At DashBouquet we know that it’s crucial that you are keeping up with the pace of business development or you lose. Simple as that. That’ why we try to catch all the surveys dedicated to biggest development trends and do as much research as possible.
We want to share with you a survey that came out recently. It features useful data about developers, including demographics, roles, education and years of coding. We find it quite interesting because it helps to understand more about developers and gives an insight on their needs and industry overall. The data is collected upon the activities and materials that users do and read while on the website.
Before listing the survey data, we first want to share some interesting information that the survey found. Firstly, it discovered an interesting misconception that people have: it implies that developers started programming since they were in school. It turned out to be false as, for example, 36.9% said they learned how to program between one and four years before starting their career.
Another fact (but we can’t say it’s surprising): 53.3% said they value opportunity to work remotely the most if speaking about new job and majority of respondents (63.9%) claimed they work remotely at least once a month.
Developer’s role
Let’s switch to the data now. We are starting with developer’s role and ¾ of respondents said they are web-developers (72%). On second and third places by the number of replies are desktop app developers and mobile developers. QA engineers are in minority with only 3.5%, almost same as machine learning specialists (3.8%).
Developer’s type
Speaking about specific developer’s type, the leader is full stack web developer (63.7%), followed by back-end (24.4%) and front-end (11.9%). It’s interesting that in USA proportion of full stack developers is higher than in Europe, for example. If we have a look at mobile developers, the leading number of respondents is Android (64.8%) and iOS got 57.6%. It’s worth mentioning that in US and UK the number of iOS developers is bigger than in other countries.
Years Spent on Learning Coding
As we mentioned before, there is a misconception that developers start coding since their childhood. However, survey results showed that 12.5% (which is ⅛ of respondents) spent 4 years learning before they became professionals and 13.3% where learning for 4-6 years.
Years of Professional Coding
An interesting discovery is that majority of respondents have been coding professionally for less than 5 years. 12.9% of respondents said they work as professional developers for 1-2 years only and 60% of mobile devs have less than 5 years of experience.
Demographics
Unsurprisingly, but in both categories (professional developers and all respondents) male respondents make 89.5% and female respondents - 7.5%. If we speak about ethnicity, among all respondents 74.4% was white or of European descent, followed by 8.8% of South Asians and 5.6% of Hispanic/Latina. Actually, 2017 is the first year that the survey had a question about ethnicity but it really matters because ethnicity influences many life aspects that should be considered by both clients and peer devs.
Speaking about connection of ethnicity and developer’s role, White or of European descent were more likely to be web developers 72.4% than South Asians or Hispanic respondents who were mostly mobile developers.
Education
76.5% of respondents said they have Bachelor or Master degree and very little percentage claimed they either did not complete any education or have ony middle school education or college.
However, 32% of respondents think that formal education is not very important and this makes sense as 90% of developers think of themselves as “self-taught”. Nevertheless, respondents with degree in computer science or computer engineering claimed that education was very important for them.
In our next post we are going to continue with the survey and will share more “professional” information: programming languages, education methods, etc. Sign up for our newsletter and never miss any IT trends and “hot materials”!
