There are plenty of resources outside of the classroom that can help teach aspiring developers how to code, and it looks like they are taking advantage of them. A recent survey by Stack Overflow revealed that almost half of developers haven’t received a degree in computer science.
“There are many ways to learn how to code,” the report stated. “Forty-eight percent of respondents never received a degree in computer science. Thirty-three percent of respondents never took a computer science university course.”
Of that 48%, 41.8% said that they are self-taught, while the other 6% utilized online classes, coding boot camps and mentorship programs to learn how to code.
Another key finding in the report revealed that 70% of respondents spend at least two hours or more a week programming on the side as a hobby, working on side projects and open-source software. About 10% spend 20 or more hours a week doing extra programming.
“For many developers, programming is a labor of love,” the report stated. “The average developer spends more than seven hours per week coding on the side.”
According to the report, companies will pay developers more with skills in niche or emerging technologies. The top paying technologies, in order, are Cassandra, Spark, F#, Scala, Rust and Hadoop.
Other key findings revealed that JavaScript is the most-used programming language, with SQL and Java following behind; Swift is the most loved programming language; and Android developers outnumber iOS four to three.
The 2015 Stack Overflow Developer Survey examined 26,086 people from 157 countries, included mobile developers, front-end developers, full-stack developers and more.
“We conducted this survey to help us better understand our community, and to help our community better understand itself,” according to the survey’s website.
The full results can be found here.
