This post will make you rethink which programming languages are worth learning
- Introduction
There are many insights when it comes to learning programming languages to start a new career or to advance in your professional career.
You have probably heard some suggestions like “you need to start learning Javascript, HTML, and CSS to enter as fast as possible in the labor market” or “you need to learn machine learning to have better incomes”.
What about taking a look at what data is telling us? You can build a finer understanding of which are the next steps in your career if you analyze the graphs in this post.
The study presented in this post used data from the StackOverflow 2020 annual survey to deeper analyze this topic. The selected population to make this study was software developers who responded to the StackOverflow survey and have annual salaries between 2,000 and 300,000$, which in total represents 32,518 developers.
The survey contains data of software developers all over the world and some of the information and questions are:
“Annually converted salary in USD using the exchange rate on 2020–02–19”
“How much satisfied are you with your current job?”
“Which programming, scripting, and markup languages have you done extensive development work in over the past year?”
Part I: Which are the most popular programming languages in the labor market currently?
The survey question to gather the data to answer to this topic was:
“Which programming, scripting, and markup languages have you done extensive development work in over the past year?”
The graph below shows how many respondents worked with each programming language in 2019 and 2020.
We can see that the most popular languages in the labor market were Java, C and JavaScript.
We can also see that JavaScript and HTML/CSS are between the most popular languages, that is probably related to one of the most popular job position in the current labor market: web developer.
Python and SQL are also between the most popular languages, which is probably related to Data Science, Data Analysis and Data Engineering roles.
Part II. How is the job satisfaction related to the programming languages?
In order to answer to this question, the data related to job satisfaction was quantified from 1 to 5 (in which 1 is very dissatisfied and 5 very satisfied with their current job).
Programming languages shown in this graph correspond to the languages the developers worked with in 2019 and 2020.
We can see that the job satisfaction is weakly correlated to the programming language and less popular programming languages like Julia and Haskell showed the highest job satisfaction.
Part III. How is the programming language related to developers’ salaries?
In the graph below we can see the salaries of developers who worked with each language in 2019 and 2020.
As well as the job satisfaction graph, this graph (mean annual salaries) shows that developers who have worked with less popular languages like Scala, Perl, Rust, and Go have higher salaries.
Part IV. But what about Python?
We can see that python developers have, in average, higher salaries than developers who have worked with other programming languages like JavaScript, Java and HTML/CSS.
Maybe, we can infer that data scientists have higher mean salaries than web developers who work with JavaScript and HTML/CSS.
In order to statistically confirm this assumption, it was performed hypothesis testing with 95% significance. It was corroborated that Python developers have higher salaries than developers who have worked with: TypeScript, C++, Kotlin, C#, VBA, SQL, C, JavaScript, Java, HTML/CSS, Dart and PHP in 2019 and 2020, so far…
Conclusions
Some of the most interesting findings of this post are:
- JavaScript and HTML/CSS are between the most popular languages, which is probably related to one of the most popular job position in the current labor market: web developer.
- Python and SQL are between the most popular languages, which is probably related to Data Science, Data Analysis and Data Engineering roles.
- The programming language is weakly correlated to the job satisfaction of developers.
- Python developers have, in average, higher salaries than developers who have worked with programming languages related to web developing front-end roles like JavaScript and HTML/CSS.
With this in mind, what is the next programming language you are going to learn?
If you are interested in reviewing the details of the methodology, please visit:
