What Do YOU Need to Do to Become a Developer? A Deep Dive into StackOverflow’s Developer Survey
Crunching data to understand what it takes to become a professional software developer.
Becoming a software developer is not easy. You need to excel in one or more programming languages and master multiple frameworks. The gap between what you learn in college versus what the industry demands, makes it even more difficult.
To understand what it takes to become a professional software developer, I have analyzed a comprehensive survey conducted by StackOverflow.
StackOverflow is a popular Q&A website, where veteran programmers interact and discuss solutions for programming problems. Let us see what StackOverflow users consider the best way to become a software developer.
Diving into Data
Conducted in 2017, the StackOverflow survey featured more than 50,000 participants from 201 countries and regions.
Developers from the United States responded to the survey the most, making up 22.29% of the total respondents. Developers from India (10.11%), the United Kingdom (8.55%), Germany (8.1%), and Canada (4.34%) also contributed heavily to the survey.
More than 70% of the respondents were either working as professional developers or had worked as developers before. Since we seek advice on how to become professional developers, we will only focus on what current and former professional developers had to say.
What formal education do most professional developers have?
According to the data, 47.64% of professional developers graduated with a Bachelor’s degree, whereas 25.01% completed a Master’s degree. Interestingly, 15% of respondents were working as professional developers although they hadn't completed a Bachelor’s degree.
The survey shows that 7.5% of the professional developers did not even attend college. In total, 22.5% of the respondents became software developers without completing a degree.
Moving on, the data also shows that respondents with doctoral degrees featured proportionately higher as professional non-developers who coded occasionally.
Although respondents with doctoral degrees comprised only 2.5% of total respondents, they constituted 7.68% of professional non-developers who sometimes write code.
What is the best way to break into software development?
When asked about what’s the best way to break into the field of software development, respondents had differing views.
Approximately 21% of professional developers suggest taking online courses is the best way to enter the field of software development.
Students today are often deprived of practical skills during academic studies. Instructors in online courses bridge this gap by teaching students new technologies, frameworks, and in-demand skills.
Likewise, 16.1% of professional developers recommend studying textbooks and solving exercises to gain software development skills. Mind you, these books aren’t the typical textbooks, but books with proper coding exercises.
Experts publish these books for specialized technologies and frameworks to help beginners. They contain several useful exercises that refine the reader’s understanding and helps them leverage new tools more effectively.
Part-time and evening courses serve the same purpose as the previous two options. In these physical courses, mentors interactively teach students essential industry skills by helping them build real-world projects. No wonder, 10.36% of professional developers suggest these courses.
Since coding on live projects is a great way to enhance coding skills, 10.24% of respondents also suggest contributing to open-source projects.
Online coding competitions motivate students to practice coding skills and compete against other young developers. Therefore, coding competitions and hackathons allow students to hone their coding skills.
Unsurprisingly, 4.51% of professional developers recommend participating in online coding competitions to hone coding skills, whereas 3.59% had a similar opinion about participating in hackathons.
Since most software development roles require refined programming skills, it’s important to practice coding in open-source projects, hackathons, and online coding competitions.
Lastly, attending conferences and meetups can also be excellent for networking. Therefore, 7.56% of survey participants recommended meeting industry professionals and seeking opportunities in person to earn an entry-level development role.
Is higher education recommended to break into software development?
Usually, a Master’s degree is ideal for specializing in a field and gaining relevant expertise. However, the results here are a little different.
According to the survey, pursuing a Master’s degree to become a software developer is not efficient. Respondents from the survey advise learning practical skills instead of investing in higher education. This goes on to show how different software development is compared to other fields.
Upon further analysis, the data showed that professional developers with Master’s degrees were biased at suggesting Master’s degrees to others.
Out of all the professional developers who recommended a Master’s degree, 68.4% had completed a Master’s or doctoral degree themselves. In other words, respondents with higher education were biased at recommending Master’s degrees twice as likely than other professional developers.
Are bootcamps worth it?
Bootcamps are one of the most popular ways to break into the field of software development, especially among students who graduate with a Bachelor’s degree. Despite that, only 7.33% of professional developers recommended it in the survey.
In total, 5% of survey respondents attended Bootcamps themselves. Let us see how bootcamps helped respondents of the StackOverflow survey.
According to the data, approximately 46% of Bootcamp graduates already had a job when they started the program. Therefore, it’s hard to tell if the Bootcamp helped them get a new role.
9.68% of Bootcamp graduates secured a development job before they completed the Bootcamp, whereas 11.3% of respondents found a job after completing the program.
At the same time, 6% of graduates succeeded in finding a job in less than a month, whereas 12.8% of graduates had to wait between one and six months.
Unfortunately, for 6.26% of people, it took from six months to more than one year to find a job. Likewise, 8.1% of graduates didn’t find jobs after completing the Bootcamp until the time of the survey.
Bootcamps seemingly helped survey participants in landing a job. However, it’s unclear if bootcamps help professional developers improve their salaries.
Nonetheless, participating in Bootcamps can be a great way to gain hands-on experience and apply programming skills.
Key Takeaways
Data shows that investing in Master’s degrees isn’t the most efficient way to become a software developer. Master’s degrees may help you specialize in a field but pursuing them requires significantly more time, money, and effort.
That said, the majority of professional developers at least have a Bachelor’s degree. So graduating with a computer science major may improve your chances of becoming a software developer.
Bootcamps are known for training fresh graduates for the industry. The data shows here that at least 20% of individuals earned a job upon graduating or earlier. However, it’s still unclear how much bootcamps helped people who were already professional developers.
Most veteran software developers in the survey agree that learning in-demand software development skills is the best way to become a software developer. Whether you do that by enrolling in online courses, buying books and solving exercises, contributing to open-source projects, or participating in coding competitions and hackathons. Getting your hands dirty with software projects will help you become a professional software developer.
