Good to Great — How to become the top 5% developer in the world!Max ZachowBlockedUnblockFollowFollowingJun 17Every Year, Stack Overflow is providing us with many interesting insights of their annual Developer Survey.
You will get a great understanding of the markets most demanded programming languages, highest paid roles and much more.
At Graphext we are also always very interested in the survey results, but this year we wanted to try to find insights by ourselves.
Thanks to Stack Overflow that published their Survey Data we could simply run our own analysis using a different approach.
By creating clusters based on all the answers a survey respondent provided we are going to find typical and more detailed developer profiles.
So today we will show you how we can move from this:To This:To spice our analysis up a little, we asked ourselves the following question before starting our profiling analysis:Who are the top 5% best earning Developers?Filtering the 88883 Survey Respondents by those who have answered most of the questions we end up with a population of 52545.
From those we select the 95% Quantile of the Annual USD Salary Column and we end up with around 2600 Respondents for our Project.
All these people have a minimum Income of 573,108 USD per year and we want to understand who these people are.
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General NetworkAfter feeding our Dataset into Graphext we end up with this beautiful Graph that you can see above.
There are several uniquely colored groups of developers already recognizable, and with one click we can find out what are the main characteristics of these people.
In the following we will show you now the main variables that explain a Profile.
The values of each variable are sorted by Uplift, which means:Imagine only very few people (6%) in the whole population program in VBA.
When we create a Filter of our Population it is unlikely that VBA will become the most important programming language in that Selection.
BUT if its proportion increases to — let’s say — 12%, its significance for that Selection doubled and we therefore say that it is an important feature of that Person.
On the other hand: If 50% of all the People program in Java but in our Cluster only 30% do so, that Characteristic is less important than others even if it would be the single most used Programming Language.
Profile #1: Americans with Bachelor DegreesKey FactsSome study besides workingData & Business Analysts, Database Admin, Designer, QA, Desktop Applications, .
Bachelor and Associate’s DegreeWork in big CompaniesImportant Languages: VBA, C#, F#, PHP, SQL, .
They look for flexible schedules, company culture and remote work options when deciding for a job offerProfile #2: German DevOps and Backend DevsKey FactsDevOps, Backend Devs, Dev.
for Game and Graphic,.
Masters Degree, Professional DegreeNot very satisfied with their CareerBelieve in the Quality of Open Source SoftwareImportant Languages: Rust, Scala, Erlang, Java, .
They look for Diversity, Professional Development and Financial Performance of the Company when deciding for a job offerProfile #3: British with PhDs & MastersKey FactsExecutives, Mobile Devs, DevOps, Backend, Front-End, Full-Stack, System Admin, .
Master & Doctoral DegreesAlmost all of them work with MacOSThey work on average less than 40 HoursImportant Languages: Dart, WebAssembly, Clojure, Ruby, JavaScriptThey look for Diversity, Company Culture and the Industry when deciding for a job offerConclusion & AdviceEven though the profiles are very different we can extract a few guidelines for you to enter the top 5%.
In the US you don’t need a Master Degree, start working right after your Bachelor.
Whereas in Germany and the UK, the traditional path through Master Degree and PhD is more common.
Learning Niche Languages like Rust or WebAssembly will give you a competitive advantage and make you more demanded in the market.
Company Culture and Diversity of the Company are frequently named criteria for the top 5% when they decided about a job offer.
Choosing a workplace that suits you well seems crucial to be successful.
Be open minded about your career choice.
You can make a great Salary as a DevOps or Full-Stack Developer as well as a Designer or a Developer QAOf course, there are more clusters and insights to discover which is why we are making the project accessible to you.
By following this link you can access the project and start your exploration journey.
If you want to know more, feel free to ask us for a demo right here or join our Webinar on June 19.
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