Are Only 20% of Devs Happy? | Stack Overflow’s Erin Yepis

**Dan Lines** (0:01)
First of all, this one, I'm not surprised. I was surprised by only 20% of developers are happy. I'm not surprised that one of the biggest complaints is technical debt. I think that's been since the beginning of time. I think that's what the data shows on the Linear B side. Not a lot of companies are, let's say, properly advocating or allocating enough space to reduce technical debt. So all of that makes sense to me.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:36)
Hey, everyone, I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson, Director of Developer Experience here at Linear B. And today, I'm excited to be joined by Erin Yepis, Senior Analyst of Market Research and Insights at Stack Overflow. So Erin, thank you for joining us today.

**Erin Yepis** (0:51)
Thank you for having me, and I wanted to make a quick mention. I love the name of this podcast, and I have listened to a couple of episodes, and I like the content of this podcast too, so really appreciate being on it.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:05)
I always love getting a compliment at the start of my days. So thank you for that. I wanted to bring you on because Stack Overflow has this developer survey that comes out every year, and we'll have a link to that in our show notes for our audience. But I heard you actually on another podcast discussing this survey and just felt like we had to get you on because it's such a relevant topic to our audience. So in particular, we think about developer productivity, developer experience, like those really come to mind a lot. And I think there were some pretty fascinating and maybe even alarming takeaways about developer happiness and job satisfaction. I was really looking at the professional developer section of the survey because a lot of our audience are people who do software development professionally. And the thing that really stood out to me was, all right, one of the findings that said that only about one in five professional developers are currently happy with their job. Can you break that down for us? Like, what does this tell you and what does that number mean?

**Erin Yepis** (2:11)
Definitely. And I'm happy to talk about this because this is a new question this year for the 2020 Word survey. You know, part of my job looking at the survey responses is to figure out the why behind the numbers. And so this new question gave us an opportunity to look at our community, which we also, our community is mostly professional developers as well, and then ask them how they feel about work. We have, we've run surveys in the past where we ask directly developers how their jobs are going. We ask them some questions about what do you look for when you're searching for a new job? What are some of the reasons why you might leave your current job? But this would be the first time we're asking just blanket statement, umbrella statement. Are you happy with your current job? So I definitely thought it was really cool. And so also we know in the background of a lot of the research we've been doing too, that there's been disruptions in the industry. So it was top of mind as far as like the satisfaction goes, job satisfaction. For this question in particular, we used a NPS style scale for, which means users could select from to 10, happy, unhappy, 10 being happy. The NPS style I thought was a good option for this question because unlike the Likert scale, which is five options, the NPS relies a little bit more on the normal distribution, assuming that a lot of people are going to be picking something closer to the middle. That way, if you are categorized as a promoter or happy, a happy developer in this scenario, you selected 9 or 10 I also like this too because for anyone that was maybe a little wishy-washy on the fence, it's like saying, if you're not a hell yes, you're a no. I thought it was, yeah, sometimes the surveys with a qualitative approach, you have to be a little bit tricky in order to get the real scoop.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (4:18)
Yeah. Interesting. Surprising to me seeing that, I think that same number was about almost a third of developers were unhappy with their work.
There definitely seems like there's this large volume that's in the middle. I think the word used in the survey to describe it was complacent with their jobs. But it's just surprising to see that 80 percent of developers basically are really not engaged with their work. To me, that goes against my perception of the field. Because I know it is a tough profession to get into, but at the same time, it's a pretty good job to have being a software developer. So I personally expect it to be very different. Not necessarily like developers all being super excited about their job, but seeing only one in five really engaged. Another interesting aspect of this was that their managers actually weren't even much happier. Because I think that number was a little bit closer to like one in four managers are happy with their work. It seems like they're similar but still a little different. Do you think there's anything to that?