content: survey 2017 results

Change-Id: I00c17fd14b10f3c1b652bc0bf381a294f7b2cda9
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/95855
Reviewed-by: Cassandra Salisbury <cls@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Sameer Ajmani <sameer@golang.org>

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+Go 2017 Survey Results
+26 Feb 2018
+Tags: survey, community
+
+Steve Francia
+spf@golang.org
+
+* Thank you
+
+This post summarizes the result of our 2017 user survey along with commentary
+and insights. It also draws key comparisons between the results of the 2016 and
+2017 survey.
+
+This year we had 6,173 survey respondents, 70% more than the 3,595 we had in the
+[[https://blog.golang.org/survey2016-results][Go 2016 User Survey]]. In
+addition, it also had a slightly higher completion rate (84% → 87%) and a
+higher response rate to most of the questions. We believe that survey length is
+the main cause of this improvement as the 2017 survey was shortened in response
+to feedback that the 2016 survey was too long.
+
+We are grateful to everyone who provided their feedback through the survey to
+help shape the future of Go.
+
+* Programming background
+
+For the first time, more survey respondents say they are paid to write Go
+than say they write it outside work. This indicates a significant shift in
+Go's user base and in its acceptance by companies for professional software
+development.
+
+The areas people who responded to the survey work in is mostly consistent with
+last year, however, mobile and desktop applications have fallen significantly.
+
+Another important shift: the #1 use of Go is now writing API/RPC services (65%,
+up 5% over 2016), taking over the top spot from writing CLI tools in Go (63%).
+Both take full advantage of Go's distinguishing features and are key elements of
+modern cloud computing. As more companies adopt Go, we expect these two uses
+of Go to continue to thrive.
+
+Most of the metrics reaffirm things we have learned in prior years. Go
+programmers still overwhelmingly prefer Go. As more time passes Go users are
+deepening their experience in Go. While Go has increased its lead among Go
+developers, the order of language rankings remains quite consistent with last
+year.
+
+.html survey2017/background.html
+
+* Go usage
+
+In nearly every question around the usage and perception of Go, Go has
+demonstrated improvement over our prior survey. Users are happier using Go, and
+a greater percentage prefer using Go for their next project.
+
+When asked about the biggest challenges to their own personal use of Go, users
+clearly conveyed that lack of dependency management and lack of generics were
+their two biggest issues, consistent with 2016. In 2017 we laid a foundation to
+be able to address these issues. We improved our proposal and development
+process with the addition of
+[[https://golang.org/wiki/ExperienceReports][Experience Reports]] which is
+enabling the project to gather and obtain feedback critical to making these
+significant changes. We also made
+[[https://golang.org/doc/go1.10#build][sigificant changes]] under the hood in
+how Go obtains, and builds packages. This is foundational work essential to
+addressing our dependency management needs.
+
+These two issues will continue to be a major focus of the project through 2018.
+
+In this section we asked two new questions. Both center around what
+developers are doing with Go in a more granular way than we've previously asked.
+We hope this data will provide insights for the Go project and ecosystem.
+
+Since last year there has been an increase of the percentage of people who
+identified "Go lacks critical features" as the reason they don't use Go more and
+a decreased percentage who identified "Go not being an appropriate fit". Other
+than these changes, the list remains consistent with last year.
+
+
+.html survey2017/usage.html
+
+* Development and deployment
+
+We asked programmers which operating systems they develop Go on; the ratios of
+their responses remain consistent with last year. 64% of respondents say
+they use Linux, 49% use MacOS, and 18% use Windows, with multiple choices
+allowed.
+
+Continuing its explosive growth, VSCode is now the most popular editor among
+Gophers. IntelliJ/GoLand also saw significant increase in usage. These largely
+came at the expense of Atom and Submlime Text which saw relative usage drops.
+This question had a 6% higher response rate from last year.
+
+Survey respondents demonstrated significantly higher satisfaction with Go
+support in their editors over 2016 with the ratio of satisfied to dissatisfied
+doubling (9:1 → 18:1). Thank you to everyone who worked on Go editor support
+for all your hard work.
