Go has earned companies’ trust: More developers use it at work now, survey shows

What a difference a year makes! Last year, Go was more of a “free time” programming language and now it is slowly gaining companies’ trust — well, enough to push the numbers (of people who use it at work) up.

For the first time, the number of survey respondents who say they are paid to write Go is higher than the number of people who say they program in it outside of work. According to the survey results, “this indicates a significant shift in Go’s user base and in its acceptance by companies for professional software development.”

Source: Go 2017 Survey Results

Source: Go 2017 Survey Results

Go: One of the fastest-growing skills, according to Upwork

There might be another explanation as to why more people are programming in Go at work. Upwork, the largest global freelancing website, recently released its newest quarterly index of the hottest skills in the U.S. freelance job market and Go is in Top 5.

We talked with Shoshana Deutschkron, VP of Communications & Brand for Upwork about Go’s growth and found that this young language “saw increasing growth throughout 2017, and that accelerated even more in Q4.”

Freelancers — who are twice as likely to proactively pursue a skills-related education than non-freelancers, according to Freelancing in America — are becoming experts in [Go]. HackerRank identified Go as one of the languages developers are planning to learn next in its new 2018 Developer Skills Report, and Stack Overflow also named it one of its fastest-growing programming languages. 

 — Shoshana Deutschkron, Upwork

Shoshana also said “Go is seen as simple and increasingly being used to create smart contracts in building blockchain, which may have played a role in its recent demand surge.” This is one was to explain its growth!

SEE ALSO: Go is a ‘free time’ programming language, survey shows

“Go is getting a lot of traction on DevOps teams”

However, Go’s affiliation with blockchain is not the only reason why this young language is gaining momentum. According to Alvaro Oliveira, VP of Talent Operations at Toptal, Go is getting a lot of traction on DevOps teams.

As you implement DevOps into a workflow that is not optimized for it, you might end up leveraging languages that naturally work well for the problem of creating tools used to connect different parts of the existing workflow and automating it. Javascript has been a big player in the space since the creation of Node.js and more recently a language that is getting a lot of traction on DevOps teams is Go. We also have some domain-specific languages and tools that were built with DevOps in mind like Chef and Puppet.

— Alvaro Oliveira, Toptal

Read the entire interview here. 

Go 2017 survey highlights

Another highlight of this year’s survey is the fact that the No.1 use of Go right now is writing API/RPC services. Last year, the No.1 spot was occupied by writing CLI tools in Go. As more companies adopt this language, the Go team expects both uses to continue to grow.

The findings also show that Go programmers still prefer Go and “as more time passes, Go users are deepening their experience in Go.”

Source: Go 2017 Survey Results

Source: Go 2017 Survey Results