We all know a friend who works in tech. And they are usually doing quite well for themselves, probably started coding since the beginning of time and often seem to be spoilt with career choices. Or are they? Here are some common myths about careers in tech and how they hold up against data. The data used here comes from a developer survey by , a website that a of developers frequent regularly. It’s a pretty comprehensive survey, with more than a hundred thousand responses from all over the world. Let’s get started! StackOverflow 1. You either have to have a computer science college degree and/or be a coding genius from an early age to be in tech Enrolment in computer science majors have spiked in in the recent years all across the globe. At the same time, there’s tons of bootcamps everywhere, promising you to get in the field in just a few months, at a fraction of the cost of college. But what kind of education do you really need to become a software developer? Let’s look at our respondents to get a feel what kind of educational background they come from. numbers mushrooming It looks like a huge portion of the developers in the survey at least have a . Looking at the types of major for their bachelors, it’s not surprising that most of them come from a background. So what about those from other educational backgrounds? It’s quite interesting to note that, of the developers only have a secondary . And even a higher percentage, of developers are college dropouts. bachelors degree computer science/engineering 9.5% school education 12.4% Let’s explore the bootcamp avenue, and find out how long it typically takes to get a job after graduating: The percentage of people responding to the bootcamp question was a rather low , and one of the interesting observations that can be made is almost half of them had a full-time developer job when they began the program. But the good news is, almost all of the other half found jobs within of graduating. 6% already 6 months Analyzing the largest developer age groups in our survey, the age bracket, a quarter of them started coding between ago. Since we don’t know the exact age, making some assumptions, in the worst case scenario, we can safely say at least a of them did not start coding till they were . 25–34 years 6–8 years quarter 17 percent of them has been coding for , which also facilitates in debunking the theory that you have to be coding since the very early teens. 20% 3–5 years Myth or Fact? Although majority of the developers in the industry hold at least a college degree, there’s still a good chunk of them who don’t. So it’s not entirely true that you have be a CS major or start coding since 10. Myth Verdict: 2. You can easily earn a six figure salary The fascination with earning is also another thing that made jumping into software careers quite lucrative. But exactly how easy is it to make that amount of money? six figures From the plots above, looks like if you are in the US, expecting a 100k is not entirely unreasonable. Adjusting for currency exchange rates, we can see making six figures is still common in other countries like . Canada comes in second at a median of roughly . Australia 85k CAD But how much does the salary vary by the developer type? Or experience? If you are in the US, the distribution of salary across different types of developers are actually quite similar. There is a great deal of overlap between the median salaries of the developer types. For example, and enjoy pretty much the same salaries. mobile developers full-stack developers Things are different down under. Although the medians for the different specializations all hover around a narrow range, the difference is more distinct compared to the US. seem to enjoy the highest median salary amongst the others. slightly Engineering managers When taking experience into matter, we can see a very clear trend towards the median increasing quite steadily with experience. In Australia, the jump seems to be bigger for compared to although they hover around the same range once you reach a of experience. Data Scientist or machine learning specialists back-end developers decade Myth or Fact? If you are in the US, making 100k as a software developer is definitely not an unreasonable expectation. Even in other countries, such as Australia, it’s still common to get paid six figures. Although you might start off with a much lower salary, the data tells us you’ll be making six figures in no time! Fact Verdict: 3. There are more jobs than people out there so software developers can move jobs frequently If there are so many jobs out there, developers probably would be moving from one job to the next whenever they feel like. In order to get an idea of that, let’s take a look at when they last joined a new job: Looks like majority of the developers in the survey have just joined a new company. Does this really prove our theory? Let’s take a look how many of these newly hired developers are already hunting for their next gig: Even though of the newly hired developers are not actively looking, they are to the idea. over half still open Myth or Fact? While a large portion of the developers in this survey seem to have just joined a new role less than a year ago, they are still open to the idea of finding something better. Although this tells us quite a bit about the job searching behaviours of developers, it doesn’t really help us prove that there are more jobs than people out there. Maybe Verdict: 4. Tech is full of men Looks like tech is indeed full of men! Over of the responses in our survey came from men, while women made up for a little less than a and representation of others sum up to a mere . While this is the current situation worldwide, the lack of gender diversity is even more shocking in certain parts of the world. 90% 7% 1.5% In terms of ethnic diversity, out of Canada, United States, United Kingdom and Australia, is leading the pack, followed by Aussie, US and then the UK. Canada While on the topic of diversity, one might wonder if there’s much difference in compensation between genders: To little surprise(unfortunately), there is a difference of almost in median salary between males and females in the United States. We have long way to go in terms of ensuring equal pay amongst genders. $15K Myth or Fact? Men do make up for majority of the developer community around the world. And not only is tech full of men, there’s a significant amount of difference in terms of financial compensation between the genders in countries like the United States. Fact Verdict: If you’re still curious about a career in tech, there’s plenty more to explore! You can head over my repository on GitHub to play around with the data on your own. Alternatively, you can get tons and tons insights from the amazing team at Stack Overflow . here here
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