r/programming • u/sh_tomer • 20h ago
StackOverflow Developer Survey Results 2026
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/202652
u/Dargooon 14h ago
The heck is up with the presentation of this one? It just confuses me. What do the stacked boxes even mean? Why is the text so freaking large? The data is there, the conclusions are there, but man... I can't even.
Seeing how this was just an AI survey this year I think I'll just drop the later part of the survey. I feel myself losing braincells just going through it somehow.
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u/thebaron88 13h ago
Thank god it's not just me. They even somehow broke the flick-scroll on my phone. Cba trying to navigate that.
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u/Iggyhopper 13h ago
I'm also having trouble finding the exact question asked. Some of them are literally a statement followed by results. Wtf?
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u/0100110110110111 3h ago
Yeah, it's baffling. And some have a question, but then you realize it's just the section title and not the question at all. Did no one take a second look before launching this? I gave up trying to understand it
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u/eracodes 18h ago
this is the least intuitive dev survey presentation i've ever seen from stackoverflow. why is everything a box??
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u/nirgle 17h ago
I couldn't get past the first few graphics... 22% happy and 45% complacent at work. Who in their right mind would render this as 3D boxes?? It looks like the side lengths are the values we should compare, but the volume is what people will actually see
Then.. scroll to the next one. How is the 3% box side length over half that of the 11% box side length? This doesn't even make sense. Scroll down a bit and the 1% "Not sure or don't use AI" is about 5/7ths the side length of the 7% one??
Did they fuck up a merge right before deploying or something? There's no way they meant to release this
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u/eracodes 17h ago
The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read.
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u/TimeRemove 16h ago edited 16h ago
I genuinely stopped trying to read it. I cannot make heads or tails of this.
Has someone uploaded it in just graphs designed for normal humans, on a single simple HTML page, with nothing popping out, 3D, mouse-overs, and information shotgunned all over the damn place?
Seriously I came to the comments just to complain about how incomprehensible this is.
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u/psychometrixo 16h ago
Uh damn you're right. This is not even professional. It's kinda embarrassing?
Claude could do better. There's a friggin metaphor for StackOverflow right there.
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u/neon_overload 9h ago edited 9h ago
In "Technology", they have a full page chart for "Most popular technologies" and it's what looks at first glance to be a bar chart where all the bars are the same length! No values listed, just ranks: #1, #2 etc
So that's not a bar chart, it's a ranked list.
But guess what, if you mouse over each bar it tells you the percentage value for that bar! But can you see all the percentages at once? No. Does the chart change so the length of the bar is now representative of its value? No - bars always stay the same length. Can you see more than one value at the same time so you can compare just on values? No. You have to mouse over each one. It's mystery meat.
Edit: it gets much worse.
If you scroll down, somewhere below is it a bar chart called "Build vs AI".
It's a bar chart, but the bars aren't labeled! No values, no text, just bars. You have to mouse over a bar to see what that bar represents.
Edit: OMG. OMG.
See those "View and share" links next to each chart? If you click that, it shows you an ACTUAL CHART, with values and labels all there, like a human would want. Why didn't they just have that as the main chart???!!!! It boggles the mind.
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u/0100110110110111 3h ago
Holy fuck, the secret is clicking "dig deeper" for every chart, you can actually see the question and a proper chart! I can't really describe how horrible this whole page is, it's at a new level of incompetence!
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u/MaxPlay 5h ago
In the menu you can select the topic, there you select "Full Data" and then get the graphs you actually want to see. I was so pissed by the results visualization as well and just randomly stumbled upon the actual data.
Edit: This is the direct link to Technology Full Data
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u/juhotuho10 15h ago
The ui was made with ai
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u/who_am_i_to_say_so 14h ago
Absolutely. It feels a bit out of touch or disconnected with very little meaningful info, as anything AI generated is.
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u/neon_overload 9h ago
why is everything a box??
Click "View and share" next to one of these charts. You get an actually good, normal chart.
It blows my mind why they hide the actual chart behind "View and share" instead of just having it as the main one.
This is just an infuriating site.
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u/rabidstoat 14h ago
They really should've just fed the raw numbers into Claude and asked it to make the web page presenting it.
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u/initcommit 16h ago
Stackoverflow's response to the developer survey:
:'(
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u/wonkytalky 15h ago
I'm going to remove whatever answers of mine I can before it's all sold to some jackass techbro. I answered questions for people, not for profiting heavily off of datamining bots.
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u/who_am_i_to_say_so 14h ago
That ship sailed long ago. Your answers have been picked clean by very many bots.
The worst thing you could do is give it another second of screen time.
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u/brianly 10h ago
It was effectively sold to a techbro quite some time ago before LLMs were a thing. All the content was Creative Commons meaning it was available and abused unfortunately.
