Developers’ Behaviour from DataScience Perspective
Introduction:
In this article, we will use a data-driven approach to programmatically determine some of the aspects of the behavior of the Developers using the Stack Overflow developer survey data 2020. Stack Overflow yearly conducts surveys to better know about the IT Landscape from the perspective of the developers. The survey consists of a lot of questions ranging from developers’ hobbies, education, interests, work-related questions, etc.
Using the Stack Overflow data we will try to answer the following questions:
- What are the major Job Factors the developers evaluate while looking for a job?
- What are programming languages the developers mostly worked/working on now and are interested or desired to work later?
- Will developers have more Job Satisfaction by having a Master’s degree over a Bachelor’s degree in some field or by having a CS Major over a Non-CS Major?
Part I: Job Factors
Let’s pretend you got job offers from 3 different companies. All three companies are offering the same compensation. Then on what criteria you will choose which company you should opt for?
I am sure one can decide based on the circumstances, but let’s see what the developers around the world are saying. Stack Overflow developer survey 2020 has got around 65k responses from the developers from as many as 184 countries.
Here in the following chart are the percentages of individuals who selected various Job Factors that may help in choosing the right job in descending order.
Of course from the chart, the top Job Factor is ‘Languages, Frameworks, and the technologies the developer would be working with’ approximately with 17.5 percent of respondents suggesting this.
One point to note here is, among all the respondents, most are developers by profession but some developers just code as a hobby or a student developer or not a developer primarily but just codes sometimes as part of their job.
When we separate professional developers and compare the percentage of the responses between the professional and non-professional developers there are some slight differences. Let’s have a look at the following plot.
The top Job Factor from the responses of non-professional developers is ‘Opportunities for professional development’ which is the fourth preferred job factor by the professional developers.
Part II: Programming Languages
Knowing a programming language is the first step for anyone to become a developer. Any developer would be working or worked on multiple programming languages. Also, the developers might be having a desire to work now or later on the most trending programming language.
With the Stack Overflow developer survey dataset, we are able to get some insights on these attributes. Let’s have a look at the following chart.
developers_worked/working_with_%:- the percentage of developers who worked in the past or currently working on a programming language.
developers_desired_to_work_%:- the percentage of developers who have desire/interest to work on a programming language now or later.
From this, we can say that JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, Python, Java are the top 5 programming languages in order, that the developers have worked on.
But, among these top 5 programming languages, except Python overall desire/interest among the developers for the rest of the four programming languages are diminishing.
Python took the top spot among all the programming languages that developers are desired/ interested to work with. This implies that Python is the most trending programming language currently.
Part III:- Job Satisfaction
Job Satisfaction is of the utmost importance for any developer. Stack Overflow data helped in relating the Job Satisfaction between the developers having CS Undergrad Major and Non-CS Undergrad Major. And also between developers having a Bachelor’s and Masters’s degrees in some fields.
In the following chart, Job Satisfaction Rating is plotted against the percentage of respondents for two categories( CS and Non-CS)
Here we can see that percentage of respondents with ‘Very Satisfied’ is slightly more for the Non-CS Major category than the CS Major category. But we can observe that overall there is no much difference in Job Satisfaction of developers between the CS and Non-CS Category.
In the following chart, Job Satisfaction Rating is plotted against the percentage of respondents for two categories( Masters and Bachelors)
Even in this case from the plot, we can observe that overall there is no difference in the Job Satisfaction of developers by having a Master’s degree or a Bachelor’s degree.
Hence the data suggests no evidence having a Master’s over a Bachelor’s degree or having CS Major over Non-CS Major will have more Job Satisfaction. The overall Job Satisfaction is the same irrespective of the degree or Major pursued.
Conclusion:
In this article, with the help of Stack Overflow developer survey 2020 data, we tried to understand some behavior aspects of the developers across the world.
1. We gathered the advice from a large number of audiences that what is the most important Job Factor to consider while choosing a Job.
2. We were able to identify the programming languages which are the most trending nowadays and also which lacks the developers’ interest
3. Finally, we concluded that having a Master’s degree over Bachelor’ s or CS Major over Non-CS does not affect Job Satisfaction.
The programmatic analysis can be found at my Github profile. Link Here!
One Last Point,
The findings here are observational based on Stack Overflow survey data, not the result of a formal study.
