Salary Pressures, Not AI, Vex Developers, Says Stack Overflow

Developers don’t think AI threatens their jobs. Nor should they be overly concerned about being laid off. Instead, constraints on take-home pay have become very real, according to data from Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey.

Unsurprisingly, only 12% of surveyed developers believe AI is a threat to their current job. In fact, 70% are favorably inclined to use AI tools as part of their development workflow.

The latest edition of the global annual survey found full-time employment is holding steady, with over 80% reporting that they have full-time jobs. The percentage of unemployed developers has more than doubled since 2019 but is still at a modest 4.4% worldwide.

Stack Overflow’s report is based on 65,000 participants whose responses were collected in May and June. Overall, 77% consider themselves to be a professional developer and 73% provided information about their salaries.

The median annual salary of survey respondents declined significantly. For example, the average full-stack developer’s median 2024 salary fell 11% compared to the previous year, to $63,333. Developer advocate salaries did increase 24%, but they represented less than 200 respondents (.2% of the survey).

More Developers Are Freelancing

Wage pressure may be the result of more competition from an increase in freelancing. Eighteen percent of professional developers in the 2024 survey said they are independent contractors or self-employed, which is up from 9.5% in 2020. Part-time employment has also risen, presenting even more pressure on full-time salaries.

Polls of The New Stack readers earlier this year found concerns about future layoffs may be due to high salaries.

Job losses at tech companies have contributed to a large influx of talent into the freelance market, noted Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar in an interview with The New Stack.

Since COVID-19, he added, the emphasis on remote work means more people value job flexibility. In the 2024 survey, only 20% have returned to full-time in-person work, 38% are full-time remote, while the remainder are in a hybrid situation.

More Developers Using AI Tools

Anticipation of future productivity growth due to AI may also be creating uncertainty about how much to pay developers. Among those who use AI tools in their development workflow, 81% said productivity is one of its top benefits, followed by an ability to learn new skills quickly (62%). Much fewer (30%) said improved accuracy is a benefit.

Professional developers’ adoption of AI tools in the development process has risen rapidly, going from 44% in 2023 to 62% in 2024. Here is some more context about that trend:

• There is a difference between using AI and using a specific AI-assisted technology. Still, 32% of professional developers used AI-assisted technologies in 2024, up from 16% the year before.
• Younger developers, those with less experience and those living in countries such as India and Brazil are more likely to be using and trusting AI. Seventy-one percent of developers with less than five years of experience reported using AI tools in their development process, as compared to just 49% of developers with 20 years of experience coding.
• Overall, 85% of developers who have adopted AI tools use them to help with writing code, 69% use it to search for answers and 57% for debugging and getting help.
• Experienced developers are less likely to be using AI tools for debugging. Only 47% of those with more than 20 years of experience do so, compared to 70% of AI-tool users with less than a year of experience.
• Those just learning to code are less skeptical of AI tools, as 46% believe their AI tools are good at handling complex tasks within their development workflow. That compares to just 34% of professional developers.

ChatGPT Still Most Popular Among Devs

Including usage outside of the development workflow, ChatGPT continues to be well-liked. At 82%, it is twice as likely to have been used than GitHub Copilot. Among ChatGPT users, 74% want to continue using it.

Codium and Perplexity are the only two tools asked about in last year’s survey that actually saw increased use in 2024.

Not all tools have been well received. Chandrasekar told us that many developers are hitting a complexity cliff where tools are either unable to fully answer a question, or not able to answer the question at all.

That churn, he said, is “increasing on those AI tools, because these tools are not inexpensive for those people to buy, and the tool actually didn't fulfill the user's request.”

Here are some findings about declining usage:

• There were big drops in usage of GitHub Copilot. WolframAlpha and Tabnine also saw declining usage in 2024 compared to the previous year.
• GitHub Copilot was used by 41% of respondents in the last 12 months, down from 55% when the same question was asked in 2023. Since 72% of the Copilot users plan to continue using it, we believe the decline is based on a changing perception of the Copilot product.
• Besides a better understanding of what the product does, Tabnine’s drop in adoption from 13% in 2023 to 5% may also be due to user satisfaction, as only 36% of its current users said they want to use it in the next 12 months.

