Programming from 15 years

The study found that most participants wrote their first lines of code at the age of 15, although this figure varies depending on the country of origin. While in India, for example, code is not written until the age of 17, in Germany it is written much earlier: at the age of 14.5.

Regarding the salary, developers earn good money worldwide. The highest salaries are paid to engineering managers ($95,000) and those in engineering positions. Full-stack developers - which include most of the developers in the survey - have an annual income of around 57,000 US dollars.

Research and development in academia brings up the rear. Another important finding of the study is that women and non-binary professionals have been working as IT experts for longer. Between five and nine years of (professional) experience are held by 31 percent of the men, 34 percent of the participating women and 32 percent of the third category.

Still, the self-doubt is showing: 68 percent of men, 53 percent of women and 59 percent of non-binary participants consider themselves competent enough for their jobs. The fastest growing major programming language is Python.

It has displaced Java this year and is considered the second most popular language after Rust. Still, for the seventh year in a row, Java is the queen among the most used coding languages, with second place held by HTML (63 percent) and third place by SQL (54 percent).

The programming languages that meet with the least interest and even rejection among their users are VBA (75 percent), Objective-C (69 percent) and Assembly (64 percent). In the tools and technologies section, jQuery and Node.js are the most popular among web frameworks, and MySQL among databases.

Most developers write their codes for products running on Linux (53 percent) and Windows (50 percent). Incidentally, the latter is the most popular operating system again this year, ahead of macOS and Linux-based systems.

But what about future technologies like blockchain? After the hype of the last few years, 80 percent of the participants nevertheless say that they do not use any blockchain technology. Most participants come from the USA (24 percent), India (10 percent) and Germany (7 percent) and are of European descent or white.

They mostly have a bachelor's degree in computer science or computer engineering. Job prospects remain very good for developers: only 15 percent of developers worldwide are actively looking for a job, with 54 percent of respondents saying that programming languages and technology are the most important things to them in their new position, closely followed by office environment and corporate culture (48 percent) and flexible working hours (47 percent).