What Developer Trends Tell Us About The Future of Tech Talent | Stack Overflow SVP, Marketing

Hello everyone. Good afternoon. Welcome to my talk, what developer trends tell us about the future of tech talent. We'll get started in just about 10 or 15 seconds. I can't tell who's all here, but I think we're waiting for a few people to join from other platforms. All right, so we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you again for joining me this afternoon or this evening or this morning, depending on where you're based. I'm coming to you from New York City, where Stack Overflow is headquartered. Wish I was in sunny California though. It's a beautiful day here in New York. So like I said, today I'm going to be talking about what developer trends teach us about the future of tech talent. Why am I qualified to talk about this today? Because I work at Stack Overflow, so I run marketing communications for the company. I've been here for about three and a half years. And Stack Overflow, if you haven't heard of it, and I imagine if you are a for this talk, you have as one of the largest communities of developers in the world, we have about 13 plus years of experience working with developers. 100 million people who code visit our platforms every single month. And through tag data on that site, survey data, which we're going to talk a lot about today, and other insights, we like to think that we have our finger on the pulse of what developers are thinking, how they're working, and how it will continue to shape our workforce, especially in an environment when hiring is super challenging. So let's go ahead and get started. So like I said today we're going to dig into some of our survey data. So over the last 13 years of Stack Overflow's existence, for 11 of them we've gathered insights from our developer community with the largest survey of its kind. And this year's Results, we surveyed 83,000 people who code, 61,000 of whom are professional developers. They span 180 countries all over the world. Many countries are represented and this survey is a popular one. It's cited by Forbes, Business Insider, many top tech publications, in addition to lots of different technology platforms. People are always checking out our survey to see which languages are really up and coming, which languages are dipping in popularity, and which platforms and technology tools developers are passionate about. The first pillar that we learned through the survey data and our site data is pretty intuitive and that's the technology is changing quickly. I don't need to tell anyone on this call this. And especially in the past year and a a half we've we've read our share of thought leadership and think pieces on how technology is accelerating and changing, but that's really reflected in our data this year. So over 70% of developers are learning a new technology at least once a year. And just to put that into perspective, I spend a lot of time talking to high school students and college students. That means by the time that someone graduates from college or university, the latest developer language or technology would have changed at least four times. And with technology changing so quickly, we need to consider how we hire and upskill tomorrow's workforce. Again, especially in the context of the hiring shortage that we're seeing today and the really, really tough landscape. It's always been tough for developers. Developers, as many of you probably know, don't respond to InMail on LinkedIn. You have to court them if you want them to work at your company. Employer branding is super important. That's especially true today. And one way to do it is by prioritizing learning. So because technology is evolving really quickly, developers are turning to online resources, forms and courses to learn new skills. The increased focus on L and D means it's an investment that you must make. But the shift to online learning means that it might not be as expensive as it once was. And so this year, in this year's survey, we used a catch all for online resources, videos, blogs, et cetera. I think it's something we're going to want to double click on next year. But what we're seeing anecdotally is developers learning to code from platforms like YouTube, for example, from apps like Solo Learn as opposed to enrolling in full coding boot camps or university programs. Developers are getting much scrappier, especially around the world in terms of how they consume information, how they upskill, and what that means is a real opportunity for companies to invest in smaller scale programs than they once did. Technical certifications remain really important, but tools like Stack Overflow Again, podcasts, YouTube and various apps are represent a real opportunity for L and D programs within a company to invest in upskilling their staff and ensuring that they feel engaged and just reinforcing what I just said. Opportunities to learn are a real priority. So this is from our survey a couple of years ago, but the data remains largely the same. And that's that 60% of respondents cited wanting to work with a new tech as a driver for leaving a job second only to higher compensation. And this is especially true as people think really long term. I think one thing that the pandemic has done is it's really gotten us to think about our careers more long term. And so comp on one day or comp today for this year is important, but how employable a developer is five or ten years from now is even more important. And so, especially in a competitive hiring landscape like we see today, this is one opportunity where companies who don't have this sort of ote opportunities or the equity that some other companies can offer can really say, hey, our company is working with cutting edge technologies. We'll invest in L and D around those technologies, upscaling you, and it could be a really powerful recruiting tool. And so, just diving into the languages and