AI and the Stack Overflow’s Future

Stack Overflow is famous as being a Q&A site for developers, but the rise of generative AI solutions has caused uncertainty about the company’s future. Will developers go straight to a generative AI prompt to find answers, or will they continue to participate in specialized communities of experts?

Even though the survey was primarily of Stack Overflow users, it does provide some valuable insights:

• The frequency with which survey respondents use Stack Overflow has changed little year-over-year.
• Eighty-two percent of developers learn to code with online resources. When asked to describe what types of online resources, technical documentation was cited by 83% and Stack Overflow by 80%.
• Significantly, 37% of respondents also say they use AI to help them learn how to code.
• Generative AI tools are used to discover and research solutions by 19% of respondents when buying a new tool or software.

Stack Overflow’s CEO sees the company moving to providing knowledge as a service. One way is via OverflowAPI, a subscription service that provides continuous access to Stack Overflow’s public dataset to train and fine-tune large language models (LLMs). In other words, Stack Overflow is letting the large LLM and cloud companies train off its data.

Chandrasekar believes that the generative AI tools will not destroy Stack Overflow because 1. their accuracy is questionable and 2. many complex questions need experts, not AI, to be answered.

He told about how Stack Overflow can be used to respond to the unanswered questions. The more than 20,000 customers of Stack Overflow Teams are able to ask questions within their own company, to a corpus of LLM knowledge, and most significantly, to Stack Overflow’s community of experts.

“It basically goes and then it effectively trains the next model, and then it's able to then be attributed back to Stack Overflow users, so you can trust in the content and the user is on their way,” Chandrasekar said.

The Stack Overflow community members will have free and open access to all this data, and they can use it for their own purposes via Creative Commons Share Alike license.

Chandrasekar believes that the ability to attribute the source of the knowledge – the experts in the community – is essential because it will continue to incentivize participation by experts who are seeking to improve their reputation.

Community access to their data and increased attribution of individuals may quell the revolt by some users to the company’s deal with OpenAI to use its member contributions to help train AI models.

Stack Overflow is also working to make sure that its community is not overburdened with a long list of question threads to respond to. Just like open source maintainers, active Stack Overflow members are usually not paid for their participation. However, GenAI is making it possible for these contributors to focus on interesting questions rather than similar topics that have already been addressed.

How Frameworks and Frontend Tools Fared

Overall, most of the 366 programming languages and technologies covered in the latest  Developer Survey saw little year-over-year change since 2022. That being, these are some of the fascinating trends we uncovered in the adoption of web frameworks and frontend tools:

• FastAPI and Next.js adoption rose. Use of the Python framework FastAPI rose from 6% in 2022 to 9.9% in 2024. Meanwhile, Next.js usage rose from 13.5% in 2022 to 17.9% in 2024.
• React and Node.js adoption fell. React usage dropped from 42.6% in 2022 to 39.5% in 2024. Meanwhile, Node.js fell from 47.1% using it in 2022 to 40.8% in 2024.
• Svelte cooled off. After rapid increases in 2023, slightly fewer developers are using Svelte in 2024. But those who are using the framework seem satisfied, as 73% of its current users want to continue doing so in the next year.
• Vite is increasingly used. The frontend tool is compatible with multiple frameworks. Vite was first covered by the survey in 2023, when 14.7% of developers reported using it. That rose to 19.9% this year.
• Newly asked about in 2024, only 3% of the survey are using the highly touted Astro.

TNS Coverage of Stack Overflow’s Previous Surveys

• 2023: “70% of Devs Using or Will Use AI”
• 2022: “Adoption and Developer Pay Do Not Align, New Data Suggests”
• 2021: “Eyeballs, Training, China: Reasons for the Stack Overflow Acquisition”
• 2020: “Developer Dissatisfaction Doubles”