Is it worth to be a developer?

Based on Stack Overflow Developer Survey data, 2017.

When you finish high school, or even before that, you start thinking about what you want to be and what major in collage or university you want to choose. There are many many options, and becoming a developer (after graduating from IT majors) is one of them.

You may wondered whether being a developer is better than being an engineer, or a doctor. Obviously, you want to do something you like for the rest of your life but at the same time you also want to secure your future. Different people will give you different advice, and looking from an answer over the internet my vary based on where the answer comes from.

But have you ever wondered what the data suggest? How much developers around the world get paid? How much job satisfaction these individuals have working as developers? How working as a developer vary from one country to another?

Though, we used data from Stack Overflow’s 2017 Annual Developer Survey, to better understand the field and to answer these questions. The survey contains 64,000 reviews from 213 countries. The survey has 150 questions that focus on software development and data analytics.

What we are really interested in, is how much countries around pay developers. But before trying to answer this question, let us have a look where developers actually come from.

The figure above shows that more that %25 of the developers come from the United States, followed by India, United Kingdom, and Germany respectively. Developers from these five countries represent more than %50 of total developers around the world. But how much these countries pay developers compared with the rest of the world. Do they also maintain the same ratio or having more than %50 of world’s developers lead to an excessive abundance such that other countries have to pay more salary to secure developers.

Figure 2 shows a comparison between how much developers get paid on average compared with the world’s average salary. Interestingly, only five countries from top 20 pay developers above the world’s average. Even though USA has the highest number of developers, yet it is the best place for developers to earn money. On the other hand, average salary for developers who work in India is %81 less than compared with world’s average salary. However, it would be more interesting to see whether developers from these five countries have higher job satisfaction than the rest of the world or not.

What we saw until now is that in general, countries with more developers tend to pay them less money (only 4 countries from top-20 pay developers above world’s average), but how much this affected their job satisfaction. In other word, we want to know whether developers from countries that pay higher salary have higher job satisfaction than those who get paid less. To answer this question, we will compare job satisfaction to the average job satisfaction for above top 20 countries.

Interestingly, most of the developers who work in the top 20 countries have job satisfaction above the world’s average. This lead us to think that there must be other factors that affect job satisfaction more than salary itself, for example the size of companies these developers work in?

This question investigates whether there is a relationship between the size of the company and job satisfaction. The figure below shows different companies’ size and the average job satisfaction for each size around the world.

What we are interested in knowing is whether a company is small or large, so we divided companies into two classes, large companies where they have more than or equal 1,000 employees, and small companies where they have less than 1,000 employees. Then we calculate the average job satisfaction for the top 20 countries. Excluding “I don’t know” and “I prefer not to answer”, we see from below that even though the difference is not that much but small companies tend to have slightly higher job satisfaction than larger companies.

Most developers who work in companies, large or small, in top 20 countries have job satisfaction roughly around 7 out of 10.

How important having a higher education for developers? To answer this question we check the average salary for the top 20 countries based on formal education and then compare how much developers from these countries get paid.

The table above shows that there is a big gap between having doctoral degree and other educational degrees. On the other hand, having master degree does not seem to add any value in terms of salary. This conclusion is for the entire top 20 countries, but what we really interested in is how developers’ formal education apply to these countries. The figure below show the average salary for top 20 countries based on their formal education.

The figure shows that in general, developers from United State have the highest salary no matter what formal education they have. The figure also shows that developers with doctoral degree means that they have higher salary than the rest of developers from the same country except for Russia and India.

Like any other professional job, developers should maintain their resume somewhere. Sometimes, it becomes a challenge to where developers post and maintain their resume, especially with the increment of job profile website on Internet.

When we investigated where developers maintain their resume, we found out a domination for LinkedIn over the rest job profile options as shown in the figure below.

Now let us see whether or nor having a LinkedIn profile result in higher job satisfaction over top-20 countries. The answer for this question is shown in the figure below.

From the above, even though the dataset shows LinkedIn as the most popular professional network, yet results showed that LinkedIn did not record the highest job satisfaction rate for developers who maintain their resumes over there. TripleByte is the network with the highest job satisfaction for developer, which may lead to think that this platform has the best job recruitment (although the number of resumes are very low compared with other networks). On the other hand, Nakuri network has the lowest rate for developers job satisfaction.

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