The outfit’s third annual report on the profession of developer found that the majority of developers (58.2 percent) learn to code either at university or at school. However, close to 35 percent (34.6 percent) consider themselves to be self-taught. Although more than a third of developers learnt to code all on their own, thanks to the free and handy resources such as tutorials, books, YouTube, etc., none of them considers that they simply learnt “on the job”.
More than 54 percent of the developers that have gone on to achieve a higher level of education hold either a Master’s or a Bachelor’s degree. Two percent even have a PhD. But as stated previously, formal education isn’t the only path to becoming a developer: 21.7 percent declare they don’t have any formal qualifications.
Those who do have a formal qualification generally studied computer science but close to 10 percent have studied something else entirely: business, architecture, marketing, philosophy.
Developers are always perfecting their skills and learning new ones. A massive 64.9 percent say they devour online written tutorials (blogs, official documentation, etc.). YouTube is also a popular go-to for developers hungry for knowledge .60.8 percent of developers state it as their favourite medium to improve their coding skills or learn new ones.
A vast majority of developers (69.7 percent) agree that learning is doing. The survey shows that developers are so passionate about their coding that 1 in 3 developers code for more than an hour a day outside of work or school.
CodinGame has also focused its survey on what’s trending this year in the programming world. Results show that the best-known frameworks in 2020 are Node.js, React and .NETCore, closely followed by AngularJS and Spring.
Javascript, Java, Python and C++ are the best-known programming languages: over half of the respondents answered that they know how to code in these languages. Rare are the developers who know how to code in Clojure, F# or OCaml.
It’s no wonder that Python, Javascript and Java are in the top three of best-known programming languages: it’s because they’re the most-loved coding languages by developers. Especially Python, that is in the top position for the third year in a row.
Regarding the most-dreaded programming languages, Java and Javascript seem to divide developers: the languages are cited both as two of the most-loved and most-hated languages by respondents.
There’s one thing, however, that everyone agrees upon - PHP is developers’ most-dreaded language.