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by arkadiytehgraet 3027 days ago
I love the part about SO developer story: 84% either do not use it or have never even heard about it (which basically shows its failure) yet insights team tries to interpret it as 40% actually using it. Based only on this point, I wonder how extremely biased their conclusions are overall.
3 comments

Quite a few of those stats seem suspect. For example, I personally find it hard to believe that "80% of professional developers" prize Javascript above all other languages. Seems unlikely based on my network (which of course is a representative sample of all developers).
20% of survey respondents said they're students currently. 50% of survey respondents have less than 5 years of experience. 30% of the respondents said they work on the front-end only.

That will lead to some really weird results when viewed in aggergate.

Where did you get the prized by 80% from?

I only see the "Most Popular Technologies" and it has JavaScript at 71% and it's not "prized":

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-popular-...

As far as it's popularity is concerned. It's not surprising the in least. If you have anything to do with web development you're going to have to use JavaScript. Making it "popular" out of necessity but not "prized".

I'm using "prized" here as a synonym of "favored"; perhaps it's a bit archaic. I don't intend to alter or misconstrue the meaning of the survey result.

Certainly, a front-end developer has a choice of compile-to-JS languages from which they can choose.

Not too unlikely. Cannot praise what you don't know and JS is the only language for quite a few developers.
~50% of developers using standing desks is definitely not the norm either
Both you and SO are including the "it's out of date" category in your "side," that's why. Also their choice of wording is odd, I would have expected "Yes, but it's out of date." as opposed to "No, I have one but it's out of date."
IIRC checking it out, even just out of curiosity and not filling anything in, automatically created a sparse one based on your Q&A activity. That could explain the wording.
Were are you reading that? It's a long report but I wasn't able to find what you're referring to. Would be awesome if you could clarify!
Towards the end. Ctrl+f developer story.