Here at CodinGame, we know developers. We know what they want and what they (really) don’t.
With CodinGame.com, we provide coders with everything they need to perfect their skills, learn new ones, have fun (#obvs) – and even land a cool job.
With our tech recruitment platform, CodinGame for Work, we’re paving the way for skill-based hiring. Good jobs for good programmers – no matter their educational, professional or social background.
But enough about us, let’s get stuck into the results. We surveyed over 20,000 developers from all over the world to bring you this report.
We found out all sorts of interesting stuff, such as:
Want to know more? Read on.
The majority of developers (58.2%) learn to code either at university or at school. However, close to 35% (34.6%) consider themselves to be self-taught. Although more than 1 in 3 developers learnt to code all on their own (thanks to the free and handy resources out there: tutorials, books, YouTube, etc.) none of them consider that they simply learnt “on the job”.
The majority of developers have gone on to achieve a higher level of education: 54.8% of them hold either a Master’s or a Bachelor’s degree (2% even have a PhD!).
This is very cool. However, formal education isn’t the only path to developer greatness. In fact, 21.7% of developers say they don’t have any formal qualifications. It’s what you know that counts!
Those who do have a formal qualification generally studied computer science. Go figure, huh?
Obvious as that seems, a whole bunch of developers (close to 10%) studied something else entirely: business, architecture, marketing, philosophy and more!
Well, the vast majority of developers (69.7%) think so.
Not only do programmers keep up to scratch thanks to various resources, they also keep their coding skills up to date by doing (well, coding).
1 in 3 developers say they code for more than an hour a day outside of work or school.
The top three things developers would like to learn more about in 2020 are: Machine Learning/AI (49.2%), Game development (35.4%) and Web development (33.1%).
ANSWER CHOICES | RESPONSES |
|---|---|
Machine Learning/AI | 49.17% |
Game Development | 35.43% |
Web Development | 33.14% |
Mobile Development | 26.04% |
Functional Programming | 25.49% |
Big Data | 24.88% |
Cybersecurity | 22.37% |
DevOps | 22.20% |
UI/UX Design | 19.72% |
Internet of Things (IoT) | 19.04% |
Robotics | 14.73% |
Virtual Reality | 14.24% |
Blockchain | 13.91% |
Business Intelligence | 9.14% |
Growth Hacking | 8.89% |
Other | 4.49% |
ANSWER CHOICES | RESPONSES |
|---|---|
Node.js | 35.76% |
React | 23.80% |
.NETCore | 22.82% |
Other | 21.38% |
AngularJS | 20.26% |
Spring | 18.48% |
Angular 2+ | 16.67% |
Django | 15.55% |
ExpressJS | 14.41% |
Vue.js | 14.26% |
ASP | 12.17% |
Flask | 10.17% |
Symfony | 9.82% |
Laravel | 9.71% |
React Native | 8.40% |
JSF | 5.73% |
Struts | 3.54% |
RoR | 2.98% |
Play | 2.86% |
Backbone.js | 2.70% |
Cocoa | 2.41% |
ExtJS | 1.91% |
Meteor | 1.72% |
Ember | 1.43% |
Pyramid | 1.23% |
RubyMotion | 1.07% |
Padrino | 0.55% |
ANSWER CHOICES | RESPONSES |
|---|---|
Javascript | 65.46% |
Java | 62.74% |
Python | 57.13% |
C++ | 51.73% |
C | 49.58% |
C# | 42.92% |
PHP | 39.10% |
Bash | 26.73% |
VB.NET | 11.54% |
Other | 10.33% |
Pascal/Delphi | 8.62% |
Ruby | 7.81% |
Go | 7.02% |
Lua | 6.86% |
Kotlin | 6.82% |
Perl | 5.25% |
Swift | 4.69% |
Scala | 4.26% |
Haskell | 4.02% |
Rust | 3.75% |
ObjectiveC | 3.66% |
Groovy | 3.33% |
Dart | 2.98% |
OCaml | 2.95% |
F# | 1.58% |
Clojure | 1.08% |
It’s no wonder that Python, Javascript and Java are in the top three of best-known programming languages – it’s because developers can’t get enough of them! They’re the most-loved coding languages.
Special mention for Python, in top position for the third year in a row. The language has truly captured developers’ hearts.
ANSWER CHOICES | RESPONSES |
|---|---|
Python | 35.97% |
Javascript | 29.48% |
Java | 29.10% |
C# | 24.98% |
C++ | 24.26% |
C | 13.15% |
PHP | 11.47% |
Other | 4.96% |
Bash | 4.12% |
Kotlin | 3.94% |
Go | 3.84% |
Rust | 3.25% |
Ruby | 2.82% |
Swift | 2.30% |
Haskell | 1.92% |
Scala | 1.87% |
VB.NET | 1.60% |
Lua | 1.30% |
Dart | 1.21% |
Pascal/Delphi | 0.89% |
OCami | 0.75% |
Perl | 0.75% |
Clojure | 0.73% |
F# | 0.70% |
Groovy | 0.57% |
ObjectiveC | 0.57% |
Oh! There’s Java and Javascript again!
