Engineering

HackerRank 2018 Developer Skills Report

(Research.hackerrank.com)

Whether you’re a developer, technical recruiter or just curious, HackerRank’s 2018 Developer Skills Report is a fascinating and comprehensive summary of programming and developer trends. The well-funded startup allows technical recruiters to create programming challenges and run live coding sessions with potential candidates. In their 2018 survey they interviewed nearly 40,000 developers on a variety of topics (with breakdowns by age category) from preferred programming frameworks, what languages developers are planning to learn next and what developers look for in a company when job searching.

We launched HackerRank in late 2012 with the goal of matching every developer to the right job. And the growth has been amazing — we reached 3.2M developers in the community and powered 2% of all developer hires last year.

For the first time, we surveyed the HackerRank community to get a pulse on developer skills (when did they push code for the first time, how do they learn coding, what are the favorite languages and frameworks, what do they want in a job, what hiring managers want in a candidate, and more). There are some great insights, from 39,441 responses, that we are happy to share with you today. Did you know that 1 in 4 developers learned to code before they could drive?

Some interesting bits: Python continues to be a popular and accessible multi-purpose language (notably in ML applications) and interest in Kotlin has jumped sharply, owing to its adoption as the official language for native Android development. Value in good work-life balance and professional growth opportunities trump compensation by a significant margin, and vastly outstrip company size/stability and perks. Digging a bit deeper into what ‘work-life balance’ policies matter, developers unanimously valued ‘flexible work hours, support for remote working and a focus on outcomes, not hours worked’ as the top three factors.

Not to be outdone, Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey interviewed over 100,000 developers, and is definitely worth a read as well.

January 16, 2019 — Richard Switzer