Bengaluru Sends Most Traffic to Developer Q&A Portal Stack Overflow: Survey

Developer community portal Stack Overflow, which sees over 40 million visitors every month, has just released its annual Developer Hiring Landscape report, derived from over 50,000 responses fielded from 173 countries.

A demographic breakdown of the global survey saw the most number of respondents from US and UK, with India coming in at third place among countries with a 2 percent or greater representation of respondents.

Bengaluru sends more traffic to Stack Overflow traffic than any other city, the survey notes. Salary ranked as the most important factor in a developer's job priorities, Indian developers also prioritise flexible work hours, building something innovative, working remotely, and care a lot about their job title. The mean and median annual salary in India for a developer with over five years of experience is $25,457 (roughly Rs. 17 lakhs) and $15,000 (roughly Rs. 10 lakhs) respectively, based on inputs from 2,927 respondents in India.

Globally, the average developer has about 6.5 years IT or programming experience. India has the lowest developer age, at 25.5 on the survey, while US has an average developer age of 32.

JavaScript continues to be the most popular programming language on the planet. Node.Js and Angular JS both registered a significant growth from 2015, while PHP, C, C#, C++, and Objective C declined in popularity.

The survey reveals how recruiters can no longer rely on degrees to ascertain the mettle of a developer - 70 percent of respondents said that they were self-taught, a dramatic rise from 42 percent in the previous year.

(Also read: How Competitive Coding Platforms Are Changing the Tech Hiring Landscape)

The 2016 survey also highlights the disparity between genders in the developer ecosystem - women are more likely to be designers than any other developer type, and only 5.8 percent of the 55,128 respondents were women. Stack Overflow later notes that around 12 percent of visitors to its website are women.