With an annual salary of 1.35 million, what kind of programmer "gets older and eats better"?

Organize | Su Mi

Listing | CSDN（ID：CSDNnews）

Born at the turn of the century, JavaScript has undergone 27 years of development and has become one of the most popular programming languages in the world for developers today.

Recently, stateofjs.com website officially released the "2022 JavaScript Annual Survey Report", which surveyed nearly 40,000 developers, twice the number of respondents last year. The reason for such a large-scale survey is that JavaScript has been in the industry for many years, so many people have begun to question its real development status.

For example, new front-end frameworks such as Solid and Qwik have risen rapidly, and the performance is close to native JavaScript, and many netizens have shouted: This is my ideal React; On the server side, the Astro, Remix, and Next.js frameworks have led many developers to rethink how much code we need to send to the client. The development of the JavaScript ecosystem is quietly undergoing a lot of changes, including a decline in the awareness and usage of some features.

In order to further understand the development of JavaScript tools and frameworks, we will also take an in-depth look at the latest report, which we hope will be useful to you.

JavaScript developers get older and more prosperous

As we all know, any application that can be implemented in JavaScript will eventually be implemented in JavaScript. As such, it is one of the most commonly used languages for projects in code-hosting platforms like GitHub.

The longer you use a technology, the more popular it becomes, and this is most evident in JavaScript. According to survey data, developers with more than 10 years of JavaScript experience are more likely to get high salaries, of which JavaScript developers with more than 20 years of experience earn the highest proportion of 100,000-200,000 US dollars (about 670,000-1.35 million yuan), 40%, and 14% of respondents who receive more than 1.35 million yuan.

Respondents with less than 5 years of development experience are paid less than US$50,000 (about 340,000 yuan).

The salary of JavaScript developers in China is 200,000-340,000 yuan, accounting for the highest proportion

This year's report covers many countries around the world, with the United States having the highest number of JavaScript developers, accounting for 11.9%. 0.8% of developers participated in the survey in China.

The developer group is dominated by young people, with developers aged 24-34 accounting for the highest proportion at 36.5%.

The salary of JavaScript developers in the United States is concentrated at 100k-200k US dollars (about 670,000-1.35 million yuan), accounting for 53.2%. 50k-100k US dollars ((about 340,000-670,000 yuan)) ranked second, with 16.9%. Second, the countries where programmers who master JavaScript and get high salaries are Israel, Switzerland, Australia, and Norway.

Chinese JavaScript developers received the largest number of 30k-50k US dollars (about 200,000-340,000 yuan), accounting for 24.2%.

WebAssembly is no longer brilliant?

On the technical level, the official gave this assessment, "JavaScript technology may be evolving quickly, but it seems that JavaScript developers are more up-to-date, because many relatively new features have shown high adoption rates."

The report divides the JavaScript ecosystem into three categories: language, browser API, and other features. The outer ring size in the figure below represents the number of users who understand this feature, and the inner ring size represents the number of users who actually use this feature.

Among browser APIs, WebSocket usage was the highest, accounting for 66.5%. However, the number of users of this technology is decreasing year by year. The second most commonly used APIs include Shadow DOM and Service Workers.

In terms of other features, in the past year, many people are no longer optimistic about the development of WebAssembly, and even often compare it with K8s in the cloud. Previously, the HTTP Archive's 2022 Web Technology Report showed that "WebAssembly is not widely used enough, and we have not seen an increase in usage, but a small contraction." "According to the latest survey data, this is indeed the case, WebAssembly is currently used at 20.1%, which is not a high number of users. However, the number of developers using it has increased every year.

React goes up, Angular goes down

The figure below shows the evolution of technology in the JavaScript ecosystem from 2016 to 2022, with higher points indicating that more people are using the technology, and higher points indicating that more respondents want to learn it or have already used it and will use it again.

Overall, it is not difficult to see that in the past 6 years, front-end frameworks, rendering frameworks, testing tools, mobile and client-side, build and other tools have developed very rapidly.

Taking React as an example, 2016-2019 was the rise of React, and its user base increased exponentially. However, after 2020, developers' enthusiasm for React gradually waned. 

When it comes to front-end frameworks, many people's first reaction is React, Angular, Vue.js the three musketeers. However, at present, although the Three Musketeers are still there, the three of them are moving in different directions.

According to the figure below, React users are the most sticky, with 57% of respondents saying "have used this technology and will use it again in the future", followed by Vue .js with the highest satisfaction.

In stark contrast to the first two, developers are increasingly dissatisfied with Angular, with a whopping 24% of developers saying that they "have used this technology and will not use it again", and 34% of respondents directly saying that they are not interested in this technology.

In fact, the decline of established tools to some extent highlights the rise of new technologies. In the front-end framework field, Solid and Svelte usage increased, ranking first and second in satisfaction.

In addition, when it comes to cross-platform tools, the satisfaction of Electro, an established cross-platform desktop application development tool, has fallen significantly, with only 74.8% of respondents now satisfied with it, compared to 92.8% in 2017.

Instead, native development is gaining popularity. Meanwhile, Tauri, released in 2021, is supported by 91.7% of developers.

In the past two years, JavaScript building tools have emerged one after another. Parcel, tsc CLI, Rome, Snowpack, SWC, esbuild, Vite, etc. are all new tools born in the past two years. However, in terms of satisfaction, the new tool came later, with Vite, esbuild, and SWC ranking in the top 3 positions.

Vite won three awards and became the most used, satisfying, and most talked about technology by developers

The report also ranks developers based on their satisfaction with the codebase, which refers to "the number of people who will use the repository again" (note: less than 10% of the codebase is not included).

It is worth noting that Vite is a next-generation front-end development and building tool launched by You Yuxi in 2019, and its plugin API and JavaScript API bring high scalability. According to the latest data, Vite is voted the most wanted tool framework for developers with 98% satisfaction.

At the same time, stateofjs.com website also selected some awards for JavaScript technology this year. Unsurprisingly, Vite became the biggest highlight, winning three awards: most technology adopted, highest satisfaction, and most attention.

In addition, Top-Level Await won the "Most Adopted Feature" award from developers with a percentage of 26.4%. Astro was the most mentioned project by respondents, and Private Fields won the "Most Reviewed" award; React is the most talked about library.

Write at the end

"One day without learning ten days" is an exaggeration to describe the changes in JavaScript, but it is not exaggerated. Nearly half out of ten developers feel that the JavaScript ecosystem is changing too quickly.

For developers, the three most difficult pain points for JavaScript are code architecture, managing dependencies, and state management.

The most missing features of JavaScript right now: Static Typing, Standard Library, and better Data Management.

Of course, many respondents also hope to see a better ecosystem and functions of JavaScript in the future.

Commenting on JavaScript's evolution over the past year, Sarah Drasner, director of engineering and network infrastructure at Google, concluded, "JavaScript and TypeScript are more dynamic than ever."

"When we see a drop in satisfaction with mature frameworks like React, Angular, or Vue, a lot of people are likely to think about what this means for the future," it said. I believe that this downward trend is a true embodiment of the tools being tested and used in production. This is a sign of maturity and a clear understanding of what these tools can offer. They will also learn from innovations in the field and continue to evolve.

Finally, I am very pleased to see that Vite has received the award for the second year in a row, and its development and service technology is indeed making great progress, and we all benefit from this hard work." Attaboy! ”