frameworks that we talked about in our surveys, languages and frameworks with diverse and efficient implementations that are easy to learn continue to be the most popular. So Rust, you know, and this is a slide that reporters ask us for all of the time that's flashed up at lots of technical recruiting conferences. But Rust is the most loved language in our survey for the sixth straight year, and Python was the most wanted for the fifth straight year. And while it's not as new as Rust, Python is really easy to learn. It's applicable across industries. It's one of the most widely implemented languages. And programs written in Python tend to be really clear and readable. In fact, I was just on the call where an analyst on the marketing team on my team wrote a program in Python and was presenting it to the marketing and product teams. So developers working with Rust and Python see higher median salaries earlier in their careers compared to others. And so if it's not part of your tech stack now, it likely will be in the future. And again, looking for developers who specialize in those languages, who understand them, is really important and a big opportunity. The other thing sort of reinforcing what we saw in the last slide is that flexible languages attract higher salaries. So Rust, for example, tracks the highest median salary for under 10 years of experience by far. And we see this to be the case among all of the languages that are really easy to learn. New frameworks that are easy to learn are also skyrocketing in popularity. So Svelte, which is a new language this year, takes the top spot as the most loved framework, likely because it's easy to pick up open source and a compiler framework that is more efficient than its peers. And that last point is really important. The one around open source we constantly see relative to the tags on our site, again visited by 100 million people, is companies that have adopted open source technology tend to be better received by developers and by coders, and also have a Much easier time recruiting them to join their organizations. And this slide is around the cloud. So flexibility in the cloud also fuels popularity. So one interesting addition to our survey this year was asking how people use Google Cloud. Microsoft Azure, which made substantial gains from last year, though AWS continues to lead as the most widely used, the most loved and the most wanted cloud platform. So one thing that we think is interesting is one we're going to keep an eye on this, make sure this question is really longitudinal in nature, but it represents an opportunity for developers who specialize in one cloud platform to continue to be very marketable and for all of the cloud providers to continue to take share from aws. All right, so continuing on through the top ways to recruit technical talent relative to how you sort of organize your company, agility and flexibility remain really paramount themes. As we build technical teams, developers are gravitating towards more flexible work environments. And I don't need to tell you this, I'm coming to you from my apartment in New York where I've been working for the last year and a half. Last week I was in Iowa, where I'm from. But developers were really ahead of this trend. Stack Overflow, a developer centric company, was almost 50% remote prior to the pandemic. GitHub, of course, has long been the gold standard of remote work, a very developer centric company. But we think about flexibility in greater terms than just where someone works. So the percentage of developers employed full time is decreasing and the percentage of professional developers who are self employed as independent contractors or freelancers is increasing. This means that tech talent will become harder to recruit if you're building and less favored languages and frameworks, and also if your policies and your benefits don't meet the standards of other top companies. So when it comes to flexible work arrangements, for example, it means that you have to really embrace work from home arrangements. You have to allow for stipends around L and D. For example, one thing that we do at Stack Overflow is we allow folks to attend conferences, virtual or otherwise, to work from where they want. And we've also created a culture that's incredibly inclusive of work from home arrangements as well. So for example, again, long before the pandemic, if one person on a call was remote, everyone on that call would be remote. And that really spoke to our values of developing an inclusive culture. And it helped us recruit technical talent from day one, even when we weren't the known brand that we are today. And so flexible schedule is another area of flexibility beyond just where people work and so, you know, I think there's a stereotype that developers often don't start work until 10 or 10:30 in the morning. Although that stereotype tends to be sort of true or was when I was coming into the office every day. So a flexible time or a flexible schedule in addition to a remote work option is a really attractive thing for the technical talent you might be recruiting. So for example, at Stack Overflow, one thing that we do, regardless of the role that we're recruiting for, is we state what working hours have to be for any position. So the position might be global in nature or North America or EMEA based, but you have to be online between the hours of 11am and 1pm Eastern. For example, any meeting that's scheduled outside of those hours, the expectation would be that that person wouldn't need to attend unless it were a top priority or they were in agreement around it in advance. And so thinking beyond the pandemic today, thinking beyond just where a person work, but how they work as well is really important in embracing flexibility. So what does all this mean to you? So, so one, on the technical side, Talend is going to cling to easy, efficient implementations of language and frameworks that they can learn online. That's especially true of the next generation of coders. Creating technical foundations that are flexible will help you win. So one, flexible, easy to learn technology attracts, engage, attracts and engages talent. Two, invest in learning opportunities from your teams and stop thinking about that as being a robust L and D program when it can be as simple as a stipend to upskill on a specific course, download a learning app, or carve out time for an entire team to watch a YouTube video together, attend a training, prioritize a podcast, et cetera. 