Lesson learned from StackOverflow Survey for a new entry
By: Xue Wang
Tags: Stackoverflow, Jupyter Notebook, Python

Lesson learned from StackOverflow Survey for a new entry

Picture made by the author

As I am in a career transition phase, have worked in the industry related to coding, but without formal education in the area of computer science, I am wondering whether I can find some hits from the StackOverflow survey, which has the largest developer community.

After reviewing serval years of the survey, I find that the survey 2017 does give the questionary in the survey, but not include in the following years. But sometimes, the hints keep the same, so I choose the survey 2017. At the same time, I also want to know which tools are the most used for the developer, then the latest is better, so I choose 2020 for this part.

So I would like to summarize my questions as following:

What are the suggestions from the survey for a new entry? If no chance for formal education, how could they prepare themselves? If somebody still has a chance to pursue formal education, it is important to take it to become a developer? The suggestions from one have a bias because of the different backgrounds of the participates or not? What are the most used tools?

Let’s have a look at the survey 2017:

Survey 2017

And the schema:

Survey Schema of 2017

Q1: What are the suggestions from the survey for a new entry?

This report has 51392 records. There is one column which is named CousinEducation, which asks the participants to give suggestions to the people who would like to change career to software engineer without a computer science background. There are 27824 records without information, which means there are 23568 suggestions being given.

After the data wrangling, the results are like the following:

The top recommendations for a new entry

The top three suggestions:

“take online courses”: which appears in 15246 records, respectively, 64.7% from all of the 23568 records. “Buy books and work through the exercises”: with 11750, 49.9% out of all. “Part-time/evening courses”: with 7517, 31.9% at the third place.

Now if somebody is hesitant to attend formal education, do you think it is important? There are 23355 records with answers. The result chart is as follows:

How people think about the impact of formal education

There are 7489 records that think formal education is not very important or not at all important, which means 32% out of 23355. 68% of the developer take formal education at least somewhat important, even very important.

Q2. The suggestions from one have a bias because of the different backgrounds of the participates or?

Here no records of FormalEducation are empty. Let’s say a Master's degree and above are higher education, which marked as 1, the others are 0. ed_1perc minus ed_0_perc gets Diff_HigherEd_Vals. The bar table as following:

Recommendation Bias between developer with higher Edu and without high Edu

Developers without higher education degree intents to taught themselves, developers with higher education are intended to take a master degree, although both recommend for take online courses.

Bias towards formal education between developers with higher education and without higher education

For formal education, developers with higher education definitely take it as important, respectively, 41.3% out of the given answer, vs 27.2% from developers without higher education. It is 8.9% vs 16.5%, developers with higher education vs without education, who think formal education not very important, at least.

Q3. What are the most used tools?

Now we get the suggestions, and what we should learn? From my understanding, the current most worked with tools are good indicators, like languages, Databased, Platforms, and Webframs.

Following are the pie charts which show the top 10.

The most used Databases: are MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server, respectively 21.2%, 13.8%, and 12.6%.

The most used languages: at 2020 are JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and SQL, with 16.5%, 15.4% and 13.4%.

In 2020, the column as CollabTools is newly added: Github, Slack, and Jira are the top three collab tools for developers, respectively, 22.4%,14.3%,12.9%.

Linux dominates the Platform market as usual with 19.8%, and the followers are Windows and Docker, with 19.1% and 12.6%.

The most worked with WebFrames are jQuery, React.js, Angular/Angular.js with 18.8%, 15.6%, and 10.9%.

The code can be found here.

These are the lessons I learned from the StackOverflow survey. How about your stories?