Developers: The honest truth
We all know that the world is now Digital and there are more coders in this generation than there were in the last generation. The world is developing so fast, if you blink you might miss it.
In the last 2 to 3 years, I have heard the word “developer” get thrown around very often. I decided to do a little digging and find out who a developer is. Searching “Who is a developer?” will get a few vague explanations. My best definition is by Computerhope.com
“A developer is an individual who is responsible for creating or working on the development of a product or service. Most developers utilize one or more programming languages to develop their product or service.”
I’ve had a few questions bugging me and so I decided to try and find answers using the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 2017 as a case study.
I looked at the survey and here are some of the answers I found.
You don’t have to have a Higher Education to be a developer
I always imagined developers as tech enthusiasts who went to University to study computer science. I imagined them going to the library or coffee shop after lectures in hopes of finishing projects, going back home only to stay up late trying to debug their program and fix errors. Sadly, I’m mistaken, a lot of developers did not go to University.
Approximately 74.51% of developers did not attend University.
This is very motivating especially for high school students who cannot afford college but want to be developers. You can still achieve your dreams without going into student debt.
What developers love more than money is code
I’ve heard a lot of people complain about the struggles of coding, from bugs to errors that take up so much time to fix. I just assumed that most developers do not like coding and only code for the money. My research proved otherwise, about 50% of developers love to code as a hobby, about 5% of developers contribute to open source code, about 25% of them love to code as a hobby and contribute to open-source code.
Some developers are unemployed
I’ve heard a lot about successfully employed developers, but I wanted to see behind the curtain and have a look at the percentage of developers that were actually unemployed. Although the majority of developers are employed (either full-time, self-employed or part-time). There are still 10.32% of developers that are unemployed.
How many developers are Black?
I know that there are a lot of White and Asian developers but I wanted to know if there were any developers who were just like me. Out of 19102 developers, only 178 are purely black or of African Descent developers. That’s less than 1%. I hope that there is a greater representation of black people in the tech industry.
What percentage of developers are women?
I am a girl and so this definitely had to be part of my questions. The majority of developers are male and just a small percentage is female. 5.078% of developers are women. It would be great if more girls were encouraged to be in the tech space and industry. Growing up, I did not know a lot of female tech gurus. Although there were many, the majority of the tech gurus highlighted were male.
How many developers are black and also women?
Out of an ENTIRE 19102 developers, only 21 are black and female. I hope more girls go into the developer's world. I’d like to see more representation for black girls.
Conclusion
The tech industry is dominated by White men.
You don’t need student debt to be a good developer. A lot of developers do not attend college.
A lot of developers actually really love to code.
A lot of girls are not going into the tech industry and so there is VERY little representation for girls.
The number of black females in the tech industry is staggeringly low.