+
+Go deployment is roughly evenly split between privately managed servers and
+hosted cloud servers. For Go applications, Google Cloud services saw significant
+increase over 2016. For Non-Go applications, AWS Lambda saw the largest increase in use.
+
+.html survey2017/dev.html
+
+* Working Effectively
+
+We asked how strongly people agreed or disagreed with various statements about
+Go. All questions are repeated from last year with the addition of one new
+question which we introduced to add further clarifaction around how users are
+able to both find and *use* Go libraries.
+
+All responses either indicated a small improvement or are comparable to 2016.
+
+As in 2016, the most commonly requested missing library for Go is one for
+writing GUIs though the demand is not as pronounced as last year. No other
+missing library registered a significant number of responses.
+
+The primary sources for finding answers to Go questions are the Go web site,
+Stack Overflow, and reading source code directly. Stack Overflow showed a small
+increase from usage over last year.
+
+The primary sources for Go news are still the Go blog, Reddit’s /r/golang and
+Twitter; like last year, there may be some bias here since these are also how
+the survey was announced.
+
+.html survey2017/effective.html
+
+* The Go Project
+
+59% of respondents expressed interest in contributing in some way to the Go
+community and projects, up from 55% last year. Respondents also indicated that
+they felt much more welcome to contribute than in 2016. Unfortunately,
+respondents indicated only a very tiny improvement in understanding how to
+contribute. We will be actively working with the community and its leaders
+to make this a more accessible process.
+
+Respondents showed an increase in agreement that they are confident in the
+leadership of the Go project (9:1 → 11:1). They also showed a small increase in
+agreement that the project leadership understands their needs (2.6:1 → 2.8:1)
+and in agreement that they feel comfortable approaching project leadership with
+questions and feedback (2.2:1 → 2.4:1). While improvements were made, this
+continues to be an area of focus for the project and its leadership going
+forward. We will continue to work to improve our understanding of user needs and
+approachability.
+
+We tried some [[https://blog.golang.org/8years#TOC_1.3.][new ways]] to engage
+with users in 2017 and while progress was made, we are still working on making these
+solutions scalable for our growing community.
+
+.html survey2017/project.html
+
+* Community
+
+At the end of the survey, we asked some demographic questions.
+
+The country distribution of responses is largely similar to last year with minor
+fluctuations. Like last year, the distribution of countries is similar to the
+visits to golang.org, though some Asian countries remain under-represented in
+the survey.
+
+Perhaps the most significant improvement over 2016 came from the question which
+asked to what degree do respondents agreed with the statement, "I feel welcome
+in the Go community". Last year the agreement to disagreement ratio was 15:1. In
+2017 this ratio nearly doubled to 25:1.
+
+An important part of a community is making everyone feel welcome, especially
+people from under-represented demographics. We asked an optional question about
+identification across a few underrepresented groups. We had a 4% increase in
+response rate over last year. The percentage of each underrepresented group
+increased over 2016, some quite significantly.
+
+Like last year, we took the results of the statement “I feel welcome in the Go
+community” and broke them down by responses to the various underrepresented
+categories. Like the whole, most of the respondents who identified as
+underrepresented also felt significantly more welcome in the Go community than
+in 2016. Respondents who identified as a woman showed the most significant
+improvement with an increase of over 400% in the ratio of agree:disagree to this
+statement (3:1 → 13:1). People who identified as ethnically or racially
+underrepresented had an increase of over 250% (7:1 → 18:1). Like last year,
+those who identified as not underrepresented still had a much higher percentage
+of agreement to this statement than those identifying from underrepresented
+groups.
+
+We are encouraged by this progress and hope that the momentum continues.
+
+The final question on the survey was just for fun: what’s your favorite Go
+keyword? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most popular response was `go`, followed by
+`defer`, `func`, `interface`, and `select`, unchanged from last year.
+
+.html survey2017/community.html
+
+Finally, on behalf of the entire Go project, we are grateful for everyone who
+has contributed to our project, whether by being a part of our great community,
+by taking this survey or by taking an interest in Go.
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