Interesting facts that you MUST know about seeking a job as a developer
Data wrangling and treatment from a developer StackOverflow survey on 2020 for finding employment factors to take into account according to the CRISP-DM
Getting into a field as huge as programming can get confusing or overwhelming at first since there are lots of job types and sub-fields in it. However, there are some curious but interesting facts to learn about getting a job as a developer in the industry.
Through this post, multiple worrisome questions will be answered by the usage of a dataset from surveys made by StackOverflow in 2020 to developers and provided to the Kaggle platform through this link.
These questions were proposed following the CRISP-DM according to the “Business Understanding and Data Understanding” steps, these were:
1. “What is the correlation between being transgender and salary as a developer?”
2. “What job factors interest developers the most when seeking a job?”
3. “What relates to employment status?”
4. “What is the average age of employed developers in the industry?”
After wrangling the data and searching for the best conclusions, these were the results.
1. What is the correlation between being transgender and salary as a developer?
This could be a controversial but necessary question. Does being transgender can relate to earning less money? The raw answer is “yes, it does”. According to data, transgender developers earn 16% less annually than non-transgender ones. The average wage of a transgender is $8,800 USD vs. $103,700 USD earned by the other group mentioned.
2. What job factors interest developers the most when seeking a job?
Searching for the perfect job isn’t a possible task, although, finding the job that fits you the best is always a great deal. With the question from the survey…
“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?”
Important factors that developers consider were notable, with a preference of getting a position where they are able to work with their language and framework of wish. Also, an important aspect of the job for developers is the environment and culture of the company as can be observed in the following bar plot.
3. What relates to employment status?
When breaking into the field, it is important to feel comfortable with the topics you are working on, even so, having the certainty to be employed with the work you will do is also a key decision when thinking about your future as a developer.
Here are 3 main factors that affect your employment status according to the data from StackOverflow.
Factor #1: Developer Type
Being a full-stack developer is a huge advantage as it allows you to work in many positions, this carries to a low percentage of unemployment and therefore, a high probability of getting a job easier.
Factor #2: Living Country
Since remote work is becoming a profitable option for tech companies, people from around the world are getting hired to work for corporations led from the other corner of the globe, being the country of residence an impactful but also not impactful factor when applying for a job, as remote work is growing faster than ever before but it doesn’t concern the 100% of the vacancies in the industry.
Despite this fact, the US is the country with the most amount of developers hired but also unemployed, followed by India which has half of the US employed people, however, it has a bigger rate of unemployed ones.
Factor #3: Education Level
Having or not a degree isn’t always the right answer for getting hired in the programming industry, nonetheless, it definitely helps on a big basis. Bachelors are highly employed followed by Mastery education level, even though these two groups are notorious on the data, people without professional education and also those who drop from college have a low unemployment ratio surprisingly.
4. What is the average age of employed developers in the industry?
Like many other job fields, teamwork is an important aspect of day-to-day work, and knowing your co-workers' average age can be helpful for better communication or empathy.
In consonance with the data, the average age of employed developers is around 31 years old for full-time jobs, 27 for part-time, and 35 for independent contractors or freelancers.
Conclusions
Through this post, employment facts were analyzed according to the data, from which it can be concluded:
- Being transgender does affect your income as a developer in a factor of 16% less than non-transgender developers.
- Languages and frameworks of usage, together with the company’s culture, are the two most important aspects that developers take into account when seeking a job (without talking about the wage).
- Full-stack developers, living in the US, and having a bachelor’s degree are the best set of conditions for having a bigger certainty of getting hired in the programming industry.
- The average age of developers employed is 31 years old for full-time jobs and 27 years old for part-time jobs, in other terms, youngsters are the biggest group of employed people in the current industry.
For more information and code related to this post, go visit my Github repo about the data analysis made here.
