Things You Should Know About Web Development.

A data based approach using Stack Overflow’s developer survey data from 2017.

Image from https://www.analyticsinsight.net

Introduction

There are a lot of tools being used by developers in the world today and this can be overwhelming for young developers around the world. I usually get the following questions from young developers or persons trying to get into the field; what is the best IDE for web development? What is the most adopted Software design methodology in software development? Is communication skills as important as knowing how to code? The list of questions goes on.

To find answers to these questions, I used data from Stack overflow’s 2017 Annual Survey to have a better answer these questions.

The survey data covers 64,000 reviews from 213 countries and territories. The goal of the survey is to understand multiple aspects of jobs related to software development and data analytic. There were more than 150 questions as part of the survey, including:

“How long has it been since you first learned how to program?”

“Are you currently enrolled in a formal, degree-granting college or university program?”

“In terms of the number of employees, how large is the company or organization you work for?”

Part I: How important is the knowledge of algorithms and data structures, and communication skills in the recruitment of a Web Developer?

In the grouped bar plot below, you can see how important communication skills and the knowledge of data structures and algorithms are in the recruitment process of web developers.

The blue bars in figure 1 represents communication skills while the orange bars represent algorithms and data structures. Over 81% of respondents suggest that communication skills are either very important or important in the recruitment process. Taking a deeper look into how the size of the company can influence the respondent’s suggestion, I observed the great importance of communication skills in a large company of five thousand employees and above.

Figure 1: Importance of communication skills and algorithms algorithms and data structure.

On the other hand, a total of 51% of web developers suggests that algorithms and data structure in a recruitment process is either important or very important. Meanwhile, approximately 40% suggests that it is somewhat important.

The data used here are aggregated over all web developers in the survey.

Part II: What is the most adopted Software Design Methodology and Version Control System in the world?

There are different Software design methodologies and version control systems available in the industry. The charts below displays the most used methodologies and version control system respectively.

Figure 2: Different types of methodologies

Figure 3: Different types of version control systems

From the chart, it is observed that approximately 27% of companies in the world use the Agile methodology and 23% uses Scrum. On the other hand, an astonishing amount of 77% uses Git version control. However, this is not the case for companies of five thousand employees and above. In order to have a closer look, I divided the data into two groups. One with large companies of five thousand employees and above and the other group consists of employees below five thousand employees.

Figure 4: Version control systems by large companies.

From figure 4, we can observe that the two most common version control systems in very large companies are Team Foundation Server and Subversion. Also, the data used here are aggregated over all web developers in the survey.

Part III: What is the average salary of web developers and which group has the highest average job satisfaction?

Finally, I observed the average salaries of different groups of web developers. Figure 5 displays a bar chart showing the average prices for Front-end, Back-end, and Full-stack web developers.

Figure 5: Average salaries of web developers.

Full-stack web developers seem to earn the highest of $58,237.96. Next is the Back-end web developers with an average of $52,855.46 and Front-end web developers earns an average of $48,772.56 annually.

Conclusion

In this article, we looked at the importance of communication skills, data structures and algorithms, the most adopted design methodology and version control systems in web development. These findings are observational and not the result of a formal study.

To see more about this analysis, kindly see the link to my Github here.