January 25th, 2023 × #State of JS#JavaScript#Web Development
We React to State of JS 2022
Wes and Scott discuss the results of the State of JS 2022 survey, analyzing trends in frameworks, libraries, developer demographics, salaries, and more.
- Overview of State of JS survey
- Take survey results with grain of salt
- Don't judge libraries by survey fluctuation
- Shout out to creator Sasha for great work
- Data visualizations are inspiration for devs
- Compare survey countries to Syntax countries
- Survey countries different than Syntax
- India top free, Germany paid listener
- Most salaries 50k-100k, then 100k-200k
- Cool salary vs experience data explorer
- Filter US salary by experience trends
Transcript
Announcer
Monday. Monday. Monday.
Announcer
Open wide dev fans, get ready to stuff your face with JavaScript, CSS, node modules, barbecue tips, get workflows, breakdancing, soft skill, web development, the hastiest, the craziest, the tastiest web development treats coming again hot. Here is Wes, Barracuda, Boss, and Scott
Guest 1
CSD.
Wes Bos
Welcome to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats.
Overview of State of JS survey
Wes Bos
Today, we are going to be To the state of JS, this is a survey that goes out every single year, and they ask questions about what frameworks with libraries, knowledge of of different JavaScript features are that people know. And it's kinda interesting to see over the years, frameworks and libraries and whatnot that have come up and come down and and whatnot.
Wes Bos
So we're gonna gonna go through it and give our 2¢ and on it and and pick out some interesting things.
Wes Bos
My name is West Boss with me. It's always mister Talinski. How are you doing today, Scott? Yeah. I'm doing great. In addition to reacting,
Guest 1
we're gonna be taking a quick look at some of these solid graphs that have quite angular lines on them.
Guest 1
Anybody there? Okay.
Take survey results with grain of salt
Guest 1
Yeah. Let's let's talk about this stuff. I love this this time of year where where the stuff, these these charts come out. We can all take a look at them. But I think it's important to state before we get too into any of this stuff. These certs are useful to look at, but they're not necessarily something that you want to base your whole life off of, so to say.
Guest 1
Yeah. They're good us to take everything in this with a pinch of salt because this is a sampling of a portion of this community.
Guest 1
It's not The entire web development community. So, while these charts are amazing, and and Sasha, who puts this together, does great work every single year.
Guest 1
See it. He, like, really puts in an effort to improve this stuff, and I I love it. I absolutely love these charts.
Wes Bos
Don't Don't be offended by anything in these charts or or anything or any of the results. Don't use it to say this is better than this or this is worse than this or whatever. It. By all means, it's it's just a sampling of data. Yeah. There's every time this comes out like, shout out to Sasha. I don't think I could run this thing because people are it. So critical over any survey of this type of thing, and he'd I think he does he does a good job of trying to get good demographics and whatnot. And, Every time it comes out, people are either cheesed about a specific result because it's not true, or They didn't collect enough information on x, y, or z, or they just think it's silly in general.
Don't judge libraries by survey fluctuation
Wes Bos
So and, And also, like like, library authors, I think this is probably hard for library authors to, to see because people say, like, oh, yeah. Like, Remix is plummeting, and it's just like, no. There's literally 200 less people a year or something like that. Like, that's a rounding error in this type of thing. So it's hard when you put your entire Life into something like this, and then you get just these wing nuts running podcasts saying, we're reacting to the state of JS. You know?
Shout out to creator Sasha for great work
Guest 1
It. Yeah. Totally. I hear you. And and and, like, again, Sasha does an amazing job. I've known him for a long time. He was a big part of the meteor scene.
Guest 1
So, you know, he he does just tremendous work overall, and and I I'm huge fan of the survey. One thing I really love about this survey, And if you look at the data explorer page, which is, like, maybe the first thing after t shirt, it it really kind of gives you a nice little introduction to these charts. But one thing it does is it's really, like, gives you a good sampling for, like, how cool visually some of these charts are. They really take a good good approach to, I think, attempting to display these things in various ways that, You know, can give you a different eye for this information.
Guest 1
But also, man, I use this for inspiration all the time when I'm doing data vis stuff because there's so many cool, So many cool visualizations in this data explorer.