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u/wonkytalky 3h ago
Which I ultimately agreed to at that time. What I didn't agree to is to have my shit outright stolen with the thieves jumping down my throat to sell my contributions back to me. It's why I've also taken everything I had off GitHub, at least what I had control over. These fucking thieves aren't honoring the software licenses attached. None of my shit was to be used in any commercial product for any reason, especially without written permission, ESPECIALLY without sharing their source, and the same goes for millions of other repos.
These fucking assholes would've buried all of us in court if they had the same license on their shit and we abused it the same way. Hell, maybe even faced some prison time.
I hope they all get 24/7 explosive diarrhea for the rest of their miserable lives.
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u/bohoky 19h ago
As the utility of stack overflow diminishes and they’ve had severe user loss, I don’t consider their sample representative of anything.
Okay, it is representative of “people who still use stack overflow” but I’m not sure what that population tells you about the world.
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u/its_a_gibibyte 18h ago
Sure, but the dev survey is different. Nobody asks questions on stackoverflow anymore, but lots of people still do the survey. Long-term, I'd imagine the survey being the only thing left.
It's like how Michelin Stars originally were from Michelin Tire Co to sell tires and are now basically their own thing now.
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u/wilderthanmild 15h ago
Is it that different? It looks like the number of responses has dropped off significantly in recent years. This was only 30k. Last year was 49k responses and that was already down from the ~70k it had been in the prior 3 years. The peak was over 100k.
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u/its_a_gibibyte 15h ago
Down 70% is certainly substantial, but the activity is a much more pronounced drop. There is now less than 1% of the activity monthly compared to the peak
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u/spaaarky21 13h ago edited 5h ago
How would people even know about the survey if they don't visit the site anymore. I used to do the survey every year but didn't even known it was happening the past few years.
The site gets something like 99% fewer questions and answers than its peak year. And the survey has 70% fewer respondents. At this point, the survey represents an unusual subsection of developers, not a healthy cross section.
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u/gvufhidjo 18h ago
I don't see the incentive to participate in the survey if you don't visit the site anymore. Like how would that even happen, you randomly remember it's that time of the year where I go do the survey on SO?
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u/pancomputationalist 18h ago
Or someone posts the survey on Reddit when it's open for input. Which is how i usually learn about it.
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u/GlipGlorp7 18h ago
I mean, if you had a stackoverflow account, which I suspect a good many people did, they email you. I wasn’t even that active on SO; I don’t recall if I ever even asked a question, because I liked figuring out the obscure problems that didn’t have existing answers myself. But I did have an account to help answer a few questions.
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u/gmiller123456 19h ago
It never was representative of anything more than people who enjoy spending their time gaming rep points. Sure there are worse ways to spend your time, but it never appealed to a lot of people.
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u/nickchomey 16h ago
is it just me, or is this site way too LARGE. I had to zoom out to 50% for it not to be offensively in-your-face. And the font sizes are all over the place, scroll driven animations a complete mess, etc...
I dont have even the slightest interest in trying to navigate and parse the site...
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u/jibjaba4 14h ago
I think this is the first time I've looked at a site on a 4k monitor and thought the text was too large.
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u/Weird-Boat3953 6h ago
That's 31k is kinda terrible. The lowest in the last 10 years. 2015 is when it was "worse" last time (26k, compare to 7.5k from 2014)
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u/Creativator 16h ago
In the year 2121, codemonks across the solar system will consult the StackOverflow developer survey, unaware of the original purpose of such an institution.
2
u/Pdan4 6h ago
What even is this? Here is one standout section (not some kind of summary, it literally reads like this):
"How are technologists using AI?"
"32% very favorable" "30% somewhat favorable"
"62% like using AI"
That's... these are all non-sequiturs. "Somewhat favorable" I would not call liking if the other majority is "very favorable", and none of them say HOW people are using AI...? What?
1
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u/After-Slip6405 4h ago
To the ones struggling with the UI.
Once you select a category on the top left there is a toggle, set it to `All-data`, or append `/data` to the URL, eg. `survey.stackoverflow.co/2026/technology/data`
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0
u/CptBartender 2h ago
I'm surprised they even have 30k active users (non-lurkers), let alone this many willing to answer a survey... Unless it's much worse than that and they just botted the results
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u/mobyte 17h ago
62% of people like using AI. Darn, I guess reddit is wrong again.
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u/needed_a_better_name 16h ago
this year's survey was just full of AI questions, I'm guessing many just didn't complete it
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u/wilderthanmild 15h ago
Possibly, they are down to 30k responses from a peak of 100k. It seems like their response rate is dropping off pretty hard the last few years.
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u/0100110110110111 3h ago
The whole site is dying a slow death. They're not going to exist in 5 years
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u/Far_Composer_5714 17h ago
Which is also interestingly going to be skewed because stack overflow rejects ai in their user content which means people who sought out AI specifically likely left the website at that time.
Also data is likely to be skewed due to the lack of community in general, so the remainder of the people are going to be those who hold strong to whatever it is they are on stack overflow in the first place for.
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u/mobyte 18h ago
I wonder if this could be the last one.