This year's survey is officially open! We've added a few new questions based on your feedback from last year and we are really looking forward to publishing the results in January.
Once you've taken the survey, we will send you (US or Canada) a limited edition sticker as a small, yet terrific, token of our appreciation.
The last page with questions about advertisements.. option "I use adblocker" should make the rest of the questions in this block non-mandatory. I can't say anything about the adverts if I never seen them.
First, a bug report. The "Which of the following languages or technologies have you used significantly in the past year?" question lists both jQuery and jQuery. I suspect that's an oversight and only jQuery should remain.
Second, I don't understand how you define "company" for very large organizations that are broken down. For someone like me, there's a massive conglomerate on top with different businesses inside of it, which are often broken down into SBUs and then sites. The number grows from 500 to a site to 10k for the business. More clarity should be provided.
jayQuery, imagine if that was a control question! jay is John Resig's pet hamster.
Commented
Dec 13, 2012 at 1:27
I notice one of the questions asks "If you make a software product, how does your company make money?". There's no answer provided to that for "it doesn't".
This also implies that my making a software product has some direct connection to my company making money (once again assuming that the company does, in fact, make money).
The survey is pretty much geared towards those who have a job in IT. Quite a few of us code for fun and/or are students. Most of the questions make no sense from these perspectives. Maybe a few more options could be added to certain questions so that it makes sense for these two groups to answer them?
What are the privacy considerations of this? If one wants the swag, one has to link one's name, salary with an address. Is that being sold?
Did I miss a privacy blurb stating SO will not sell your information related to this questionaire?
I completed the survey and just want to add two things about the last part. In Canada we don't have:
The equivalent would be:
To some of you this may seem irrelevant, but too many sites forget about this detail and most of the time formats do not match. (Zip Format: xxxxx / PostalCode: format xxx - xxx).
status-completed Thank you! You love Kiwis after all :)
Here're the current options for keepsake (note "Australasia")
I got stuck on the first question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Asian_countries_by_GDP
https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/asia.htm
No "New Zealand" to be seen. Australia is both a country and continent, but New Zealand is not part of it.
I guess you didn't want responses from New Zealand then?
It appears you have completely omitted anything related to the world of academia. "Education" does not work because I am a researcher, not an instructor.
And all the questions about your company don't fit well for asking about a university/department. How should I know how much my "company" makes? The department gets funding from many people/organizations and professors have their own funding on top of that.
I would think that a large percentage of users on SO as well as on a lot of SE sites are students. SO, how are you expecting this group of users to fill the survey? In its current form, it's rather obviously not considering students to be a major part of the site.
This survey is for employed people only?
(click on image to zoom)
I don't work in ANY industry – I am a student.
Under "What other departments / roles do you interact with regularly?" it would be best to include:
...as I have nothing to call the engineering folks.
"Tester/QA Engineer" isn't available as a choice in the occupation selector. It should be available. I think the number of SO users with such a job is large enough to be taken into account.
Similarly, the option "Developers" is absent in "What other departments/roles do you interact with regularly?"
Why don't you simply list all countries of the world in the "Country or Region" selection box? Your choices are almost random it seems. For example in Europe you're listing Russia, France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Ok, you got the first 5 countries by population, but the Netherlands is the 10th by population, you skipped Spain, Ukraine, Poland and Romania.
Why suffer all this criticism when you could simply list all countries. It seems like half the "Answers" to this "Question" are related to missing or ambiguous countries or regions. Not to mention it's a "delicate" subject. I mean, I'm from Romania, why are Germans listed and not us? Sure there are many countries, but if you know they're all, you'll immediately find your country in an alphabetical listing. In my case there are only 3 countries that start with the letter "R". You'll then be able to aggregate the data as you wish: by continent, by spoken language, by average temperature in January.
Where's the generic "Programmer" option for "Which of the following best describes your occupation?"
I basically do anything they need that's programming related, including but not limited to:
Under "Which technology products do you own?", I believe you forgot one important one:
"In an average week, how do you spend your time?"
Is this just at work, or in total? I assumed at work at first, but then saw commuting on the list.
Please rate the Advertising you've seen on Stack Overflow
The way that question is presented is a bit out-of-whack, in my opinion. It provides a ratings scale on a question that would be better answered with yes or no.
How can I strongly disagree that "I click on ads that inerest me"?
That doesn't make much sense.
Or, how can I strongly disagree about the fact that I use an ad-blocker? Either I use one or I don't.
These are YES/NO questions. How can you rate a yes or no answer?
Perhaps a better way would be to ask, "How often do you use an ad-blocker" and allow the user to say, "Very Often", "Often", "Sometimes", "Never", etc.
