it is three times smaller than those for whom programming is a hobby and not a way to make a living.
- 82% of Russian developers work in IT companies; in the world, 68% of developers work in the IT sector. The rest work in non-IT companies.
- The professional experience of Russian programmers is higher - 54% of them have worked in the industry for more than 6 years. In the world of developers with such experience, 43%.
- We also asked about the types of development in the companies where our respondents work (they could choose several answers). Russian programmers are more involved in product development - 63% in Russia compared to 48% in the world. Outsourcing in Russia also employs more people than the world average — 23% and 12%, respectively. But those who develop products for use within their own company, in Russia, are half as much as in the world - 26% compared with 52%.
In addition to professional topics, we asked a few questions about everyday life and found that:
- Russian developers get enough sleep enough - 72% of them sleep more than 7 hours a day. In general, around the world, 60% of respondents were able to say this about themselves.
- More than half of programmers from Russia prefer tea, while global preferences of developers with a large margin on the side of coffee.
For more details about the global development ecosystem, see the
full report with infographics (in English) . As part of the study, we asked more than 150 questions, although not all were included in this report. Full results will be available later when we publish the anonymized source data. The research methodology is available
here .
We plan to continue to monitor trends in the development and conduct such surveys. We will be glad to see you among our respondents,
join .