Dive Brief:
- Today’s average developer is white, male, has only a few years of work experience, and likes the option to work from home, according to Stack Overflow's 2017 developer survey.
- More than half of the 64,000 developers that responded to the survey indicated remote options were a top priority when considering a new job. Nearly 64% reported working remotely at least one day a month, and 11% say they’re full-time remote, or nearly fulltime.
- Full-stack web developers were the top programmer occupation at 63.7%, followed by back-end web developers at 24.4%, the survey found.
Dive Insight:
The Stack Overflow survey provides a look at today’s developers and programmers. It is widely known technology is a male-dominated field, but if anyone doubts the shortage of women in computing occupations, just take a look at this survey. Stack Overflow found women make up just a fraction of developers. Only about 7.6% of the developers are women, down from 12% last year.
Today’s developers also don’t have a lot of formal work experience. Most are fairly new in the workforce, with 12.9% saying they have coded professionally for just one or two years. That’s an important thing for businesses to note. Asking for five years of work experience on a programmer job description may not garner the widest selection of candidates. And some programming languages are just reaching maturity in the enterprise, so it is unlikely a candidate has used them for a number of years.
Most respondents also indicated they have a four-year degree, though most also said they don’t believe a formal degree is necessary for success as a programmer. According to the survey, "90% of developers overall consider themselves at least somewhat self-taught: a formal degree is only one aspect of their education, and so much of their practical day-to-day work depends on their company’s individual tech stack decisions."
