Despite Tumultuous Job Market, New Survey Shows Majority of Developers Feel Confident in Their Careers

CoderPad’s annual Tech Hiring Survey reveals developer sentiment and priorities; tech recruiters’ 2023 outlook and needs

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CodinGame, a CoderPad company, today released the sixth annual global Tech Hiring Survey, surveying nearly 14,000 software developers and technical recruiters globally, which found that the majority of developers (74%) feel confident in their jobs, which includes 33% who feel even more secure than last year.

Despite volatility in the tech sector, the overall outlook in the developer community is positive. Developers also feel optimistic about their ability to find a new role, as more than one in two developers (52%) are planning to leave their current job within the next year. Recruiters are also seeing this trend, with 42% reporting that there’s been an increase in tech employee resignations in their company in the past 12 months.

"Developers are planning to leave their companies. This is a wake up call for tech leads, CEOs and companies in general not to get overconfident,” said Amanda Richardson, CEO of CoderPad. “It seems that developers aren't necessarily willing to head back to the office or commit to 'hardcore' work hours that require them to give up their lives - and instead they're going to look for a job elsewhere."

It’s all about the benjamins (and balance)

The survey also uncovered what matters most to developers when looking for a job. Salary (53%), work/life balance (38%), and remote working options (28%) were the top three factors, respectively, marking a shift from last year when salary was ranked third and remote working options ranked eighth. The factor that had the most significant fall from last year was technical challenges/interesting problems to solve, dropping from first place to fourth.

Indicative of rising inflation rates, developers who are thinking about quitting or who had recently changed jobs cited a higher salary as the main reason (67%) behind their decision.

• Money Talks: 67% of developers have received a pay raise in the past 12 months.
  • Among those who received a raise at their current company, 40% say it was between 0-5%.
  • Among those who received a raise by changing jobs, 40% say it was over 25%.
• Off-Site: The majority of teams are now hybrid, with only 15% of developers working 100% on-site.

Developers are still in demand

Despite a rocky economic climate, data shows developer hiring may experience a comeback in 2023. While down from last year (35%), nearly a quarter of tech recruiters (23%) are still looking to recruit more than 50 developers this year. And nearly half (46%) of recruiters say they’ll have more hiring budget this year than last year, while about a third (35%) say they’ll have the same.

• Importance of retention: Continued uncertainty combined with hiring freezes, layoffs, and developers open to switching jobs has made developer retention a priority, with 42% of recruiters citing it as the number one investment in 2023. This knocks “candidate experience” off the top spot from last year.
• Contractors: 63% of recruiters say that their company hires contingent workers for tech needs, up from 42% last year.

Skills, Skills, Skills

Let the skills say it all: talent is talent, regardless of background. In another signal that companies should rethink outdated degree requirements, nearly half (45%) of developers surveyed do not have a university degree in Computer Science, and close to a third consider themselves to be primarily self-taught.

• What’s Hot:
  • The most in-demand roles in 2023 are: backend developers (55%), full-stack developers (54%) and applications developers (45%).
    • For their part, developers think the most sought-after positions will be full-stack developers (35%), data scientists (34%) and cybersecurity engineers (28%).
  • The top three skills recruiters want to hire for this year: web development, DevOps, and database software development.
  • Node.js, React, and .NETCore are consistently the most used and in demand frameworks. CoderPad’s platform now supports interviews in the most popular frameworks.
• Interview Preferences: Both recruiters and developers consider live coding interviews to be their preferred interview format (respectively, 4.10 and 3.97 out of 5).

For more information, view the full report here.

About CoderPad

CoderPad is a simple yet powerful online technical hiring platform that makes it easy to interview in the candidate’s language of choice so hiring managers can quickly get a quality signal of an engineer’s skills. We empower customers around the world to screen and interview best-in-class engineers with our comprehensive and flexible technology, responsive customer success team, and devotion to a great candidate experience. Headquartered in San Francisco, CoderPad serves over 4,000 customers, has hosted more than 2.5 million technical interviews in 30+ languages, and through CodinGame, enables 2 million+ developers to sharpen their skills, for free, by playing games and solving puzzles. Visit http://www.coderpad.io for more information.