2020: Developers & their job
A data-based approach using Stack Overflow’s developer survey data from 2020.
Introduction
In today’s world, developer is not an uncommon profession anymore. Code builds the simple yet complex world of the Internet, and more and more people are joining the team of developers.
Whether you are a student growing up in the field or a newcomer looking for a career change into the world of code, the job of a developer is always a hot topic to be discussed. Therefore, I used data from Stackoverflow’s 2020 Annual Developer Survey, to take a closer look at this subject.
The survey data covers 64,000 reviews from 213 countries and territories. The survey aims to understand multiple aspects of jobs related to software development and data analytics. There were more than 150 questions as a part of the survey, including:
What was your primary field of study?
What industry or industries do you work in?
How satisfied are you with your current job?
…
Through this data, we can find answers to our wondering about the job of a developer, so that we can better understand the industry and plan our career.
In this article, I will first examine the factors that developers consider when choosing a career. Next, I’ll explore information about their educational background, programming languages, and more, using the career of a data scientist as an example. Finally, we’ll uncover the mystery of developers working overtime.
Ⅰ. Important factors of career choosing
This comes from the following question in the survey:
Imagine that you are deciding between two job offers with the same compensation, benefits, and location. Which 3 are MOST important to you?
Here you can see in descending order the number of people that selected particular factors as being important when choosing a job.
Obviously, Languages, frameworks and other technologies that developer uses is the most common factor that influences job selection. The next three factors, which are also very frequent, are related to work environment and development opportunities. In contrast, the political and economic macro environment of a company, like diversity, financial performance or funding status, is less important in a developer’s career choice.
Ⅱ. Where do data scientists come from and where do they go? What are their common programming languages?
Degree of data scientists :
From the figure above, a dominant number of computer science related graduates can be seen in the domain of data science. And most of the people who switch into data science come from engineering, mathematics and statistics, and the natural sciences.
In addition, more than 85% of data scientists have higher education (bachelor’s and higher), with the largest number of people with a master’s degree (38%).
Moving on to the programming languages commonly used by data scientists, the statistics are as follows:
The most used languages are Python, C, Java and SQL in descending order. It is worth noting that front-end languages like JavaScript and HTML/CSS are also used relatively often in the work of data scientists.
Ⅲ. Developer’s working overtime
Finally, I would like to know about the situation of developers working overtime. Do programmers really work overtime a lot? Are there certain types of occupations that developers are more likely to face overtime?
To see this more closely, I would like to present the results of the visualization in the form of a heat map. In the graph, the lighter the color, the greater the percentage.
It’s a sad conclusion that frequent overtime is always more common for developers, regardless of their specific profession. And it’s easy to see that managers and salespeople are the most likely victims of frequent overtime, while game and graphics developers have the most comfortable schedules in comparison.
Conclusion
In this article, we took a look at some faces about developers and their job according to Stack Overflow 2020 survey data
- When choosing a career, developers place a high value on programming language match and work environment, excluding salary and geographical factors
- The vast majority of data scientists, for example, are highly educated and come from computer-related fields
- Overtime seems to be a common occurrence for developers, especially managers and salespeople
The findings here are observational, not the result of a formal study. But our exploration didn’t stop there.
Do you find some commonalities in these conclusions? Are there any other facts you want to know? …
Please feel free to leave your opinion in the comment!
Also, if you are interested in the dataset, you can check it out by clicking here. For the images in this article and their corresponding python code, you can check them out in my github page.
