Hiring Developers? Here’s How to Attract and Retain Diverse Talent
An analysis based on the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey
Introduction
Imagine you’re the head of a company and, like many others, you’re looking to hire developers. How can you attract more candidates to work for you? In particular, how can you attract diverse candidates?
I set out to answer these questions based on over 40,000 responses to the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey. The survey is taken by software engineers (and others who code) worldwide. Questions cover topics such as demographics, education, work, and technology usage. The demographics of the respondents is shown in the graphs below.
Note: The survey was conducted in February of this year, before the COVID-19 pandemic caused a lockdown of much of the world. Responses may vary significantly if the survey was conducted today.
To answer my questions of interest, I focused on responses to what drives developers to seek a new job, and which factors lead them to choose one job offer over another. I then looked at how these responses differ for developers from minority backgrounds.
From this analysis, a company could understand how to not only attract new employees, but to retain its existing ones.
To most, it may be obvious that developers are in very high demand. But how interested are they in starting a new role? The graph below shows that majority of respondents were open to or actively seeking new opportunities. This should motivate companies to learn how to hire and retain these employees.
Question 1: What drives developers to look for a new job?
Below you can see, in descending order, a series of factors that motivates the respondents to look for another job. The participants were able to select any number of factors that applied to them. These will be referred to as “job-seeking drivers” for the remainder of this discussion.
Unsurprisingly, the top driver is compensation, closely followed by interest in working with new technologies, simply being curious about other opportunities, growth or leadership opportunities, and better work/life balance. Other drivers shown in the graph were not as popular.
Question 2: What are the most important factors to developers when choosing a new job?
The question posed in the survey was the following:
“Imagine that you are deciding between two job offers with the same compensation, benefits, and location. Of the following factors, which 3 are MOST important to you?”
The above factors will be referred to as “new-job factors” for the remainder of this discussion.
Almost half of respondents selected a flexible schedule in their top 3 factors. This was closely followed by opportunities for professional development. Note that the least popular response was diversity of the workplace.
Diversity does not seem to be of top importance to developers in general. Perhaps this isn’t surprising given that white males dominate this career path. So, the final question I was interested in exploring was how responses to the above questions compared between minorities and non-minorities.
Question 3: How do the above results change for minorities?
Based on the distribution of respondents, I defined minority respondents as anyone who is not a white (Caucasian) male.
The charts below show the difference in the responses between minorities and non-minorities in order from largest positive difference to largest negative difference.
All differences in job-seeking drivers and new-job factors between minorities and non-minorities except better compensation were statistically significant (with 95% confidence).
In particular, for job-seeking drivers, minorities consider wanting to share accomplishments with a wider network and growth/leadership opportunities more important than non-minorities. Understanding that women and minority races don’t always get the same opportunities to display their talents, this response makes sense.
Likewise, opportunities for professional development as a new-job factor has the highest difference between the two groups, with over 6% more minorities than non-minorities considering it of top importance. Unsurprisingly, company diversity is also a more important factor for minorities.
Interestingly, better work/life balance has the highest positive difference between minorities and non-minorities as a job-seeking driver. However, the opposite was true for flex time. It was a top-3 new-job factor for a lower percentage of minorities than non-minorities (by about 4%).
I was curious if women in particular had different responses. Below, I compare all female to all male respondents.
The difference between women and men is significant (again, with 95% confidence) for all job-seeking drivers (left graph) except better work/life balance. New-job factors (right graph) that were significant were diversity of the company, flex time, and family friendliness.
It’s interesting to see that a higher percentage of women over men consider changing jobs because of trouble with their teammates, manager, and/or company leadership. Also, the highest negative driver difference is better compensation, which was the leading driver for the general developer population. This suggests that, while women still consider better compensation above other drivers, they are more spread between the other drivers.
It’s also interesting to note that women don’t consider better work/life balance to be a bigger driver than men do, even though flex time in a new job is more important to them than for men.
The most outstanding difference, however, is company diversity as a new-job factor. Over 12% more women than men chose it as one of their top-3 factors.
Conclusion
In this analysis, I looked at responses from the most recent Stack Overflow Developer Survey to find what makes developers leave their job and choose a job at another company, as well as how this differs for minorities in particular. My main takeaways are the following:
1. The most popular driver for seeking a new role was compensation. Companies should consider offering competitive salaries to developers they’re looking to hire.
2. Once developers chose to pursue a new role (not considering compensation, benefits, and location), they are most interested in having a flexible schedule and opportunities for professional development.
3. Minorities consider wanting to share accomplishments with a wider network, growth or leadership opportunities, and professional development opportunities to be more important than non-minorities do.
4. Diversity of the workplace is more valued by minorities than non-minorities, and by women more than men, when choosing their next job.
5. Women in particular are driven to look for a new job more often than men due to trouble with their teammates, manager, and company leadership. They are also more likely to let a bad day/week/month at work drive them to seek new work.
So, even if you’re not currently a hiring manager or a company-wide decision-maker, consider what you can do to incorporate these insights and build a welcoming workplace environment that developers thrive in.
To see more about this analysis, see the link to my GitHub available here.
