Basically I worked as a junior developer for a few months before starting my Masters. Now I’m about to go back into tech, right when AI is changing what a junior dev even does. So I wanted to know who is actually struggling in this industry, and if people like me are walking into the worst of it.
I used the Stack Overflow Developer Survey from 2024 and 2025. That’s about 29,126 developers in 2024 and 26,670 in 2025 who rated how satisfied they are in their current job from 0 to 10. The survey doesn’t measure burnout directly. So I use low job satisfaction (a score of 0 to 4) as the warning sign, and I say “unhappy” to mean that.
All charts are interactive. Hover for exact numbers and sample sizes, and click legend items to switch groups on or off.
Text summary: in every country with 100+ respondents, between about 4% and 34% of developers rate their job 4 or less. Most countries sit somewhere between 5% and 15%. Grey countries had fewer than 100 respondents. The colour scale tops out at 25%, so hover for exact values.
Across all developers it was 12.5% in 2024 and 9.2% in 2025. Move the slider and the map shifts a bit, but there’s no country where nobody is unhappy. India, where I’m from, went from 13.6% to 9.9%. Australia, where I live now, went from 12.3% to 6.8%. So where you work explains some of it, but most countries land in a similar range. The better question is who is unhappy.
Narrative technique: this is the hook and it sets up the question for the rest of the story (structure). The year slider is the interactivity, and both years use the same colour scale so the change is honest.
Text summary: the share of unhappy developers goes down steadily as experience goes up, in both years. Developers with 0 to 2 years of experience are the most likely to be unhappy, and those with 21+ years are the least likely.
The pattern is the same in both years. The first few years are the roughest, then it slowly gets better. Use the dropdown to pick a country. The lines get noisier because the samples are smaller, but the downward slope shows up almost everywhere, including India.
One thing to be careful about: 2025 is lower overall, but the 2025 sample also has more experienced people in it. That’s why I compare experience groups to each other and not just the two years.
Narrative technique: the country dropdown is purposeful interactivity, because it lets you check whether the pattern holds where you are. Showing both years together is the comparison that rules out “it’s just a bad year”.
Text summary: in both years, the darkest cells are in the bottom row (bottom third of pay for their country), mostly in the early-career columns. Moving up to the top third of pay, or gaining experience, both go with lower shares of unhappy developers.
I ranked everyone’s pay inside their own country, because a low salary in US dollars mostly just means you live somewhere cheaper. Even then, the bottom third of pay is the unhappiest row at almost every stage. And juniors are mostly in that row: 60% of juniors in 2024 and 66% in 2025 were in the bottom third of pay for their country. So for people starting out, the low pay and the early-career stage stack on top of each other.
Narrative technique: the darkest cells along the bottom row are where the reader’s eye goes first (highlighting). Each cell is also labelled with its number, so the message doesn’t depend on reading colour.
Text summary: at every experience level and in both years, developers who say AI is a threat to their job are the most likely to be unhappy, usually close to double the “No” group. The gap is biggest for the most junior developers in 2024.
Honestly this was the part I expected least. People who see AI as a threat to their own job are the unhappiest group at every experience level. That group also got bigger, from 2,380 people (10.7%) in 2024 to 3,877 (14.6%) in 2025. This doesn’t prove that worrying about AI causes unhappiness. Unhappy people might just be more worried in general. But for juniors, whose entry-level tasks are exactly what AI tools now do, it’s one more weight on an already rough start.
Narrative technique: orange for “Yes” against blue for “No”, with “Not sure” greyed out so it fades back (highlighting). This chart is the turn in the story (transition), from the old problems (experience, pay) to the new one (AI).
Text summary: among junior developers, the biggest gap in both years is between those who see AI as a threat to their job and those who don’t. Pay (bottom vs top third in their country) and work setup (in-person vs remote) also show clear gaps, and the worse-off side is always above the junior average.
This is the whole story in one chart. It’s only juniors, the group that came out worst in chart 2. Each line is the gap between the worse-off and better-off juniors on one thing. The longest gap is AI worry in both years. Pay and work setup come next, and they swap places between 2024 and 2025. Use the buttons to switch years.
So my answer to my own question is yes. People starting out in tech right now are the most likely to be unhappy. And it’s not just being junior. It’s junior plus low pay, plus less flexibility, plus worrying about AI. None of these charts prove cause and effect. But if I were picking my first job back in tech, these are the three things I’d look at.
Narrative technique: this is the ending, so it pulls the earlier charts together into one takeaway (messaging). The titles and the “All juniors” reference line tell the reader what to compare without needing a legend lesson.
survey_results_public.csv from each year directly.
Nothing is typed in by hand.Alan, B. (2024). Stack Overflow annual developer survey 2024 [Data set]. Kaggle. https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/berkayalan/stack-overflow-annual-developer-survey-2024
aliaslam25. (2025). Stack Overflow developer survey 2025 [Data set]. Kaggle. https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/aliaslam25/stack-overflow-developer-survey-2025
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Stack Overflow. (2024). Stack Overflow developer survey 2024 [Data set]. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/
Stack Overflow. (2025). Stack Overflow developer survey 2025 [Data set]. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/
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I used Claude (Anthropic, 2026) to help shortlist possible topics, check the survey columns and whether the two years could be compared, and write and debug the R code for the charts. I picked the topic and the personal angle, decided what the story should say, and checked every chart and number myself.