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The core goal of Stack Exchange is education. Everything we build is geared toward helping people learn from one another — not just the nuts and bolts of their profession or passion, but the universal skills of how to better communicate and learn. As we’ve grown as a company, we’ve benefited from many resources to assist in educating developers out of our office space, including hosting local meetups and partnering with the Flatiron School and Fog Creek for a mentorship program.

Today, we’re excited to announce our partnership with the New York City Tech Talent Pipeline, Mayor de Blasio’s new initiative designed to increase the number of qualified candidates for open tech positions in New York City.

That’s nice. But how?

The city has brought together a number of major companies that hire developers in NYC and asked us to do two things:

1. Join a committee designed to help the city identify ways it can use its resources to attack the problem more broadly (through the education system, etc.), and
2. Implement programs we can run, possibly with the help and support of other awesome like-minded tech companies in the city.

On the first point, we’re excited that our VP of Engineering, David Fullerton, will be sitting in on quarterly meetings with other tech industry leaders convened by Mayor de Blasio, where we hope we can help to represent the developer voice and to share what skills and technologies we know are most in-demand.

For the second, we’ve already brought in a bunch of (awesome) NYC companies — including Trello, Kickstarter, Foursquare, Tumblr, and Control Group — who will build and teach a new curriculum of programmer “soft skills” to graduates of public computer science programs in New York (starting with the CUNY system) that will better equip them as professional developers.

The goal is to make sure that anyone in this city with a passion for technology, no matter who they are or what neighborhood they grew up in, can get the mentoring, training, and support they need to succeed as a developer.

Why are we doing this?

As you probably know, there’s a vast disparity between open tech jobs and qualified developers in today’s market. At last count, there are nearly 5 job openings for every one job-seeking developer. With New York City’s current tech job count teetering at around 300,000 job openings, we need to increase the number of good candidates or a lot of  websites aren’t going to get built. The city needs developers. And this happens to be an area that we know a thing or two about. Our goal is to support and empower developers, no matter where they may be in their programming careers. Despite our well-known belief in remote work, our founder has always been a particular proponent of building great places in New  York for those developers who do want to work in a more communal space. Like many tech companies, we’ve been giving a lot of thought to how we can promote inclusion, both internally and in the tech community as a whole. We don’t pretend to have figured it all out, but this is just one thing we’re excited to share. As always, we welcome any ideas you may have.

When we launched Careers 2.0 back in 2011, we set out with a goal: make the job search process better for the millions of programmers who visit our site every month. Part of achieving this goal is educating employers about what you want from them. In the past, our annual user survey helped us help companies change the way they found and hired programmers, while Joel’s book on how to find the best technical talent and his talk on how to stand out and attract top talent are a few other examples of how we’ve worked to educate tech companies on what you really want.

Today, we’re taking this one step further:

Announcing the Employer Resource Center on Careers 2.0

Employers are having a really hard time getting programmers to work for them — hardly a day goes by without another article, blog post or Tweet attesting to this. A study last year found that as many as 93% of employers find a disparity between the technical skills required and the level of the talent they’re able to find while recruiting. As a result, talented programmers are in incredibly high demand, putting you in a position to demand the best jobs, perks, and benefits.

In the Employer Resource Center, we offer advice on best practices, recruitment news and trends, case studies and product guides to help employers with developer hiring. We’ll be updating the content regularly (mostly via the new Careers 2.0 blog), so check back often! If you have any tips you think employers should know about hiring developers, please leave a note in the comments below.

In December, we launched our 3^rd annual Stack Overflow Annual User Survey to learn more about our site demographics and user trends throughout 2012. Compared to last year, we received an even larger sample size this year with almost 10,000 respondents!

Here are a few larger trends we’ve observed over the past three years:

You like us…you really like us!

Since 2009, site traffic to Stack Overflow has grown by a whopping 261.7%! As if this weren’t enough, we’re also now the 86^th largest global site, according to Alexa. Our crazy goal of breaking into the top 50 is looking less crazy!

Mobile is on the move.

