The Survey Says…!

If you are reading that headline in Richard Dawson’s voice, you just dated yourself. We should grab a drink a lament the passing of the golden age of game shows!

Every year around now, Stack Overflow releases their annual developer survey. I love this survey- where else can you get data from over 100,000 developers about their viewpoints on trends, jobs, and more? With the extreme shortages in qualified IT workers, there is a lot to learn from this survey, and anyone involved on the technical, HR, or managerial side should find some things to take away from it. As the founder of a company focused on IT training, I’d like to pull out the most interesting tidbits from a training and staff development perspective.

TLDR; To attract and retain developers you need to provide professional development opportunities and build good teams within a solid culture.

One thing we’ve really focused on at DriveIT is the concept of lifelong learning, career pathways, and growth in both hard and soft skills. The survey backs up that this is the right path for increasing retention and employee satisfaction, with only 19% of respondents saying they expect to be doing the same work in 5 years. For ambitious employees, there are plenty of opportunities out there and they know it, with a whopping 75% of developers actively looking for or open to hearing about new opportunities. On top of this, 56% of developers in the survey changed jobs within the last 2 years. Considering that the cost to replace these professionals has been documented as high as 150% of annual salary, this is a huge cost of doing business! Increasing retention of technical workers in this competitive environment should be a top goal for any company that relies on a technical workforce.

An interesting survey question that appeared this year was asking developers to rate parts of the job search process as annoying, exhausting, interesting, or exciting. The top concepts that generated excitement were the words “new”, “opportunity”, “company”, and “people”. I can assure you from my technical peer group that the best way to pique our interest is to talk about new opportunities at companies with great people. Follow-up questions reinforce this point as three of the top four highest priority assessments for a job involve the technology they’ll work with, opportunity for professional development, and the company culture. The top assessment was compensation, but I know very few skilled developers that aren’t being well paid.

I’ll give women their own paragraph. For women, compensation as a job evaluation metric finished 4th for women, behind culture, professional development, and technology. So, if you want to attract more women to your team, pay close attention to your culture and make sure you have great opportunities for professional development. For both men and women, professional development opportunities was a top two criteria, so if your organization lacks quality opportunities for professional development we should talk!

On the language front, we see JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL, Java, Python, and C# as the most popular language, all of which we teach at DriveIT. Python is the fastest growing major programming language, and also finished #1 on the most wanted survey question, so we expect those workouts to fill quickly. On the tools and frameworks front we see Node, Angular, React, .NET Core, and Spring in the top fronts, again, all things we teach at DriveIT, so we’re on track there. On the database side I was surprised that Oracle was so low. MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB dominate the space. However, in the wanted question Elasticsearch finished near the top.

Although the data in the survey is global, it aligned very well with other data we've seen come out of NEO from groups like Conxus as well as data DriveIT has gathered from incumbent workers and regional employers. If you're a company that cares about providing top tier professional development pathways for your staff, DriveIT has it in a box.