The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2017

https://www.jetbrains.com/research/devecosystem-2017/

by mihau • 9 years ago

45 29 9 years ago

AJRF• 9 years ago

44% of developers surveyed said they don't contribute to open source code, but are willing too.

I assume that some people say they are willing but when push comes to shove they don't actually want too, but still seems like a gap in the market.

Someone could try and build a tool to arbitrage for the two communities.

alexanderdmitri• 9 years ago

What's the definition for contributing to open source code here? Is it publishing code (ie pushing to a public repo on GitHub), putting in the effort to maintain/market it, identifying reproducible issues in other open source projects, submitting patches/features to existing open source?

vosper• 9 years ago

I think a lot of those people are probably in the "I would do it, but I have enough / too much work already" or "I have other stuff to do in my life" category.

TheAceOfHearts• 9 years ago

There needs to be community pressure on companies to allocate resources and time for employees to contribute back to whatever projects they use.

It's not unreasonable for someone to have hobbies other than coding outside of work. Many people that contribute to open source end up doing so during their free time, but I'd guess that a fair share of those 44% of developers have different priorities.

krapp• 9 years ago

There needs to be community pressure on companies to allocate resources and time for employees to contribute back to whatever projects they use.

Companies don't allocate resources and time to employees without expecting a return on investment. Any contributions made on company time would have to managed by the company with the intent that they serve its needs first and foremost, or else be considered theft of company resources and time.

It sounds like a good idea but I can't see it turning into anything but an opportunity for companies to leverage control over open source projects.

ty_a• 9 years ago

Most places I've worked at had policies against contributing to open source projects.

slackingoff2017• 9 years ago

Was about to say the same. My company explicitly forbids it for some stupid reason. One of the main drivers for my current job search.

wolco• 9 years ago

For some its hard because they want to help somehow but don't understand the structure. If you can get to the point of creating a patch in the right format someone needs to accept the pull request. The barrier is too high for most so most work on there own stuff and publish to github.

twobyfour3• 9 years ago

Note that these results are likely a bit skewed towards Jetbrains' customers.

The stat that surprised me most was how many people never used an issue tracker. 28%? That's insane!

staofbur5• 9 years ago

About 50% of the companies I consulted for between 2004-2013 had no issue tracker. Most emailed and/or emailed spreadsheets around.

What's even more shocking is about 25% of them didn't even use a VCS, most relying on some poor guy to sit there with a diff tool and merge everyone's shit into something cohesive. One company used a wooden spoon as an ownership lock.

twobyfour3• 9 years ago

That's just depressing. WHYYYYYY?

Sir_Substance• 9 years ago

A few weeks ago, someone had a thread up asking what people did to help them get past impostor syndrome, and I had a stab at writing up an answer that revolved around "realise that if you read hacker news, you're probably inside a quality bubble. Look at how bad some people who are employed in software are at their jobs and get some perspective".

I ended up deleting the comment without posting it because I didn't have any good examples that I felt I could talk about in detail.

This is a great one though. To everyone on hacker news, if you ever feel inadequate about not writing as many unit tests as you know you should (or whatever is bugging you), remember that time Staofbur found a whole company of people so clueless they used a wooden spoon instead of version control.

Yeah you should probably write more unit tests, but overall, the fact that you even know enough to feel worried about that makes you the cream of the software industry. There's a whole pail of rather thin milk below you.

ugonna• 9 years ago

skewed towards Jetbrains' customers.

Doesn't seem so. From their methodology [1]:

"We used Twitter Ads, Google Adwords and JetBrains' own communication channels to invite potential survey respondents. To minimize possible bias, the reports include only responses coming from Twitter Ads and Google Adwords."

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/research/devecosystem-2017/demogra...

collyw• 9 years ago

I have had issue tracker in the places I worked, but if no one ever uses them properly they become more of a hinderance than a help.

aphextron2• 9 years ago

Am I alone in finding Go's syntax atrocious? It just seems so needlessly obtuse, and puts me off to an otherwise great ecosystem.

Svenskunganka• 9 years ago

What do you find obtuse with it? I don't care that much for syntax when looking at a language, because it is something you can get used to fairly quickly. The error checking is quite repetetive though.

aphextron2• 9 years ago

I don't care that much for syntax when looking at a language, because it is something you can get used to fairly quickly. The error checking is quite repetetive though

I agree, it's entirely an aesthetic issue. Just choices like using "func" instead of just writing out "function" or using an actual shorthand like "fn" really bother me. Also the seemingly arbitrary choices that run against the grain of C inspired languages like using "[]<type>" instead of "<type>[]" to initialize an array.

anotherbrownguy• 9 years ago

Try rust for a while and you'll love Go.

snomad• 9 years ago

21% target Windows mobile OS? That seems especially high since most Windows developers would start visual studio by default.

vinceguidry• 9 years ago

I didn't get very far reading this until I realized that because Java developers skewed the results pretty hard, there really weren't going to be any takeaways from it that aren't also only relevant to the Java ecosystem.

It's why I don't pay much attention to statistics in general. Nobody's constraints are going to match how I would do it.

petraeus• 9 years ago

For some people writing clever clean code is much more important than making $10 million profit a year.

What type of person are you?

The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2017

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