Who will be your colleagues on the first day when you become a professional software developer?
On my first day at work, the thing I was most curious about was who my colleagues would be. Although I am not a developer, the Stack Overflow survey(2017) reminded me of that day. This annual survey provided a wealth of information and the opportunity to answer this question. This annual survey provided lots of information and gave me the opportunity to answer this question. In addition, it enabled me to have a worldwide insight into the diversity in the software field. I would like to answer 3 main questions with the help of this survey.
- What is the environment of professional developer?
- Is there a correlation between diversity of their environment and their thinking about the importance of diversity across the world?
- Is there a sign to change the diversity in short term?
Who will be your colleague if you are a professional developer?
I analyzed 7 parameters to guess my first day at work as discussed below.
Gender
91% of the professional developer is male so we can easily say that female representation is really low when we compared other industries.
Major Undergrad
77% of the respondents has a major degree computer science/programming or related fields. I think hiring opportunity of other degrees is quiet high. There is a huge gap between graduated students with related fields and computing jobs. So if you start a computer or programming related job, most probably you will be working with a colleague that you cannot guess his/her major degree.
Formal Education Degree
74% of the respondent have bachelor or higher degree. For example in mechanical engineering perspective, it will be nearly 0% chance to see any colleague that has not any bachelor degree. It is a common thing to be a developer without bachelor degree.
Remote work
65% of the respondent have a 1 day to full remote work chance. It is again surprising results for another industries especially before covid-19. 11% of the respondent work as fully remote.
Race
73% of the respondents identifies themselves as ‘White or of European descent’ and then nearly 10% Asian in total follows. So it seems that there is an unequal distribution across the world. It is surprising that Asia countries has a big improvement in the last 5 years period however developer quantity is low.
Employment Status
Fully employment gets the highest score as expected. On the other hand, I think comparatively huge part-time or self employed workers are hired in that industry. Unemployment rate is negligible.
Experience
6 to 10 years experience gets the highest density. I was expecting to see an downtrend while experience getting higher because the developer demand getting higher each year and to fulfill this demand lots of learning and career opportunities are provided during the last decades. I think the density of 0–5 years experience should be the highest but during the first years of being developer may be awareness of survey will not enough as higher experienced developers.
If I need to guess my first day as a software developer, most possibly my team will be dominated by men and ‘White or of European descent’ colleagues. There can be some non-bachelor degree colleagues and some of them will work as remotely in that day so I could not meet them. The distribution of expertise is dominated by 5+ years so I can learn lots of information from them.
Is there a correlation between diversity of environment and thinking about the importance of diversity across the world?
I would like to understand that if the country will change the diversity of my working space and if there is a correlation about the environment and perspective to diversity. Survey questions give me a chance to analyze both questions.
I selected 4 different countries that I think there will be a cultural differences. And then I analyzed gender and race distribution parameters and try to see the correlation between perspective of diversity.
It can be seen that for above graph, there is a upward trend if the female and other races distribution is getting higher in the population then the mindset about the importance of diversity is getting higher. Only India’s diversity score is higher than US but we check only 3 parameters for this correlation and also other social, political and economic aspects can affect the results.
Is there a sign to change the diversity of working environment in short term?
The students will be the followers of professional developers so if I can check the distribution among them, I can see the short term changes about diversity.
Professional Developers’ results
- Male 91%, Female 7%
- White or of European descent 72.7% , Asian(South and West) 11%
- ‘Strongly Agree’ + ‘Agree’ = 65%
Students’ results
- Male 87.8%, Female 8%
- White or of European descent 60.6% , Asian(South and West) 17.8%
- ‘Strongly Agree’ + ‘Agree’ = 62.4%
Even there is a positive change for female on gender distribution, it is really small to change overall distribution in short term. In addition to that, race distribution has changed significantly and it is a sign that Asia will be more powerful than before on software side in short term. On the other hand, the perspective on diversity has become deteriorated. It can be related with the paradigm shift of the foreign policy powerful countries during survey date.
For more information on the study, Github repo can be found at the link below:
