So, You Want To Be A Developer? Buckle Up

Are you an aspiring developer or engineer who is looking to break into the field? It’s always a hassle to prioritize the things to learn because of a plethora of information available out there. I believe the best way to get insights is to hear directly from people working in the industry.

I derived some insights by doing data analysis on Stack Overflow’s 2019 annual developer survey taken by 90,000 developers from 170 countries. Let’s find answers to some of the questions that might help you get your foot in the industry.

1. What languages and databases should I learn?

Everyone has his/her own preference for languages and databases based on the ease of use, functionality, tech stack at company and use case. However, there are some common languages that are used in almost every company.

JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, Python, and Java are the top five languages used in the industry.

MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite, MongoDB are the top five databases used in the industry.

2. Should I pursue higher education and which subjects should I take?

It’s a well-known fact that you don’t need a degree to break into the field. You can start coding in your room and with plenty of free and paid online tutorials, you can be as good a coder as anyone who joined a degree program. In fact, big companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. don’t care anymore whether you have a degree.

But if you prefer a structured learning experience, then you might want to join a degree program at a University. Let’s see what kind of backgrounds do developers have.

We can see from the above graph that a majority of software developers have some sort of higher education. Around 67% of the respondents have at least a bachelor’s degree, 22.35% of the respondents have a Master’s degree, 12.21% dropped out of college and 4% have a professional or doctoral degree.

Overall, 71% of the respondents have some sort of higher education.

We can see from the above graph that around 82.5% of the software engineers have a degree in Computer Science, Engineering (civil, electrical, mechanical), Information Technology, Web development or design.

3. What does job and career satisfaction look like?

You always want to work in a field that gives you satisfaction and makes you happy about the work you do on a daily basis.

It can be seen that 65% of the respondents are satisfied with their job while 22% of the respondents are dissatisfied with their job. It’s pretty decent as compared to some of the other professions and we have to acknowledge the fact that job satisfaction depends on a lot of factors such as age, compensation, organization size, etc. Let’s see how satisfying is this career choice.

We see that 74% of the people are satisfied with their career and it’s much higher than a lot of other career options.

4. How much will I get paid and what factors influence the pay?

Well, we have identified by now what kind of technology you need to learn, what does the job satisfaction look like and educational background to get into this field, one last item you might be wondering about is how much developers are paid.

As you can imagine, salaries depend on the country you’re working in. I’ve taken the salaries for the top 10 countries based on the highest number of respondents. The above table tells us the median salaries in each country. As expected, the United States pays the highest followed by Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

After running several machine learning models, I found out that Salary depends on the country, years you have been coding, age, hours per week spent, organization size, ethnicity, and job satisfaction.

Interesting Insight — Pay Discrepancy

It seems from the above table that developers in countries such as India, Brazil, the Russian Federation, and Poland are paid very low as compared to those in other countries. What’s going on here?

The problem is that Stack Overflow asked developers for their salaries in local currency and then converted those salaries into US$ as per the exchange rate at that time. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t take the cost of living into account. This explains the huge difference in salaries of developers in different countries.

To get a real picture, I used Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), an approach used by economists to compare different economies. I used the World Bank’s PPP conversion factor for analysis. Let’s see the adjusted salary (in terms of international dollars), a common currency to compare economies after factoring PPP.

It can be seen from the above plot that the highest difference in the salaries after adjusting for the cost of living is seen for Poland, the Russian Federation, India, and Brazil. It’s better to use Adjusted Salary in order to make comparisons.

After adjusting the salary, Poland and the Russian Federation jumped up a few spots and have comparable salaries with other countries while India and Brazil still witness lower salaries.

Conclusion

1. We have found that JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, and Python are the preferred languages. MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite, and MongoDB are the preferred databases for developers.
2. 71% of the respondents have some sort of higher education with a background in Computer Science, Engineering (civil, electrical, mechanical), Information Technology, Web development or design
3. 65% of the respondents are satisfied with their job and 74% of the respondents are satisfied with their career.
4. Finally, the United States pays the highest salary followed by Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Salary depends on the country, years spent in coding, age, workweek hrs, organization size, ethnicity, job satisfaction.

For more details, please feel free to check out the analysis on my Github repository here.

Previously published at https://medium.com/@bismanpreetsingh/so-you-want-to-be-a-developer-1c86e23a3c51