Packt has shared the results of its recent Skill Up Survey. It joins the line up of reports that give us insights into the current developer population and reveals some interesting differences.  

This is the fourth year in which Packt has conducted a survey of developers and this time around almost 8,000 developers responded. Geographically the largest number of them live in Europe (3,190), followed by North America (2,385) and Asia (1,086). 

Although the survey was open to all developers and was publicized through diverse channels including I Programmer, there was bound to be some bias in this survey. The incentive for taking part was  80% off an order from the Packt store for books, e-books or videos on software and information technology topics, which probably attracted developers keen to learn new skills.

In terms of personal characteristics women were even more underrepresented in this survey than in Stack Overflow's much larger one (over 100,000 respondents), 5% in the SkillUp survey compared to 7% in Stack Overflow's. In terms of age, there were fewer young programmers - only 7% less than 24 compared to 26% - and more older ones - .13% over 55 compared to 2%. This age distribution partly accounts for the fact that respondents to the Packt survey wre characterized by long experience:

So while in the SO survey 45% of respondents had 3-8 years of experience and only 9% more than 20 years, in Packt's survey 55% had 10 years or more years of experience including 24% with more than 20 years. 

Respondents to the Packt survey also had on average more academic qualifications than those in the SO survey where only 2% had a Doctoral degree and 23% a Master's. As the chart shows almost half of respondents had a higher degree.

With regard to findings about developer roles between the two surveys, the fact that respondents to both could choose multiple roles makes it more difficult to discern real differences. The most marked  however is that SO has almost twice as many back-end developers, at 58% its biggest category compared to 30%. Packt, on the other hand has almost twice as many data scientists 14% compared to SO's 8%. Is this because data science is a topic Packt has focused on? 

The report itself has been published as a free e-book but you have to sign up with your name and email address to access it. The incentive offered is:

 offers relevant to you, exclusive discounts on our hottest titles, and leading edge free content.for downloading 

In conjunction with its Skill Up report, Packt is offering developers and programmers any eBook or video among its Bestsellers for $10 and any 5 such titles for $40. This offer expires on June 27th.

More Information

Skill Up 2018 - Developer Skills Report

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