Stack Overflow, one of the leading communities in IT field, conducts “annual developer survey”, where thousands of respondents from many different countries share their opinion and experience regarding the IT industry, as well as other statistical data like age, gender, educational levels, etc.
The results of these surveys are open to everyone, who wishes to take a glance on the state of things in the IT industry. Let’s try to analyze these data and answer some questions.
The first question is: what educational level is predominant in the field?
In the last 4 years, the majority of respondents (slightly over 40%) have Bachelor’s degrees. Around 20% of respondents have a Master’s degree. The next major group of people (around 10%) didn’t finish their college/university studies and approximately the same amount of respondents stopped their education after secondary school. Interesting observation: there are some people working in the field who didn’t get any formal education, although this category comprises a very low percentage of respondents.
The next question is “how have the salaries changed in recent years?”
Examining the data we can see that in between the years 2014–2017 the mean salary was on the same level, more or less, but starting from 2018, there was a significant growth with it’s maximum in 2019. The year 2020, unfortunately, suffers a slight decrease, but it still stays on a good level.
The third and the last question is: what programming languages were popular in certain years?
JavaScript is the most popular language in all years, immediately followed by Java. Python and C/C++/C# also have a respectful amount of users. Ruby, Swift, Go, R, Scala and Assembly are far less popular, but still have their niche.
It’s worth to mention that although HTML/CSS is not a programming language, and SQL and Bash/Shell aren’t general purpose languages, all these 3 are valuable technical skills and widely used in the industry.
Conclusion: formal education in college or university (even if it’s only a Bachelor’s degree) is still a valuable acquisition for those, who want to work in IT. The raise of salaries in the last three years makes this field more attractive. There are a few options regarding programming languages. The most popular is still JavaScript, but C/C++/C#, Java and Python are also good choices. And we shouldn’t forget about the popular technical skills such as databases(SQL), HTML markup language and Bash/Shell scripting.
