Author | Zheng Liyuan
Listing | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)
The ever-changing technology circle seems to be giving countless opportunities and challenges to the number of technicians at any time:
In the past year, virtual people who frequently went out of the circle once pushed the popularity of the Metaverse to the peak, but now they are gradually "quiet"; those who join the IT industry under the Internet dividend have unexpectedly ushered in "cost reduction and efficiency increase" The year of 2022; ChatGPT was born at the end of the year, making AIGC the latest technology buzzword, and countless big manufacturers and developers rushed to the top...
In the technology circle where IT technology continues to iterate and emerging trends continue to emerge, as a developer, do you have a clear grasp of where you are? In order to comprehensively and deeply reveal the true status of the Chinese developer community, CSDN released the "2022-2023 Survey Report on the Current Status of Chinese Developers". This report will focus on cutting-edge hotspots, track technology development trends, and focus on the dimensions of developer survival, development tools, and learning evolution maps. Wei Yongming, founder of Feynman Software, and Li Jing, head of stability of Yuque team of Ant Group, were specially invited. In-depth analysis and comments on the report.
First, let’s take a look at a few key findings from this report:
▶ From the job information of practitioners of all ages, it can be seen that developers under the age of 40 are mostly engaged in back-end development, and developers over the age of 40 are mainly technical managers and architects.
▶ In 2022, when the economic environment is tightening, salary increases seem to be difficult. In 2021, 62% of developers said that their salary has increased in the past year, while in 2022, this data has dropped to 51%.
▶ In the past year, 45% of developers said they had used AI programming-related tools, and 34% of developers had used ChatGPT.
▶ Less than 9% of developers spend more than 70% of their time coding every day, and the vast majority of developers write no more than 300 effective lines of code per day.
▶ 4% of the developers said they don’t have time to recharge and study, while 44% of the respondents said they would study 1-5 hours a week.
People under the age of 30 are still the "main force" and are more inclined to develop in first-tier cities
It is said that the ever-changing technology circle is a track that favors young people. Judging from the results of the survey data, this is indeed the case: among the developers in this survey, practitioners under the age of 30 accounted for as high as 71%. However, combined with previous years, the data is actually declining year by year: from 81% in 2020 to 78% in 2021, and then down to 71% today.
In contrast, the 30-40 age group, which is regarded as a "middle-age crisis" by the majority of developers, has increased the proportion of practitioners in this age group from 16% in 2020 to 22%. It can be seen that even though the trend of the Internet's rejuvenation continues, "35 years old" is not an age curse that programmers cannot break.
Regarding this phenomenon, Li Jing, the person in charge of the stability of the Yuque team of Ant Group, believes: "Compared to last year, practitioners over the age of 40 have increased from 3% to 7%. With the increase of working years, the proportion of this group will continue to increase. And this group, both in research and development capabilities and business capabilities, is relatively richer, and perhaps some changes will occur when we talk about the sensitive age of 35 in the future, and the watershed will be postponed to 38~40 years old.”
From the job information of practitioners of all ages, it can be seen that developers under the age of 40 are mostly engaged in back-end development, and developers over the age of 40 are mainly technical managers and architects.
Chart 1 Basic characteristics of developers
For the developer community, first-tier cities and new first-tier cities tend to have more job opportunities. At present, Beijing and Guangdong are the areas where developers gather more, accounting for 28.2% of the national total. Shanghai and Jiangsu are in the second echelon, accounting for 15.1% of the national total. According to the survey results, 70% of developers are more inclined to work in first-tier cities and new first-tier cities.
Chart 2 Geographical Distribution of Developers (Provinces, Autonomous Regions, Municipalities, Special Administrative Regions) Top 15
Chart 3 Developers' working city tendency
In 2022, the salary level of programmers will drop slightly
The group of programmers who have always been labeled as "high salary" Tag, facing the "cost reduction and efficiency increase" strategy adopted by most Internet companies in 2022, their salary increase will inevitably stagnate slightly.
Compared with the data in 2021, the income level of developers has declined overall in the past year. The proportion of developers with a salary of less than 5,000 yuan increased from 5.5% in 2021 to 13.7%, and the proportion of developers with a monthly income of 8,000 to 17,000 yuan dropped from 49.2% last year to 40.2%. The proportion of developers with a monthly salary of more than 30,000 yuan The ratio increased slightly to 8.1%.
Chart 4 Distribution of Developers' Monthly Salary
In 2022, when the economic environment is tightening, salary increases seem to be a difficult task. The data shows that in 2021, 62% of developers said that their wages had increased in the past year, while in 2022 the data dropped to 51%, 43% of developers said that their wages had not changed, and even 6% of developers’ salaries There was a negative growth.
Chart 5 Developer's Monthly Salary Growth
Although the overall income level has declined slightly, the salaries of programmers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are still considerable. Nearly 30% (26%) of developers with a monthly salary of more than 17,000 yuan work in Beijing, and developers with a monthly salary of more than 17,000 yuan in Guangdong and Shanghai also account for 19% and 14% respectively. In addition, the survey data shows that among the top 10 regions with a monthly salary of more than 17,000 yuan, nearly half of the developers working in Beijing and Shanghai have a monthly salary of more than 17,000 yuan, while other regions only account for about 30%.
