Here at Stable Kernel, we take our engineering culture seriously. Continuous improvement of both ourselves and our collective attitudes toward software development is one of our core values. With this in mind, when the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey came out last month, there was a flurry of conversation internally. The survey provided an opportunity for us to take a look at our culture and how we stack up versus the larger community as a whole, as well as pay attention to the trends of our ever-changing industry.
Before I start commenting on the specifics of the survey, as a methodological note, we limited our comparisons to U.S. based data and professional data.
Developer Type – I was very surprised to see that mobile engineers make up 20% of the respondents to Stack Overflow. With the iPhone being released in 2007 and Android in 2008, the fact that mobile development is now a fifth of all software engineering is astonishing. It drives home the necessity of mobile as a critical part of our company’s software offerings and why we believe in building software with a strong foundation for our clients because it is important to their overall tech stack.
Contributing to Open Source – Only half (43.6%) of software engineers contribute to the open source community, but at Stable Kernel, we feel differently. Our CEO Joe Conway developed Aqueduct, a web services framework written in Google’s Dart language, and it’s open source for many reasons. Open source projects are more reliable because any developer can dive in and see what’s going on and contribute. We believe that helping improve the community as a whole helps us as well.
Ways Developers Learn On Their Own – This stuck out to me as an odd piece of data. Attending conferences and learning from subject matter experts isn’t even a listed option for professional developers. Nonetheless, I know that my colleagues and I always come back from conferences with multitudes of new ideas and concepts to share with everyone. As I said, continuous improvement of everyone is important to us, which is why Stable Kernel provides every developer with a conference stipend to spend attending the most impressive conferences our community has to offer. If you’re going to be at Google I/O this year, come find me! Let’s talk about Android things.
Most Loved/Dreaded Languages – Speaking of Android things, I am very proud that Kotlin ranked as the #2 most loved languages. Since we switched over from Java, it has been pretty great. All of our new development is in Kotlin, which makes everything about our day-to-day jobs more pleasant. On the iOS end, I’m happy to see Swift as the 6th most popular language since it is what we use for iOS development. I’m also proud to say that we don’t use a single one of the 20 most dreaded languages.
How Do Developers Feel About Their Careers and Jobs? – 45% of respondents are only slightly satisfied, or worse, with our jobs – That’s far too high. Another 36% are only moderately satisfied. Stable Kernel tracks our employee satisfaction using a service called OfficeVibe, and we are proud to say that we rank in the top 10% of companies using OfficeVibe based on 10 key engagement metrics to measure team health. I think there are several factors contributing to this high engagement score, but to me, we build a culture where developers are builders and not maintainers. I think our continuous environment of growing and learning new languages or technologies is what sets us apart. Enjoying where you work is a critical part of writing good code. It’s hard to focus when all you want to do is leave.
Job Search Status – And finally, I see that nearly 70% of U.S. developers are open to new job opportunities. If you want to work at a forward-thinking company that cares about its developers working with the latest technologies, improving themselves, and contributing to our community, I humbly suggest you head over to our jobs page.
