Every year, the online question and answer forum stackoverflow runs a developer survey. The website boasts that almost 32 million people visit the site every month, with over 25 million of those users being return visitors. That’s credibility, and a big, fiercely loyal, following.

The benefit of taking a look at the data from this survey gives individuals looking to get into coding an peek into where there’s a demand, and helps you shape your career in coding.

Here’s a quick overview of the study:

The 2015 iteration of the survey was completed by 26,086 people who hail from over 157 different countries. Approximately 6,800 of the respondents identified themselves as full-stack developers, 1,900 as mobile developers, 1,200 as front-end developers, 2 as farmers, and 12,000 identified themselves as something else.

The site conducts the survey every year to help themselves better understand the community. However unbiased, the site does warn that the survey under represented developers who do not, or are unlikely to take English language based surveys. Countries with larger developer populations like China, Brazil, Japan and India did not show a healthy participation in the survey.

  • Demographics

    Not surprisingly, the largest age group represented in the survey came from those in their late 20’s. Individuals between the ages 25-29 represented 28.5% of the respondents, while another 24.5% of the respondents were between the ages of 20-24. Combined, respondents in their 20’s comprised 53% of all respondents.

    Interestingly the average age of a developer in the United States clocked in at 31.6, the highest of any other country in the world.

    92.1% of respondents were male, and 5.8% were female.

    32.4% of the surveys respondents reported having only 2-5 years of experience. With how quickly the programming field is expanding, this is not particularly surprising. However, to put it in context, only 25% of developers around the world have 10+ years of coding experience. This leaves a lot of room for young developers to grow.

  • Compensation

    The independent survey concluded the average salary in the United States for a Java Developer is approximately $89,054.

    The highest average salary was Objective-C, whose average salary is $98,828.

  • Technology

    The most popular coding languages, according to the study were Java at 37.4%; SQL at 48%; and Javascript was the most popular at 54.4%.

    The respondents overwhelmingly prefer Windows 7 as their OS, coming in at 33.8%, while the majority preferred using NotePad++ as their text editor at 34.7%.

  • Profession

    The majority of developers who responded to the survey are working in the Software Products industry, constituting 25% of the responses. However, web and internet services came in at 17%, while the finance and banking industry developers made up 8% of individuals working the finance and banking industry.

    On the mobile developer side, Android developers constitued 44.6% of the respondents, while 33.4% were iOS developers.

    Over 50% of developers say working remotely is very important to them, while only 29% of developers work remotely even part time, up 21% from the previous year.