Towards A More Satisfied Developer

Introduction

With the growing number of tech developers working in almost all industry, the satisfactory being a tech developer becomes increasingly important among both developers and their employers.

You might have heard that the use of Python greatly improved developers’ efficiency in coding, and that being able to work from remote makes developers’ daily schedules much more flexible. Some of these benefits are even the key factors attracting more and more people becoming a developer in various forms.

Here, I have looked into the survey data conducted by Stack Overflow and introduced a personal viewpoint to the factors leading toward a more satisfied developer. This Stack Overflow’s 2019 Annual Developer Survey covers more than 88,000 reviews from 179 countries and territories. More than 200 questions were included in this survey, with examples like:

• At what age do you first start coding?
• What coding platforms do you mainly use?
• How often do you work remotely?

A developer’s satisfaction was surveyed in as job satisfaction and career satisfaction. Below, I display my understanding of what makes a satisfied developer in both job and career by three aspects — “years of experience”, “techniques used”, and “work-life style”.

Part I: How do years of experience relate to developers’ satisfaction

Many people start coding at a young age and gradually become professional developers.

As developers gain more coding experience, they show stronger opinions toward their satisfaction on job and career development. For both professional developers and developers of other forms, the longer their coding experience is, the more satisfied or dissatisfied they feel about job and career development. This is reasonable because with more experience doing a certain type of work, one will more easily discover his/her likes and dislikes, which then determines his/her satisfaction.

Clearly for those who have similar years of experience but show the opposite opinions toward coding, the daily work plays a great role in their job and career satisfactory.

Part II: Are there certain techniques associated with more satisfaction as a developer?

In this survey data, let’s look into the techniques of four categories: Developing Environment, Language, Database, and Platform.

The distribution histograms demonstrate that the techniques exist for longer period of time are still the most popular among developers. For example, Visual Studio Code is the most used developing environment among developers. JavaScript, Java, and SQL are more popular than Python despite the fact that Python is highly recommended by most developers. MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server are still the leading databases although they have unavoidable drawbacks compared to MongoDB. Similarly, Windows and Linux are the most used platforms not withstanding the growth of iOS and Android.

When looking into job and career satisfaction, the above displayed techniques show vastly different weights. In addition to Visual Studio Code, developers using other newer developing environments such as Vim, IntelliJ, and Xcode also show express high satisfaction. More intelligent languages such as Clojure, TypeScript and Go provide more satisfaction to developers than traditional languages like C and PHP. In terms of databases, developers using MySQL show the least satisfaction compared to those using newer ones like DynamoDB and Elasticsearch. Developers coding on recent Kubernetes, AWS, and Docker platforms surely feel more satisfied in job and career development than those who are still using Windows and Linux platforms.

Following the new trend in tech industry and adapting to more human-friendly techniques are surely going to keep you more satisfied with your job and career as a developer.

Part III: What work-life style gives more satisfaction to developers?

Nowadays, developers have more flexible work-life styles. They are able to work remotely from offices, and they have access to a variety of media sources for effective communication and self-entertainment. Such flexibility add to developers’ satisfaction toward job and career. In general, developers who have the opportunity to work remotely feel more satisfied.

The media and communication tools with more comprehensive and diverse sources provide more satisfaction to developers. Interestingly, developers who do not use social media also enjoy more satisfaction at their job and career.

Conclusion

This article explored the factors towards a more satisfied developer based on Stack Overflow 2019 survey data. The main factors are investigated in three directions:

1. Overall satisfaction and years of experience is not linearly correlated. However, the longer the years of experience will lead to stronger opinions, positive or negative, toward their satisfaction as a developer.
2. In general, newer and more evolved techniques lead to higher job and career satisfaction among developers despite the fact that older-fashioned techniques are still more widely used.
3. Developers have more freedom to choose their working and communication styles feel more satisfied in their job and career.

The above analysis are merely observational and subjective, individuals may feel very differently from one another. To see more details about this analysis, please see the link to my Github here.