News

Dev Survey: Mobile Developers Are Inexperienced, JavaScript Rules

• By David Ramel
• August 18, 2016

Web and mobile development company Netguru has published the results of an ongoing Web survey it's conducting, revealing that, on the mobile side of things, "the vast majority of coders are quite inexperienced."

That claim was based on the "State of Stack" survey the Poland-based company has been running with Typeform, which specializes in online data collection. Netguru's Radek Zaleski told ADTmag that the survey has garnered results from more than 1,400 developers to date. The company has been blogging about the results of the survey and recently published a full study of the data to highlight development trends, developer job preferences and professional experience of respondents.

On the professional experience side of things, Netguru claimed that the average mobile developer has created fewer than four apps.

"The results of the study came as quite surprising," Netguru said. "It turned out that although programming has recently become one of the most popular career paths, the vast majority of coders are quite inexperienced. 59 percent of developers have worked on 1-4 apps available in Google Play or App Store, 19 percent claimed to have delivered from 5 to 9 apps, while 9 percent have worked on over 10 apps. Surprisingly, 13 percent of devs declared that they haven’t put an app on the market yet."

The much-hyped wearables market shows even less activity, with 64 percent of respondents having not created any wearable apps. Some 33 percent have created fewer than 4, while 2 percent have created between five and 10. Only one single developer claimed to have built more than 10 wearable apps.

In other results of the survey, Netguru said "you're bound to find a job" if you know JavaScript and Ruby. "Javascript and Ruby were the two most popular languages among developers: 58 percent of developers declared they use Javascript on a daily basis, while 45 percent use Ruby.

"The third most popular language was PHP (30 percent of developers) and Java came as fourth (23 percent)," the study said. "In the ranking of languages learnt recently, however, Java and PHP scored quite low with 9 percent and 8 percent of the respondents. Both languages came behind Python (15 percent), Go and Elixir (both with 11 percent)."

On the JavaScript-only side of things, more than 36 percent of respondents said they would like to learn the latest version of JavaScript, ES2015, with TypeScript coming in second with 26 percent. Netguru speculated that the latter finding may be related the upcoming launch of Angular 2, which fully embraces TypeScript.

"The old version of JavaScript, ES5, has definitely gone out of the spotlight, with only 15 percent of developers indicating it as the technology they would like to learn," the study said. "What are the other languages that developers would like to learn in the coming months? Much fewer programmers want to learn CoffeeScript (9 percent), Elm (7 percent) and ClojureScript (6 percent). Only 1 percent declared they would like to learn Opal in the coming months, while nobody seems to want to learn ActionScript and LiveScript."

Another finding indicated that salary alone wasn't the most important factor for choosing a job.

"85 percent of developers think that interesting projects are more important than money," the study said. "The financial aspect of work is recognized as very important by 76 percent of devs and 38 percent of them want to be able to work from home."

Developers wishing to take the survey can access it here.