No real surprise here, but of the mobile family, the number of users who own Android devices increased 29.2% from 2010 to 2012—a bigger increase than owners of iPhones and iPads combined. Despite the rising mobile trend, we were surprised to learn that only 7.7% of you are employed as mobile apps developers and 51.8% of companies still don’t have a mobile app.

You’re getting happier at work.

Since 2010, we’ve seen a 2.2% uptick in workplace satisfaction, so 70% of you are happy in your current jobs. We’re not going to point fingers or anything, but we hope there may be some causation for those of you who found your current job from among the 10,000+ roles that were posted on Careers 2.0 last year.

Since we now have three years’ worth of data, we wanted to put together something a little special for this year’s overview, so check out the infographic below that our designer created to highlight some of our key findings.

In our effort to make all information publicly available, here is a basic report of the results or if you’d prefer to play around with the data yourself, download the survey results.

UPDATED: Check out our European version of the infographic here.

After months of work from our dev team, last week marked the official launch of our first localized site with Careers 2.0 in German. We celebrated the occasion in style on December 5 with a blow-out party at Betahaus in Berlin complete with product demos, free food, free t-shirts, oh, and German beer of course.

(More pictures here.)

But why Germany? Well, aside from the fact that it gave us a great excuse to make these really cool t-shirts, we have a few other pretty good reasons for this expansion:

• Germans are the largest non-English-speaking group of Stack Overflow users in Europe
  To date, visitors from Germany represent the fourth largest global audience who visit Stack Overflow on a monthly basis—making this the largest non-English speaking European userbase. And even though many of these users do speak English (at least for programming), employers or hiring managers who don’t speak English can’t use the Careers 2.0 global site as easily as fluent English speakers. With this localization, we hope to bring Careers 2.0 to everyone on both sides of the hiring equation.
• Better exposure for our German candidates

  We have more than 3,600 German candidate profiles in our Careers 2.0 database, and in a job market where German tech hiring needs have more than doubled in the past three years, programmer jobs are in hot demand. (In fact, a couple of guys even showed up to our launch party wearing QR code t-shirts in their search for a developer.) Making a German site will hopefully give these candidates even more exposure to all great local companies—not just those who have a hiring manager who speaks English.

• Germany’s tech market has been growing exponentially

  It’s been estimated that 11 billion Euros are lost in possible output because German companies can’t hire enough engineers. And as the world’s largest resource for programmers (Google analytics counted more than 30 million unique visitors last month!), we hope to help solve that problem by connecting companies with the software developers they need.

• It was a good excuse for us to start accepting Euros

  If you log onto careers.stackoverflow.com/de, you’ll be prompted to pay for your job listings in Euros. If you’ve ever tried to buy something on a site in a foreign currency, you know what a pain it can be to deal with the exchange rates and credit card fees. Now we’re just more accessible for a lot more people. (We’re also now accepting the British Pound on the UK site.)

All in all, it’s been a great project for our team (though also a difficult one, as you’ll hear about in a future blog post) and localizing the site was an important way for us to support the German-speaking community on Stack Overflow.  As always, we’re open to hearing your feedback, so let us know what you think.

P.S. We know we missed some things, so if you speak German, feel free to check out the site and let us know what we still need to fix.

Berlin, wir kommen!

It’s our last party of the year, and this time, we’re heading to Germany to meet and mingle with the Stack Overflow community! As you may have noticed, we’ve been tearing up Denver this year with our opening reception of our new office and then again during Denver Startup Week last month. So we thought it was about time to bring the party to Europe.

If you’re in or around Berlin on Dec. 5 (or just want to book a last-minute trip), come clink glasses with us at Betahaus (Prinzessinnenstraße 19-20) from 5:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. While there, we’ll also be launching our first official translation of Careers 2.0 for German candidates and employers.

Join us for a fun night where you can…

• Meet other Stack Overflow users and pick the brains of our awesome developers
• Sit in on educational talks and demonstrations from our devs as they discuss how they localized Careers 2.0 for a German audience (you can check out a preview at careers.stackoverflow.com/de)
• Enjoy free food and drinks all night
• Rock out to tunes provided by SoundCloud’s DJs

Hope to see you there!

Let us know you’re coming – RSVP by December 1