How Do YOU Become A Developer?

A data based approach using Stack Overflow’s developer survey data from 2017.

Introduction

There are many competing views when it comes to breaking into a ‘tech job’ , specifically when that job is aimed at the newest and hottest fields : artificial intelligence, data science, autonomous vehicles, or blockchain development, to name a few.

You may have heard statements like “you need to have a PhD to be a Data Scientist” or “you need a degree in Computer Science to become a Software Engineer.”

Now, I have a personal viewpoint on the reality of these statements. You likely have your own viewpoint. But what does the data suggest? The future of what is required to move into developer roles is based on the ideas of those who are currently on the path to be leaders in the space. That is, current developers will determine the truth of these statements into the extended future.

Therefore, I used data from Stackoverflow’s 2017 Annual Developer Survey, to take a closer look at this question.

The survey data covers 64,000 reviews from 213 countries and territories. The survey aims to understand multiple aspects of jobs related to software development and data analytics. There were more than 150 questions as a part of the survey, including:

“Do you program as a hobby or contribute to open source projects?”

“Which of the following best describes the highest level of formal education that you’ve completed?”

“How often do you work from home or remotely?”

Part I: How to Break Into the Field?

But the question I was most interested in was

“Let’s pretend you have a distant cousin. They are 24 years old, have a college degree in a field not related to computer programming, and have been working a non-coding job for the last two years. They want your advice on how to switch to a career as a software developer. Which of the following options would you most strongly recommend to your cousin?”

Here you can see in descending order the proportion of individuals that selected particular methods as being helpful to breaking into the field. The clear leaders are Online Courses and Books.

A little more than 20% of respondents suggest taking online courses, and more than 15% suggest books. There are a number of additional suggestions from taking courses in bootcamps and universities to participating in hackathons and contributing to open source libraries.

Figure 1: How to Break Into the Field?

The data here are aggregated over all developers in the survey, but it could be more interesting to know how job satisfaction, salary, or how developers that are comfortable with specific programming languages feel about different avenues to break into their specific field of development.

Part II: How do the different methods relate to salary and job satisfaction?

In the chart below, I was interested if breaking into the field with certain methods would lead to jobs with higher satisfaction or salary. The blue bars represent a comparison of job satisfaction to the average job satisfaction (which is represented at 0.00), while the red bars represent a comparison of salary to the average salary of those provided in the dataset.

Figure 2: Job Satisfaction and Salary Comparison

Before discussing the results of this visualization, it is worth noting that the raw values on the x-axis mean very little. Scaling was done to be able to easily compare one group to the next in a way that kept the visual consistent with mathematical truths for how the categories compared to one another.

With that being said, I had two big takeaways from this image:

1. The suggestions from those with the highest job satisfaction are to break into the field by returning to college or participating in hackathons. Where suggestions from those with lowest job satisfaction are to obtain a Master’s degree or complete coding competitions.
2. Salary and job satisfaction match in direction for every path into the field with the exception of obtaining a Master’s degree.

The first finding is interesting, as coding competitions tend to simulate an online version of a hackathon. Similarly, depending on your college experience, undergrad was a more fun, less work version of graduate school. This finding might have to do more with individual perspective of life and personality, than truly “fun” jobs.

Connected to the second finding, from buy books and above on the plot, you see ways of breaking into the field suggested by those that have higher than average job satisfaction and higher than average salaries. Below buy books on the plot, you see advice from those that earn below average salaries (with the exception of graduate school) and have below average job satisfaction.

Part III: What biases did the respondents have in suggesting different methods?

Finally, I wondered if there might be bias related to those with higher formal education suggesting that as a method to break into the field. This could be taken further to an idea of

In order to take a closer look at this, I divided the data into two groups. One of the groups was a group that marked that their highest degree completed was more than Bachelor’s. In the case of the data, these individuals earned either a Professional, Master’s, or PhD. All other survey respondents, which were those with a Bachelor’s or lower degree earned as their highest formal degree, were in a second group.

Figure 3: What Individual Bias is Present in Findings?

Here, we can see that those who have earned one of these higher degrees propose Master’s Degrees as a method to break into the field almost 3% more than those who did not attain a higher formal degree.

The other differences observed between those with higher formal education and everyone else are negligible. None of them even reaching a 1% difference. This illustrates the bias individuals have towards suggesting others to enter the field in the same way they did.

Conclusion

In this article, we took a look at how to break into the field of becoming a developer according to Stack Overflow 2017 survey data.

1. We gathered the advice of the masses as to how to break into the field, which showed that the masses leaned toward less expensive methods, which also require a lot of self motivation.
2. We then looked at the how different methods were related to job satisfaction and salary. This showed that there was a common thread that these two items often move together.
3. Finally, we looked at the bias associated with this advice. We found that those who broke into the field by earning a higher formal degree were much more likely to suggest others do the same.

The findings here are observational, not the result of a formal study. So the real question remains:

How will YOU break into the field?

To see more about this analysis, see the link to my Github available here.