When it comes to their jobs, developers want to have a healthy balance between work and life outside of work. This is according to a new report from dev.to. Dev.to is an online community for programmers.
The report, What developers want in a job, collected data from more than 21,000 users from the Key Values website. Key Values is a site dedicated to helping job-seeking engineers and developers find places that share their same values. The site was created by self-made developer Lynne Tye who provides a list of values developers can use to filter out companies. Companies that participate are asked to select eight values from that list that describes their team culture.
According Key Values latest list, developers value work and life balance as well as high quality code bases the most. Those two values were ranked first and second on the list regardless of the community or country.
In a blog post, Tye writes “seeing ‘Work/Life Balance’ and ‘High Quality Code Base’ at the top of every list, regardless of community or country, says something about engineering culture at large. Clearly, the bar is too high when it comes to hours and too low when it comes to quality.”
Tye also looked at how the dev.to community values differ from others such as the Hacker News community. Visitors from dev.to valued workplaces that were good for junior developers, ideal for parents and provided pair programs much more highly than other communities. She found that visitors referred to the site from Hacker News did not care for junior developer or parent considerations. Instead, they valued impressive team members, team diversity, and eating lunch again.
Other key values from the dev.to survey included: flexible work arrangements, promotes from within, open source contributor, design-driven, and internship programs.
“Key Values has given me the opportunity to talk to, work with, and learn from hundreds of engineers across the globe,” writes Tye. “I hope that sharing this data will spark interesting conversations for others the way it has for me, and help employers and employees think more about value alignment at the workplace.”