These two programming languages seem to divide developers: they either hate em’ or they love em’. The languages are cited both as two of the most-loved and most-hated languages.
There’s one language, however, that everyone agrees on – and that’s PHP. PHP is recognized, yet again, as developers’ most-dreaded language.
ANSWER CHOICES | RESPONSES |
|---|---|
PHP | 25.10% |
Java | 23.93% |
Javascript | 21.29% |
VB.NET | 17.27% |
C | 15.44% |
C++ | 13.74% |
Bash | 9.55% |
C# | 8.84% |
Python | 8.39% |
Pascal/Delphi | 7.68% |
ObjectiveC | 7.51% |
Perl | 6.95% |
Other | 6.19% |
Ruby | 4.77% |
Haskell | 3.71% |
Swift | 3.59% |
Lua | 2.88% |
OCami | 2.84% |
F# | 2.77% |
Scala | 2.75% |
Go | 2.68% |
Clojure | 2.34% |
Groovy | 2.25% |
Kotlin | 2.12% |
Rust | 1.78% |
Dart | 1.60% |
When asked, on a scale of 0 to 10, how much they enjoy their job, 66.4% of respondents answered between 7 and 10.
On a scale of 0 to 10, do you enjoy your current job? 0: I hate my job; 10: I adore by job!
As we’ve mentioned before, higher education and formal qualifications aren’t the only path to developer success and fulfilment.
In fact, developers are happy at work regardless of whether or not they learnt to code in a formal setting.
For example, self-taught developers rate their happiness at 6.94 out of 10, whereas developers who went to university give an average mark of 6.91.
Along the same lines: developers who don’t have a formal qualification rate their happiness at work at 7.10 out of 10, whereas developers with a Master’s degree give an average mark of 6.96.
The moral of the story, we think, is that you can become a fulfilled programmer no matter your educational background.
Developers from all over the world took part in our survey. With their answers, we were able to put together a leaderboard of the top 10 countries where it’s goooood to be a developer!
The United Kingdom, Canada and the US make up the top 3.
Developers work in all kinds of industries: from IT services to Retail or Healthcare.
We’ve put together a leaderboard of the top 10 industries where developers are happiest.
The gold medal goes to the Technology industry. Silver and bronze go to the Media and Education industries.
We found that the happiest developers are data scientists and game developers.
What’s more, we’re thrilled to see that teachers, trainers and educators also love what they do. True, how empowering to pass on your programming know-how!
We’re glad to see that the world’s future coders are in the hands of people who are passionate about what they do.
The majority of our respondents (64.09%) are between 20 and 34 years old.
Close to 90% of our respondents identify as “male”.
However, the proportion of women who took part in our survey has progressed from 6% (2 years ago) to 8.7% (last year) to 11.5% this year.
Baby steps in the right direction.
50.1% of respondents are employed full-time.
Students represent 31.3% of participants, whereas job seekers only represent 8.3%.
Overall, active professional developers make up over 60% of our community.
ANSWER CHOICES | RESPONSES |
|---|---|
Full-stack developer/engineer | 24.59% |
Software developer/engineer | 20.29% |
Back-end developer/engineer | 12.92% |
Applications developer | 6.50% |
Front-end developer/engineer | 6.19% |
Architect | 3.51% |
Game developer/engineer | 3.49% |
Other | 3.11% |
Embedded software engineer | 2.54% |
DevOps | 2.21% |
Teacher, educator, trainer or academic researcher | 2.17% |
Mobile Developer/engineer | 2.11% |
Data scientist or machine learning specialist | 1.76% |
Tester/Test engineering analyst | 1.67% |
CTO | 1.51% |
Project manager | 1.29% |
Data or business analyst | 1.05% |
Systems engineer | 0.92% |
Sysadmin | 0.90% |
CEO | 0.57% |
Product manager | 0.50% |
DBA | 0.22% |
Job seeker | 0.00% |
ANSWER CHOICES | RESPONSES |
|---|---|
IT services | 22.91% |
Technology | 13.45% |
Other (please specify) | 10.86% |
Finance | 9.24% |
I don’t work in one particular industry | 8.78% |
Healthcare | 4.13% |
Education | 3.93% |
Media | 3.82% |
Telecommunications | 3.71% |
Retail | 3.29% |
Manufacturing | 2.54% |
Aerospace | 2.50% |
Energy | 2.33% |
Public administration | 1.86% |
Insurance | 1.82% |
Security | 1.47% |
Construction | 0.85% |
Real estate | 0.85% |
Agriculture | 0.83% |
Hardware | 0.83% |
Beauty | 0.18% |
We’d love for you to share our work with the world and empower people to get a better understanding of developers.
