The 4 (perhaps) surprising new facts about the ups and downs of coding
Each year the site asks its users about everything from salary to Star Wars, and publishes its insights in an annual developer survey. This year, the publication The Memo selected four code-related things they learned from the 45-point questionnaire - and its 56,000 respondents.
- Coders love working in gaming, but hate Government jobs: Data collected on job satisfaction by industry shows that the coders appear to be happiest when working in gaming, although it's also very satisfying to work in education, online, or at a non-profit company. Most unhappy with their jobs are those who work in telecommunications, closely followed by those in the finance and banking industries and Government jobs. Read more: Government tech job pays double the Prime Minister's salary.
- Most coders are self-taught: Developers are largely teaching themselves, the survey suggests, with 69.1% of respondents stating that their coding skills are ‘self-taught'. A large percentage of coders (43.9%) also said that they had gained their knowledge through ‘on the job training', while significantly fewer people had studied coding formally. Just 34.8% had enrolled on a Computer Science course at university, while 25.5% had opted to take alternative online courses.
- Happy coders work from home: As the co-living trend sees more and more people take on a globally nomadic lifestyle, coders too are embracing remote working. Those who work remotely full time reported most that they love their job (44.5%), while job satisfaction falls the more tied to the office employees are. Just 24.5% of who never leave their desks said they also love their jobs.
- Female coders need your support: While the survey highlights the well-known gender disparity in tech (just 5.8% of survey respondents were women), one of the biggest problems appears to be retaining women. One table shows that the majority of female coders are in the early stages of their careers (most identified as having between 2-5 years of experience). After this the figures drop, suggesting there are far fewer women staying in the industry to gain further decades of experience. This disparity could be twofold: the positive is that there are just more young women entering the field than ever; the negative is since sexism still exists in coding, women often don't feel comfortable in their workplace. To work towards gender equality, there is a need to encourage more women into the industry, but also support them throughout their careers. Read more: Are women really better coders? Does it matter? What's the real problem?