What are the elements affect a developer’s job satisfaction
Our job consumes the majority of our time in life. It is important that we feel meaningful, happy and satisfied with it. What are the elements affect the job satisfaction of a developer? Let’s check some insights drawn from a study on StackOverFlow survey data.
Salary, weekly hour, career satisfaction, how do they correlate with job satisfaction?
In the data set, there are a few numerical columns such as Salary, Weekly hour, Career satisfaction. Do those value correlate with job satisfaction? To see this, we made pair of above mentioned three columns with Job satisfaction, and calculated the correlation coefficient of each pair.
From above chart, we observe that Job satisfaction is highly correlated with Career satisfaction. Weekly hour is negatively correlated with Job satisfaction, which could be understood that the longer the working hour is the less satisfaction. Salary correlates positively with Job satisfaction. In general the more we are paid we tend to be more satisfied. Somehow, the coefficient of pair Job and Salary is not as much high as the one of Job and Career. (Salary and Career satisfaction correlation is calculated and included in the chart.)
How do personal interests affect Job satisfaction?
In the survey, a few questions have drawn my attention. A developer has been asked whether he or she enjoys ‘Problem solving’, or ‘Building things’. Personally I would tend to say that I enjoyed pretty much building things from scratch and problem solving is exciting. And I am a part time coder, I do code for interest.
Can we say that those are traits of being a developer and having high job satisfaction? When you code, you continue to encounter problems and you need to solve them in order to progress. When you code, you are building things, setting up procedures and automating tasks, performing logical and mathematical calculations.
From the above heatmap we could see that on the two axis, those who ‘Agree’ and ‘Strongly Agree’ with enjoying Building Things and Problem Solving get a higher Job satisfaction average rate.
How company size and company type affect the Job satisfaction?
While the nature of a job align with a personal interest is important to one’s job satisfaction, the working environment could as well have an impact on one’s happiness in work.
In the survey, there are questions about company size and style. Let’s take a look if there are certain traits or trends on this aspect.
A darker line could be easily perceived at the bottom of the above chart, which appears to be with Venture-funded startup. It seems that working in this type of company achieves most satisfaction. By contrast, The State-owned company achieve the lowest Job satisfaction. When it comes to company size, small companies (10 to 19, 20 to 99,100 to 499) tend to have a higher satisfaction average rate than those giant ones.
Summary
As we witnessed from the developer survey a few data into visualization, we could tell that Career satisfaction and Salary correlate positively with job satisfaction. By contract, the weekly hour negatively correlates with job satisfaction.
Aspects from personal interests are correlated to the satisfaction of a job. Those who enjoy Problem solving, Building things get a higher job satisfaction.
The working environment favorize as well the satisfaction in work. Being in a comparatively small-sized company seems to be more satisfied than those who work in big company. I guess, the company culture, the relationships with other colleagues, the style of the leadership and management team, could impact as well the job satisfaction of a developer.