3. I got a little ahead of myself. Make sure the types of learning opportunities are diverse. So, you know, again, don't take sort of the antiquated approach to this is what L and D looks like, because that's not true for coders, especially not true for younger coders and developers. They're really open to lots of different learning types and as we know, everyone has really different learning styles. 4. Compensate talent accordingly and reward growth and learning. And so we think about compensation across multiple dimensions. Of course, in a hiring landscape as competitive as this, it's important to pay people equitably and fairly. But it's also important to prioritize remote work to encourage flexible environments. If people are expected to work from home, to give them stipends to do so to ensure their technology is replaced, to Keep up with the latest trends and making sure that people are truly taken care of. And number five, flexible work is the new standard for engineers and technical talent. We spend a lot of time talking and thinking about how marketers, product folks, sales folks, will continue to adapt to this much more remote work environment. The pandemic has certainly accelerated that trend for technical talent and engineers. It's not going to go away. And so we have to think about flexibility across multiple dimensions. And we have to ensure that the policies of the organization are written for the engineers and for the technical talent in addition to the organization at large. So those are just a few things that we think that we've learned from our survey data, again from 13 years of being a company that obsesses with developers and engineers. And we hope that it helps you attract technical talent, engage technical talent, and stay winning in a landscape that is super tough. And I know there are lots of talks scheduled around for Saxtra this year. That said, I'm happy to take any questions that folks have in the five minutes that we have left. So one question that I got recently that I can, that I can lead with this morning is in a competitive hiring environment like this, how do we ensure that candidates make it through our process quickly so that we don't lose them? Because a competitive engineer might be interviewing for three or four jobs at once. And one thing that we've done, especially in the last three to six months, and one thing that we'll continue to prioritize is making sure that our interview process is really, really tight. So we spend a lot of time thinking about technical tests that folks take, the interview structure, the questions that are written. But what we feel is really important is moving people through the process really quickly and ensuring that they can get to an answer within a week or so. So I have a couple of questions now wondering how you would recommend mid career professional getting trained and moving into the data science or business analytical job. It's a great question. I think one thing that we've seen in our inner sur over the past several years is that data science jobs are incredibly hot. So data scientists learning languages like R, for example, have not traditionally been thought of as developers. And that's starting to change. So data scientists and business analysts are increasingly desirable to companies, especially SaaS companies or anyone who works on a SaaS model. And data scientists are also populating teams outside of the historical mandate. So we have a data scientist on the marketing team, for example. There are data scientists on the product team, on the engineering team. And so one Thing that I think is a powerful tool for anyone looking to break into the field is looking at our survey data, seeing the languages that data scientists are learning, like R, for example, which continues to gain share and upskilling yourself on those, and then picking an area to specialize within product, within marketing, within finance or Corp Dev, for example. Because again, all of those sort of functional teams and fields are adopting Data Science. Are DevOps gaining ground or is it still about best of breed tools, DevOps platforms? That's a good question and one that we have to go back to the data to look at. I remember the data quite well from when we were doing some interviews with some DevOps centric publications, but it's been a little while since I've reviewed, so that's something that we have to get back to you on. Are we using third party assessment and expert interviewing to augment our teams? So it really depends on the team. We are not to my knowledge. I don't believe we're using expert interviewing, but we have used third party assessments in the past, I believe. I'm not sure what our engineering team is doing today, although there are no shortage of tools that are doing that work and that are doing it quite well and people are seeing efficiencies around. So a lot of I know a lot of those companies advertise on stack overflow and so I have a lot of familiarity with the marketing folks. But I'm not sure what our engineering team is using today. So we have about two minutes left. Three great questions so far. Happy to take one or two more if there's anything else. All right. If there are no other questions, I think we can call it so. Again, thank you for attending my talk today. I hope you learned a thing or two. And again.