There is a certain stereotype of software developers, perceived from the outside as dissatisfied workers who are usually weakly bonded to their employers. In fact, however, this is not true.

IT staff are happy about their work, and it is also their hobby, concludes Raimo Seero, Technology Manager of Uptime LLC, reading a recent survey of software developers organized by Stackoverflow.

Stackoverflow, one of the largest gathering sites for software developers (more than 50 million visitors a month), conducted an annual survey of 64,000 software developers and published fresh results, which indeed revealed that this community is a fairly lucky group.

Fewer job seekers

Work and life satisfaction indicate, that only 13.1 percent of respondents are currently actively looking for work. But 75.1 percent of the respondents, are not against receiving offers of new job opportunities. They are not looking actively for these opportunities themselves, but may be curious about what other companies are trying to offer.

“It makes it harder to find new employees,” commented Raimo Seero on the prevailing trend, “but also reassures satisfied employees about their team. They like to work in small teams, they like to be better than others, and to ensure their satisfaction. Both we and other software developers are looking for and recruiting people who want to learn. And whose hobby is also their job.”

Did not start to program in kindergarten

Interestingly, looking from the outside it is another outright misconception that “IT boys” were already programming in early childhood. Usually this is not true. The research shows that 36.9 percent of software developers studied programming in the first four years of their career, but not earlier.
Though a large percentage of programmers in India and Russia (22.8 percent) prefer teleworking, other developers like to work in not very small enterprises, but rather decent medium-sized companies with 20-99 employees, where employees like to go to the office daily. It´s obvious that in large countries such as India and Russia, people would be willing to continue to pursue teleworking in their current place of residence rather than to move to another country or city.

The programmer’s work is also his hobby

Work satisfaction among software developers is surprising: on the ten-point scale, eight out of ten (22 percent of all votes) were marked with the highest satisfaction score, which shows that developers like to do their job and are happy with it. Career satisfaction is also high. In addition, work (programming) is also a hobby for nearly three quarters of respondents: 75 percent do so in their spare time and contribute to open source projects.

“That’s why it’s hard to expect a programmer to work exactly at nine to five every business day,” commented Raimo Seero, “if work is also a hobby, then it’s done at any time.”

Many coders write licence free programs as well, releasing freeware to Github, and interacting with others in relevant software forums.

The most popular programming languages are JavaScript (62.5%), SQL (51.2%), Java (39.7%), C # (34.1%), Python (32%).

Python – is Retro fashionable again?

The rise of Python over PHP is going to be somewhat surprising for old school programmers, but the trend for the newer era is really a tendency towards the good old Python. That has already gone through its hype curve and is now a sure choice for software developers. PHP is still popular, it´s right after the leader language Python.

Python, however, is also the programming language most developers want to continue (but Visual Basic 6, vice versa – is the most likely to be abandoned soon).

Among the most commonly used frameworks and platforms, AngularJS (28.1%), Node.js (27.9%) and .NET Core are the most popular choices.

“It’s not right to say that Microsoft .NET platform is an outcast dinosaur,” says Raimo Seero, explaining why Uptime as a software company wants to stay on some of the strong platforms and not always run along with all the momentous fashion trends that often occur in software development.

“.NET is in the top three, and is also in another top ten, where developers voted for which platform they would like to work on (albeit that it’s not always possible). So, the good old platforms may live on.”

The most promising future was mentioned for Node.js and AngularJS, with which most programmers want to continue.

A much-searched machine learning specialist is looking for a job

The most wanted specialists are in machine learning, followed by data scientists and mobile software developers. At the same time, machine learning specialists are the biggest job seeking group. It is hard to judge this inconsistency, but Raimo Seero believes that one of the reasons is probably, that many would like to work in these trendy positions, and therefore they are also looking for a job as a specialist in this area.

The second highest salary is paid, in addition to the highest-paid DevOps, for machine learning specialists, too, followed by developers with a statistical-mathematical background in third place. These are desirable and highly paid positions.

“We are currently looking for people who want to learn. The research pointed out that some of the old and strong platforms remain popular, while many tools have been created to simplify the work, which must also be used to stay competitive. But in addition to technologies, the most important thing is to have satisfied software developers who are doing their job as hobby,” Raimo Seero summarized the basic of research that was revealed.