Boring Tech Is What Matters

Every year, the Stack Overflow Developer Survey gives us an insight into the state of the industry, the tools and tech that developers love or loathe, and what’s changed from the year before.

Some of the headlines that came out of the 2025 results were predictable: JavaScript remains the most used programming language, Python continues to grow in popularity, and so on.

However, some of the biggest surprises shouldn’t really surprise us at all. Browsing the list of popular web frameworks and tech, it’s no great shock to see Node.js at the top, or Meta’s React in second place, but jQuery in third place?! In 2025?!

With this in mind, let’s take a look at the “boring” tech that keeps the web running, and see what’s worth learning in 2025.

The Web is WordPress

Seeing jQuery near the top of the list, you might think it’s having a retro revival, like vinyl records in the 1980s. In reality, its popularity mostly comes from WordPress, which bundles jQuery by default, and WordPress powers a portion of the internet.

Today, WordPress runs over 40% of all websites (more than 541 million in total), a decade ago that number was just 17%. Far from fading, CMSs like WordPress have doubled their share of the web, while the share of sites without a CMS has dropped sharply, which in the age of vibe coding certainly surprised us.

Additionally, WordPress is built in PHP. While jQuery explains its surprise ranking in the survey, PHP is the quiet giant behind it all, one of the most widely used server-side languages, powering WordPress, Drupal, Laravel, Magento, and more. It’s not flashy, but its sheer footprint keeps it relevant (and those who write it, employable).

So should developers learn jQuery or PHP in 2025? Of course one is a full-blown language while the other a library, but if you’re likely to work with WordPress or maintain older projects, the answer is yes — both are boring, but both are everywhere.

Either way, the takeaway is the same: boring tech has staying power.

JavaScript Is Everywhere… And That’s (Mostly) A Good Thing

Whether you use JavaScript regularly or not, there’s a strong likelihood it’s in your developer’s toolbelt somewhere. You might write it everyday, just occasionally, or only know the absolute basics, but there’s a good chance you know some, and for good reason.

JavaScript remains the most popular programming language (despite Python gaining ground every year due to its uses for working with data and AI), but there’s more to it than just being a gateway language for new developers, and one enjoyed for its versatility by more experienced ones. In reality, JavaScript had an advantage from the start, and still does today.

In the mid-90s, Netscape embedded the (then) new language of JavaScript into their browser and other vendors quickly followed suit. This was a game-changer, letting developers add interactivity without plugins or extra downloads.

At a time when the web was mostly static HTML, it had a low barrier-to-entry that made it explode in popularity, and developers ran wild with it, creating advanced websites (for the time) as well as browser-based games and more.

Fast-forward to today, and the JavaScript ecosystem is huge and well-developed, with JS packages, frameworks and libraries for all different aspects of software development.

Each year, new technologies make their way onto the list of popular tech, with the latest hyped-up tech usually skyrocketing in popularity before hitting a plateau or dropping off (see the Oculus Rift or VR/AR more generally, Web3, Blockchain and more).

However, look more closely and you’ll notice that JavaScript tops the chart year after year, alongside HTML and CSS, which while not being programming languages, form the bedrock of the web.

The lesson here is don’t confuse hype with longevity. Hype fades fast, but boring tech sticks around, and JavaScript is living proof.

Employability and the AI Factor

At this point you might be wondering: boring tech is everywhere, but does it actually translate into jobs? And won’t AI replace people who work with it?

The 2025 survey shows over 80% of developers now use AI tools, but nearly half admit they don’t fully trust the results. Code often comes back “almost correct,” leaving humans to debug, refactor, and steer architectural decisions that AI can’t handle.

This matters most with boring tech. In popular languages like JavaScript, you’re not only competing with millions of developers, but also with AI models trained on oceans of publicly available JS code. The result? AI is decent at generating JavaScript, but it still needs skilled humans to make sense of it.

The opposite is true for legacy tech. Languages like COBOL or Assembly are poorly represented in AI training data, meaning tools struggle to handle them.

Julia Kordick, Microsoft Global Black Belt, described how her team migrated a legacy COBOL codebase to the cloud — and found AI offered little help because so few resources existed for the language. The same is true for Assembly, which many consider “outdated,” yet remains essential in areas like video processing with FFmpeg, so much so a course launched in 2025 aiming to teach more devs how to work with Assembly, to help maintain the project.

In other words, the less glamorous the technology, the more likely humans remain indispensable. Enterprise systems built on boring, decades-old code aren’t going anywhere, and neither is the demand for developers who understand them.

The Boring Way Forward

None of this means you shouldn’t learn new frameworks or experiment with the latest hype. But don’t mistake them for your foundation.

While hyped up tech trends and fancy new tools can be fun to experiment — or even build — with, the Stack Overflow survey makes it clear that the technologies with staying power are the boring ones — the ones so universal you forget they’re even there.