In December we launched the Stack Overflow Annual User Survey in order to measure the user demographics that Google Analytics can’t provide us with. Finding out the user demographics became necessary due to the growth that Stack Overflow had in 2010. Of the 2,813 surveys started, 2,532 were completed, for a completion rate of 90%!…

In December we launched the Stack Overflow Annual User Survey in order to measure the user demographics that Google Analytics can’t provide us with. Finding out the user demographics became necessary due to the growth that Stack Overflow had in 2010.

Of the 2,813 surveys started, 2,532 were completed, for a completion rate of 90%! Thank you to everyone who participated.

Or if you’d like to do your own analysis you can download the survey results.

Now, for some interesting facts ripped from the headlines:

Job Satisfaction

ReadWriteWeb reported that according to a Gartner analyst, more than 1/3 of IT professionals are interested in switching jobs.

According to our poll, users were slightly more satisfied with 31.6% of respondents indicating job satisfaction of “FML”, “I’m not happy in my job”, and “It pays the bills”. On a good note, the remaining 68.4% of respondents were satisfied with their jobs responding “So happy it hurts” and “I enjoy going to work”.

Smart Phone Wars

The Android community reported on January 7 that in of all US Smartphone Subscribers in November 2010, 26% used Android, 25% iPhone, and majority 33.5% BlackBerry. November 2010 marked the first month that Android beat the iPhone in total number of users.

Our results looked slightly different, with iPhone and Android having the biggest pieces of the pie. In fact, iPhone beat out Android by about 4 percentage points — 34.3% iPhone and 30.4% Android. BlackBerry use within our community came in at dead last with 6.9% of users, a drastic contrast from the majority 33.5% of all smartphone subscribers.

If you’re looking to work in this exciting battlefield, we have listings for both iOS and Android developers.

Start-Ups

Especially in New York City, technical positions are in high demand at start-ups. In our survey, the majority of the respondents, 28.2%, work at a start-up – classified by us as 1-25 employees. Of those working at a start-up, the projects and job roles varied from the overall average. Web Application Developer was still the most popular job role, but by an even larger margin. 50.6% of those in start-ups work as a Web Application Developer as compared to 40.3% on average. Web platform is still the leading development project, but also at a larger percentage for start-ups — 41.8% as compared to the average 33.3%.