Chart 6 Proportion of people with a monthly salary of more than 17,000 yuan in each region
In the developer circle with more men and less women, there is also a certain difference in salary between the two parties. In the range with a monthly salary of more than 17,000 yuan, the proportion of male developers is 31%, and that of female developers is only 16%. However, in the range of 8,000 yuan to 17,000 yuan, the proportion of female developers (43%) is slightly higher than that of male developers (39%).
Chart 7 The monthly salary ratio of developers of different genders
Facts have proved that behind the programmer's "high salary" Tag, a large part of it may be related to overtime pay. Among the developers who work 40 hours a week (standard working hours), only 24% have a monthly salary of more than 17,000 yuan. On the other hand, those who work more than 55 hours a week have a higher proportion of high salaries. In addition, factors such as the severe industry situation and the epidemic in 2022 will have a considerable impact on freelancers: the proportion of this group with an income of more than 17,000 yuan has dropped from 24% last year to 16%.
Chart 8 Salary distribution of developers with different working hours per week
In addition, the salary level of programmers is also related to education and length of service:
▶ The results of the survey show that developers with higher educational backgrounds have a larger proportion of high-income groups. For example, more than 50% of developers with master's and doctoral backgrounds have a salary of more than 17,000 yuan.
▶ As the length of service increases, the salary of developers will also increase year by year. Among developers who have worked for 11-15 years, 67% have a salary of more than 17,000 yuan, while among developers who have worked for less than 1 year, only 10% have a salary of more than 17,000 yuan.
Chart 9 Salary Distribution of Developers Working Years
Python is getting more and more popular, ChatGPT dominates the list
In terms of programming languages that are closely related to programmers, the number of developers using Java in China still ranks first, and Python, which has long occupied the top of the TIOBE list recently, ranks second with 31.2%. In addition, Python is also the next programming language that 25.3% of developers want to learn - it can be seen that with the development of artificial intelligence, the usage of Python is gradually increasing, and it is also very popular in the developer circle.
Chart 10 Programming language usage ranking (multiple choices)
Compared with the popular Python, 38% of developers still dislike obscure low-level language assembly, and C and C++ are also daunting to some developers because of their high learning threshold.
Chart 11 Ranking of languages that developers hate most (multiple choices)
In recent years, Vue.js has grown in popularity among web frameworks. The data shows that 36.1% of developers have done a lot of development with Vue.js. In contrast, the usage of jQuery is decreasing year by year, from 29.1% last year to 23.3%.
Chart 12 Web framework usage ranking (multiple choices)
The cross-platform tool Flutter has also been rapidly expanded in recent years. Major domestic developers such as Ali, Tencent, and Baidu are vigorously promoting the use of it. 6.8% of developers said they would often use Flutter in their work—— In the results of this survey, Flutter squeezed out React Native to enter the top ten list.
Chart 13 Ranking of technical framework usage (multiple choice)
Collaboration is also the most important part of a developer's development work. It is worth mentioning that in January this year, GitHub announced on its official blog that it had reached 100 million users, that is, more than 100 million developers are now officially using GitHub to build, maintain and contribute software projects - this achievement is also included in this survey It is reflected in the results: 62% of developers use Github as a R&D collaboration management tool, followed by GitLab, which accounts for 30%.
Chart 14 R&D collaboration management tools
As mentioned above, cost reduction and efficiency increase will be the main theme in 2022. In this context, both low-code platforms and AI programming "artifacts" are beneficial tools for programmers to improve development efficiency:
▶ Only 31% of developers have used low-code development platforms in 2021, but this figure has increased to 42% in the past year, of which 24% of developers have used Ali Yidao platform.
Chart 15 Ranking of low-code platforms used (multiple choice)
▶ The explosion of ChatGPT in 2022 has set off a new wave of development of AI large models, and the use of AI programming tools is no longer so unfamiliar to developers. In the past year, 45% of developers said they had used AI programming-related tools, and developers who had used ChatGPT directly accounted for 34%.
Chart 16 Ranking of AI programming aids used (multiple choice)
However, since AI tools can help people program, there has been a lot of discussion about whether they can replace developers. Regarding this question, 61% of developers believe that current AI programming cannot replace developers, and a small number of developers think that AI programming is expected to replace existing developers.
Chart 17 Will AI programming aids replace developers?
Regarding this issue, Wei Yongming, the founder of Feynman Software, believes: "Essentially, whether a new technology may replace the whole human being or a part of human beings or a certain profession is determined by the cost of substitution. And the development of computer software to today's scale, It is the result of stacking layers of software. Even if AGI technology can design and implement its own operating system, compiler, and database, no one will spend money to let AGI do this, because economically speaking, it is extremely Not cost-effective. So substitution will happen, but only at the application level for the foreseeable future.”
As for the impact that AI will bring, Wei Yongming also predicted: "The evolution of AI in software development roughly follows from assisted programming (such as code completion, automatic generation of test cases) to the generation of complete application-level code. Provide human assistance in vertical fields such as software system security and reliability. This has two effects: on the one hand, developers who understand business or requirements can complete application development without resorting to professional developers; , bottom-level and system-level developers always have their value.”
