In this short study, I provide a brief overview of where software engineers at big tech companies come from. Specifically, I look at the following:
- Field of study
- Highest degree earned
- Country or countries in which a degree was completed
In this study I focused just on Google because it is well known for hiring top-tier engineers, and can hopefully stand in for other big tech companies, and as further research it would be interesting to actually compare the data across these companies.
Data Sources
In order to obtain data on software engineers at Google, I used Linkedin, and filtered my search to people with the title “Software Engineer” at Google and who work in the US. Specifically I automated this process in order to speed it up and introduce true randomness in terms of who I sampled.
In order to obtain more detailed location data for schools, I used Google.
This resulted in a random sample of N = 250 observations.
1) What are the most common fields of study?
Not surprisingly, the majority study CS. We can see that nearly 50% have a degree in computer science, and that there is a long tail of CS-related degrees such as “Computer Science and Engineering”.
2) What are the most common highest degree earned?
We can see, maybe surprisingly, that a majority have as their highest degree earned a Master’s degree. About 35% have only a bachelor’s degree, while 5% have a PhD.
3. In what countries do people study?
The hypothesis that Google hires foreign people as software engineers was validated in the above plot. It shows that > 70% of software engineers receive a degree in another country, and possibly also receive a degree in the US, whereas the complement ~25% only receive a degree from the US.
We might be interested to know in which countries software engineers at Google are receiving degrees. This plot shows a breakdown of where people are receiving degrees. We can see that 35% of people have received a degree from China, whereas less than 25% of people received a degree from the US. This is followed by India and Canada.
Finally, we can show a pattern in which software engineers at Google receive a degree in another country, followed by a degree in the US.
This plot shows that nearly 60% of software engineers at Google have received a degree in another country followed by the US, whereas about 25% only received a degree in the US, and about 15% only a degree in another country.
Summary
We have shown a few characteristics of software engineers at Google. Namely:
- The majority have at least a Master’s degree
- They study CS
- The vast majority are not American
Further research
It would be interesting to combine data from work experiences with the degree data, however I ran into problems scraping LinkedIn in order to combine these. If we were to do this, I hypothesize that by combining work experiences with degrees, we could show that much more than just 70% of software engineers at Google are not American. It is probably more like 80% who are not American.
It would be interesting to compare these trends to other companies, other industries, and other countries. I hypothesize the following:
- Other industries in the US do not hire >70% of foreign workers
- Other countries do not hire >70% of foreign workers
- This trend of hiring foreign workers is common across all big tech companies in the US
