Developer Survey 2018 and forecast for Startups

Developers are the people who live and breath in technology. They are the people who implement the technology you imagine.

Here is the Survey of the developers and their behaviour which leads to a detailed analysis about the latest trends towards growth and demand of technologies.

The stats of last year and forecast for year ahead –

The Developers Survey from Stack Overflow is out for 2018 and here is what it means for Your IT Strategy for 2018. Stack Overflow or SO is the largest Developer community and their Survey is what mostly determines the IT resource management for IT Industry, Tech Startup and SME’s dealing with IT. Though it is mostly statistical analysis and graphical presentation of data, In this post we will translate it for you and give a clear picture of the market situation.

  • “57.9 % among the community are backend developers.”

– This helps us to forecast that depending upon the technology stack the backend developers will be easily available and cost effective. So if you deal mostly with api driven platform, analytics and backend frameworks it is a good news for you. On the other hand, you should be ready to invest more on frontend developers and mobile developers if you deal with complete technology stack.

  • “48.2 % among the community are full stack developers.”

– This helps us to forecast that almost half of the community is full stack developers, and that means, right mix of these guys in your team can significantly reduce the cost and have better ROI, however the caveat is you may reduce the experts on particular area.

  • “56.4% of professional developers contribute to open source.”

– This helps us to forecast that developers now would not be dependent on much training & KT which leads to lower Learning & Development cost, to be within budget. Yes you got it right if you are a Open Source Technology stack consumer and contributor you can safely reduce your L & D budget.

  • “24.8% of developers learned to code within the past five years.”

– This helps us to forecast that the it is easier and less expensive to find developers for slightly newer technologies i.e Ruby,Javascript,Node,Mongo etc. Thus making it useful for the SME’s to use the trendy and handy coding language and experiences with new techs in place. The optimizations needed from future perspective would be much lesser giving best ROI.

  • “48.3% of developers prefer Linux.”

– This means the software cost for the running the operations are going to be less costly usually the linux free flavours are quite popular for the client machines on the other hand the enterprise variant and event the free ubuntu flavours are popular on server side which makes it almost free.

  • “85.4% of developers use Agile development methodology and now moving to DevOps.”

– This helps us to forecast that Businesses implements DevOps only if it’s directly contributing to the company’s increased productivity, effectiveness and, profitability. The way that it’s possible for SMEs is when the IT and Operations teams work in sync and streamlining the provision of tech solutions that solve the business needs.Thus this shift from Agile to DevOps seems faster.

What is the new key from business perspective ??

For the tech startups full stack and backend developers are cheaper, frontend developers will still be costly. Learning and development cost along with the softwares to run the technology operations are going to be less expensive due to open source contributions. Newer technology with the DevOps are going to be right choice for building faster Go to Market strategy. The survey also concludes that a very few percentage of developers are working in the field of Machine Learning only around 3.5%. Among professional developers looking for work, a higher proportion of machine learning specialists and data scientists were looking for jobs compared to other occupation types. That said, only 14.3% and 13.2% respectively are active. But they are also the highest paid professionals in industry. Also a certain portion of ML developers work remotely. But more and more people are are getting attracted to this niche field. ML development is getting easier and widespread with the development of newer and newer libraries and packages in the field.