Or, maybe the question would be better split into parts in order to provide better information:
What types of purchases are you involved in?
Ah, this is another one! You are given a checklist of things to choose from, such as "hardware", "servers", etc. and then, and THEN there is consultant - honestly, I've never seen a consultant for sale in Best Buy! Ha ha!
I think that is a bit strange, no?
Which of the following best describes your occupation?
I think this question should allow you to choose multiples. What if I am the "back-end developer" AND the "front-end developer" AND the "customer support" AND the "web-developer".... The question asks what best describes you, but all of those best describe me. Sometimes we IT guys just plain do everything, especially in the smaller operations.
All that being said, I actually kind of enjoyed taking the survey! If, whilst using my ad-blocker, that is a way I can give back to Stack Overflow, then I'll fill out the survey next year too.
I find it not very surprising but none theless absurd that the survey is so biased to northern america. I'd guess from the lack of english skills and the shear number of users on SO that quite a lot of the community lives in "the rest of the world" I as quite a few others couldn't pick my country (Denmark) and some of the questions are just fun. "How important is a 40 hour work week to you" Well I wouldn't take the job because that's above a standard work week. The salary is immensely funny as well seeing that the wages are a factor of magnitude higher in northern europe than in the states (and so is the taxes) which severly skews the picture you won't find a programmer with an academic background with less than $100000 a year and $150000 is common which is above the top option, similar can be said about most of the questions regarding what's important when choosing a job
I got stuck at 2nd page of survey having below question:
How would you best describe the industry you currently work in?
I mean to say what if i work for multiple domains so user must be able to check multiple answers.
And after filling out some of the questions, questions are being arised in my mind. Why questions are arised? Because there are some of the questions i doubt, why stackoveflow is asking such questions:
title at every page that this is for Advertiser, this is for users or anybody else. What you say? So that particular section will be filled up by only targeted audience.
Commented
Dec 14, 2012 at 4:13
This question caused my a high level of anxiety because I believe it is highly ambiguous
Although I believe I make a software product it isn't something that we sell. You see at our company we have a large group of oompa loompa's, the leaders of these oompa loompa's come to us and tell us to "Build this awesome thing we need" and we do. They then attempt to use it, with varying degrees of success. Once this takes place the head oompa loompas return and make demands for further changes which we oblige this is a cycle that repeats here at my place of employment.
Given this scenario I wasn't sure what to answer, I clicked other but it has since caused me a great deal of anxiety. Are my efforts not to be considered a software product? If not then I could not truthfully answer the question at all yet I was forced to choose "Other"
Again, I find the entire question highly ambiguous.
I wonder if in 'Types of purchase' you shouldn't include books?
There should be another option for the last page of ads I don't see any ads because of my rep. Because I wasn't sure I just mainly did neutral. But I think doing neutral could affect the results.
If by ads you mean the Careers image that never changes. I wouldn't consider that an ad as it never changes and is still a SE product.
"How would you best describe the industry you currently work in?" is missing an option for government (at least 15% of the US workforce).
"Including bonus, what is your annual compensation in USD?" -> is this before or after taxes? You know, in the EU is 50% off (no kidding, taxes eat more or less half your wage in many EU countries)
I miss Caribbean in the list of regions.
Which should I choose? Central America? South America? The Greater Antilles like Cuba can be considered part of Central America and the Lesser Antilles like Curaçao can be considered part of South America. Although technically completely wrong, is it okay to consider my region like that for this survey?
In terms of "regions of the world", Wikipedia considers it to be part of North America, which is IMO incorrect. The site as Richard the Kiwi is referring to in his New Zealand defense, Caribbean is mentioned as in "The Americas and the Caribbean", indicating it to be a separate territory. In terms of area and population, the Caribbean is however calculated together with Central America.
To avoid this confusion, it'd make sense if Caribbean becomes a separate entry in the list of regions.
Why do you ask what my reputation is? Can't you get that information automatically?
Where you ask how much one plans to spend next year, the $5,001-10,000 range is missing.
"Gaming" implies gambling and casino machines. Is that what was intended?
I make video games. Broadly that's "entertainment media" (which isn't represented at all) and the specific "video games" (quite different from "gaming") would be a fine entry as well as I know a lot of my peers frequent SO.
My company makes consumer software but we don't sell direct to consumers, we go through retail. We don't do direct sales to anyone, our products magically appear in retail stores and sales are handled by other companies. (IOW, there should be a separate spot for "retail packaged software".)
I got my sticker for participating in the survey!! :D
jQueryandJQuery?