In addition, Li Jing also said that developers need to be prepared for this: "AI's in-depth development in the developer field is of obvious value. At present, AI is more likely to appear in the role of the strongest brain, assisting developers with higher quality and efficiency. In the future, AI will further affect a large number of industries, and developers need to be prepared to join the ranks.”
Coding no more than 300 lines per day, "hate" frequent meetings
The change in the overall employment situation in 2022 will cause some changes in the working status of developers. From the perspective of the outside world, the IT industry, which has a relatively fast turnover of personnel, will see a slight decrease in the frequency of job-hopping among developers in 2022. Less than 30% of developers have experienced job-hopping in the past 1-2 years.
Chart 18 Frequency distribution of developer job hopping
In the past year, the proportion of developers who work according to standard working hours (40 hours) has also increased, from 30% in 2021 to 34.2%, that is, 73% of developers usually do not work overtime or only a small amount of overtime. For these developers, reasonable working hours guarantee their happiness in life, so their satisfaction is generally high: only 4% of developers who work 40 hours a week are dissatisfied with their working hours.
Chart 19 Working Hours of Developers
Chart 20 Developers' Satisfaction with Working Hours
For most programmers, it is always difficult to match comfortable working hours with an ideal high salary, so they are also divided into two camps regarding the attitude of "big and small weeks": 23% of developers said that although big and small weeks will occupy Weekends are off, but they would rather "big and small weeks" for high salaries; 56% of developers choose a more relaxed lifestyle and don't "big and small weeks".
Chart 21 Developers' attitudes towards "big and small weeks"
People say that programmers are also "code farmers", but they don't seem to spend much time writing code in their daily work: less than 9% of developers spend more than 70% of their time coding every day, and more than half of their time is writing every day Code people are less than 30%.
Chart 22 The time developers write code every day
Insufficient coding time greatly limits the output of code, so most developers write no more than 300 effective lines of code per day.
Chart 23 The number of lines of code written by developers every day
The reason for this phenomenon may be that various things encountered in the work interrupted the work at hand, thus affecting the development efficiency. According to the survey data, 42.7% of developers believe that frequent meetings seriously affect work efficiency, which shows that more and more developers "abhor" meetings.
Chart 24 Impact on work efficiency ranking (multiple choice)
As for the "headache" of frequent meetings for programmers, Li Jing pointed out: "Facing the communication difficulties brought about by remote office, enterprises can introduce more efficient collaboration tools and processes, such as building shared workspaces on cloud services, and adopting real-time communication tools and standardized document management to reduce unnecessary meetings.”
Actively learning hot technologies, half of developers want to transfer to management positions
Faced with the continuous iterative update of new technologies, programmers must keep up with the times if they want to improve their capabilities. Statistics show that 61% of developers will improve their careers by learning hot technologies.
Figure 25 Ways developers improve their careers (multiple choice)
As for the learning path, 54% of developers said that online courses are their first choice. This is also an important path for people to continue learning today. Its advantages are obvious: it breaks time and space constraints and is highly interactive. You can learn all kinds of courses at home. Secondly, 43% of developers will master new programming languages, frameworks or tools through self-study.
Figure 26 Ranking of continuous learning paths for developers (multiple choice)
Leisure time after work is an important time period for many developers to improve themselves. Only 4% of developers said they had no time to recharge and study, while 44% of respondents said they would study 1-5 hours a week.
Chart 27 Weekly learning hours of developers
Whether you have strong self-learning ability is also one of the criteria that most people use to judge excellent developers: 48% of developers prefer programmers with strong self-learning ability, followed by developers with independent open source projects.
Figure 28. Developers evaluate other programmers’ bonus points (multiple choice)
Whether studying or at work, problem solving is an essential skill for developers. As a well-known Chinese programmer community in China, CSDN has a lot of resources to help developers solve problems. The data shows that 64% of people will go to CSDN to find answers after encountering problems.
Figure 29 How developers deal with problems
In addition, paying attention to the cutting-edge technology of the industry is also an important way to enhance the vision, which will help developers better plan their future development path. However, the survey results show that 20% of developers usually pay little attention to cutting-edge technology.
In this regard, Li Jing suggested: "Although the data shows that 20% of developers hardly pay attention to cutting-edge technologies, enterprises and practitioners still need to pay close attention to emerging technologies. The development of these technologies will have a profound impact on the future industry. These technologies help chart the course of development for individuals and businesses."
Chart 30 Developers’ attention to cutting-edge technologies (such as Metaverse, Web3, etc.)
And when the relevant development skills reach a certain level, programmers will also usher in the choice of "technical post vs. management post": 49.9% of developers say they want to be a manager, and only 9.6% of developers don't want to become a manager.
Figure 31 Do developers want to be a manager
So far, this is the end of the interpretation of the "2022-2023 Chinese Developer Survey" of this CSDN in-depth research. After that, we will successively announce the survey reports on the four major themes of open source, basic software and hardware, cloud computing, and AIOT. expect.
