We’re celebrating National Coding Week here at Mexa Solutions, a week dedicated to helping adults and children with learning digital skills.
The coding community is vast, and there is now even more access to resources, coding platforms and peers than ever before. If you’re a developer just starting out, or someone with years’ worth of experience, there is always the opportunity to expand your knowledge and grow your career.
One of these platforms, Stack Overflow, has compiled together a developer survey* for 2021, to understand more about what developers are learning, the tools they are using and what new things they are looking for. I thought that this week would be a great opportunity to share some of the key points from this report.
Traditionally, coding would have been taught in education environments, or self-taught from books. Over the last few years, we’ve seen a shift from the more traditional ways, with greater access to online resources. It seems the younger developers are learning most of their skills from online tools (videos, blogs, etc.) but school still has a key input for their learning. Education has embraced coding in more recent years, with skills taught now as young as primary school, and greater options for computing at GCSE and above.
Most developers have been coding for 10 years or less, 1-4 of those years typically in a professional manner. This shows how a larger proportion of the coding community is now made up of the younger generation – evidence that initiatives such as greater access to coding in schools, are working. I still regularly recruit for the higher-level team leader/manager roles, but I’m increasingly seeing more opportunities for entry to mid-range developers, and these are becoming competitive roles to apply for.
There are many different types of developers, and with technologies constantly changing, the prevalence of these job roles keeps changing too. Previously the role of designer was more commonplace, however this has now swapped with system administrators. The job role with the highest prevalence is still the full-stack developer, followed by back-end then front-end.
This National Coding Week has a big focus on education, and the survey highlights how it is still a key component to a lot of developers’ careers. 70% of all their respondents and 80% of professional developers have completed some form of higher education, most commonly a bachelor’s degree. This is not to say that you need to have a degree to become a successful coder. There are still many developers that have reached Secondary School education and have progressed into professional roles – platforms such as GitHub and Stack Overflow allow developers to continue to educate and expand their skillsets without the need for further formal education.
One area of the report that cannot be ignored, is the section on technologies. I’m regularly asked what technologies developers are using, and what technologies are emerging. Most of the developers that I speak to work with .NET / C#, JavaScript and HTML/CSS. Within this survey, JavaScript was the most used programming language, followed by HTML/CSS then Python. What’s interesting is that the language that most Developers wanted to work with was actually Python, followed by TypeScript then JavaScript.This gives a good indication as to where technologies are shifting within the workplace. In terms of web frameworks, React.js is the most used, followed by jQuery and Express. React.js is still the most wanted web framework for developers, and I am seeing this technology more within the roles I recruit for, and as a skillset many candidates now have.
I couldn’t finish this article without mentioning cloud technologies! For years, AWS has been the leading platform, and is still the case with what developers both currently use and want to use. However, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure have seen substantial gains from last year. With new military contracts won in the USA from Microsoft, and the continuing prevalence of Android technologies, this will be an area to watch closely.
There is so much incredible information on this report, so I do urge you to have a read. I could only highlight a few areas within this article, but it’s an amazing resource for anyone within the coding community.
If you are keen to discuss any of these topics covered or would like to know a bit more about the current job market within software development, then do get in touch. You can call me on 01489 850202 or email me at info@mexasolutions.com.
*source: 2021 Developer Survey, Stack Overflow, https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021
