Let’s explore the developer's work environment and find insights into it?

Abhinav Jha
4 min readMay 9, 2020

--

Introduction

Every year from 2011, Stack Overflow conducted a survey to know the better IT landscape from the perspective of developers across various countries. The survey asks a lot of questions about developers' jobs, how many hours do they work, how much their salary, how satisfied do they feel about their job, etc.

In this article, I used Stack Overflow Survey Data 2019 to answer several questions like how the developer is satisfied in his job, how much their total salary, etc. If you are interested in analyzing the data by yourself, you can find it in this link.

Outline

There are several questions I asked myself while analyzing the survey, and these are three questions that I am going to answer in this article:

1. Which country has the highest job satisfaction for developers?

2. Is there a difference in job satisfaction between developers whose undergraduate major is IT-related a those who are not?

3. Are there any differences in terms of salary between people who contribute to open source and those who are not?

1.The country with the highest job satisfaction

In this 2019 survey, there are nearly 90,000 responses from over 170 countries, and for this question, I have analyzed only the top 30 countries based on the total number of respondents.

Figure 1: Job Satisfaction Level

The data shows that the United States is the best country in terms of job satisfaction of its employees with almost 40% of the developers feel very satisfied followed by the Netherlands and Sweden, and from the visualization, above we know that 5 of the top 10 countries with the highest job satisfaction level are located in Europe. Asian countries' developers are not satisfied as per the data. ink

2. Job satisfaction based on developers background

It is not a secret that anyone can be a developer even if they do not have a computer science / IT background. There are tons of online and offline bootcamps/meetups or Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) they can learn from. YouTube and various websites provide free courses and interactive courses that help developers to grow and learn efficiently. In fact, the result shows that 29% of developers do not have IT-related background (they are undergraduate majors).

Figure 2: Job Satisfaction Percentage by Undergraduate Major

I found and analyzed that developers whose undergraduate major is not IT-related have slightly better job satisfaction compared to those who have IT-related backgrounds with 34% and 30% of respondents feel very satisfied respectively.

3. Contributing to open source makes your salary higher?

One thing that I was interested in from this survey was about contributing to open source. Does this have an impact on the developer's salaries? That was the question I asked when I first saw the survey data.

Figure 3:Contributing to open source per salary

We can see from the data that the more frequent the developers contribute to open source, the higher their salary. On average, people who contribute to open source once a month or more have a 7% higher salary than those who never contribute. The correlation between those two variables does not mean if we want the higher salary, we have to start contributing to open source

I have read this quote before starting contributing to open source. I thought to share it with you guys.

Figure 4: A quote regarding open source contribution

Conclusion

In this article, we did the analysis of developers from Stack Overflow Survey Data 2019, and these are the summary of what we have done.

We measured the job satisfaction level for each country and found that the United States has the highest job satisfaction level for developers in the world.

We then looked at their undergraduate major and found that developers whose undergraduate major is not IT-related have slightly better job satisfaction.

Finally, we found that developers who contribute more to the open source have a higher salary.

Thank you for reading my article! Feel free to leave a comment below and please do not hesitate to connect and leave a message in my Linkedin profile if you want to ask about anything. You can check my contribution and my projects on my Github profile.

Sign up to discover human stories that deepen your understanding of the world.

Free

Distraction-free reading. No ads.

Organize your knowledge with lists and highlights.

Tell your story. Find your audience.

Membership

Read member-only stories

Support writers you read most

Earn money for your writing

Listen to audio narrations

Read offline with the Medium app

--

--

No responses yet

Write a response