Building a curriculum for industry - Part 2

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In the last post of the series, we covered the People asks from Engineering Managers and Heads of Engineering for an industry relevant Junior curriculum.

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In this post we will dig into Tech and Process.? As a caveat, our sample set of 100 leaders isn't intended to be a reflection of the entire industry, it carries bias from our network but it does still provide some valuable insights.

The most requested languages:

1. Typescript
2. C#
3. Python
4. Java

(We will ignore the one person that selected GO.)

Cloud:

1. AWS
2. Azure
3. GCP (a distant third)

Technical Practices and Technologies:

1. CI/CD
2. Branching strategies
3. Observability
4. Docker/Containers
5. Terraform

Key Processes:

1. Effective Retrospectives
2. Stand-ups
3. 3 amigos
4. Incident awareness

With a slightly bigger sample set of 4,905 responses, the Stack Overflow Survey shows HTML/CSS and JavaScript leading the way.

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A crude search on LinkedIn shows around 1 million results compared to over 10 million for Software Engineers/Developers (backend developers don't really call themselves backend developers.)

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Depending on the complexity and nature of the product it's also not uncommon for a team/squad to consist of more backend developers to frontend developers (We are desperately trying to avoid re-opening the Full Stack Developer debate!)

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Again, none of this is an exact science but given our collective experiences and local demand we have taken the decision for SummitToTech to buck the trend for junior talent pipelines and focus almost exclusively on backend languages, primarily TypeScript and .NET/Java. This will allow more time to focus on SOLID, TDD with a sprinkling of GangOf4 and UML.

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The Agile Manifesto hits 23 years old this year, all tech Leaders expressed concerns with the regression and understanding of basic agile principles in the industry with 69% asking for foundational knowledge of Kanban, XP and Scrum.? It's fair to say organisations may have their own versions of agile but we want to embed a continuous improvement mindset to avoid cargo cult practices.

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SQL is still going strong with 84% of correspondents considering queries and joins a must.? XML and JSON also notable asks.

It's worth remembering this is still a Junior curriculum, our goal is provide a general awareness of industry trends and best practice.

We want this to be a curriculum for industry so we do intend to make our curriculum repo available to our industry partners to fork and contribute.

If you are interested in our backend, AWS curriculum leave a message below or send a DM.

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