A resent survey of software developers and their habits was released last month by Stack Overflow (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017).

The report found that 74% of the 64.000 developers who responded from 213 countries - identify as web developers. The next most common were desktop application developers (29%) and mobile application developers (23%).

Diversity among software developers is up, with women representing 10% of the developer workforce in the USA, up from 6% last year. Women were less like to be DevOps or systems administrators, and more likely to be data and graphic designers. One side note: more women than men reported they have been coding less than 1 year. Interestingly, 2.6% of respondents chose something other man or woman when asked to check of their gender.

A big focus of the survey was to see how software developers go about finding jobs. 27% said someone they knew contacted them about a position, and 18% said they were reached out to by someone at a company. Another 13% said they went through a headhunter to find a position.

What do software developers find most important in a job? Ongoing learning and the opportunity for professional growth and that even beat compensation. Another important factor for software developers was the ability to work remotely. Some 53% of those who work remotely reported a higher job satisfaction than those who were in an office.

How much do software developers love their work? 75% of software developers said they write code as a hobby. Can you imagine finance guys getting from work and then doing finance as a hobby?