Data visualizations are inspiration for devs
Guest 1
Dynamically explore the survey's audience by picking 2 questions and see how the respondents are distributed between them. It's just really cool.
Guest 1
So I love I love this stuff. And I think that if nothing else, if you're not looking at this for the data and look at For some dev ins, well, it's really just fantastic.
Wes Bos
First one, we'll take a look at country of where people are coming from. I just wanted to Put that up against
Guest 1
the countries that people listen to this podcast. I'm curious if it is it. Similar. The number one country of origin, 11% of the people or 12% ish of the people who, submitted this poll are from the United States of America, 5.2% from Germany, 3.7 from France, 3.6 from the United Kingdom, 3.2 from India. Hey. 2.5% from Canada, And 2.4% from, my my, somewhat homeland of of Poland.
Compare survey countries to Syntax countries
Wes Bos
Let's, So the top 5, for our podcast are US, UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia. And the top 5 here are US, Germany, France, UK, and India.
Wes Bos
So it is different, very different than the people that listen to this podcast, which is kinda interesting. Yeah. Definitely interesting.
Survey countries different than Syntax
Guest 1
Interesting that Germany is so high in this. That's that's kinda interesting. Yeah. Germany is
Wes Bos
I think Germany is number 2 or 3 for for me for core sales.
Wes Bos
And India is number 1 For, I think, for or US is number 1 for everything, but I think India is number 1 for free. Germany is, like, number 2 for
India top free, Germany paid listener
Guest 1
For page or something like that, UK is always up there. France is always up there. So they're generally kind of the same, I guess. Yeah. Totally. It. We can do like, let's talk about, like, the salary. Yeah. I think the salary part is kind of interesting. You know? A lot of times people in this industry, like, talk about a big money salaries as if that's, like, a very common thing. There was, like, that Amazon image that was going around Twitter about, like, Some developers or whatever being able to be offered up to, like, $700,000 a year or something crazy. But, You know, in reality, most salaries the the highest percentage of salary listed on this chart was between 50,000 and a 100,000, which For most of my devs, dev jobs absolutely tracks. In fact, I think my 1st dev job, I got paid, like, $27,000 for. So, you know, anywhere Anywhere in that range is the most common according to people who filled out this chart, and the next most common being a 100,000 to 200,000, And that probably tracks more with, like, FAANG companies. I remember when I interviewed at Google, the amount that they were going to be offering was way higher than what I was currently making, but that was also because they expected me to live in San Francisco. Right? Yeah. And and I think that accounts for it.
Guest 1
Mitch is maybe why some of those salary ranges can get, greater than 200 k, which by the way, over 200 k, only 3% of the people who filled out the survey make over 200 k, which honestly 3% is a lot because that's a a big salary. But, you know, there's a lot of people doing really important work that's bringing in a ton of money, so That also tracks. But, again, you know, most dev jobs are going to be in that 3, 30,000 range to anywhere from 30,000 to 200,000 Depending on probably what you're working on, where you're working in that type of thing. In my experience, most agencies are gonna be paying way less than these big thing companies, But there's probably a different level of, you know, cost of living associated with that as well. Yeah. They have this new thing called the data
Cool salary vs experience data explorer
Wes Bos
explorer where you can pick 2 thing. You can take their yearly salary and yearly experience, and you make a grid out of that, and you can see the distribution over that.
Wes Bos
I think that's really cool. I would love to be able to also filter for the I guess you're kinda getting into, like, Google BigQuery and things like that, but you're able filter for people who live in the US
Filter US salary by experience trends
Guest 1
and see their years of salary versus their years of experience and it. Kinda get a layout of that. Yeah. Yeah. There's also some interesting stuff with the higher education. 21% of people don't have a higher education as in, like, a college degree. It. 40%, yes, in a related field, 14% in an unrelated field. I'm one of the 14% of my my degree was in music. That that I'm actually surprised that it's 14 for yes in an unrelated field because you would not believe how many people you know, you and I have both met at conferences it. That are I was doing this, and then I decided to transition out of that, or I went to school for this. And while I was there, I had to pick up web for some reason, and that's why I, you know, ended up running with. But it does also track that, you know, A large amount of people just knew that this is what they wanted to do from before they started college. Right? Let's get into the JavaScript features,