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DevSkiller IT skills report 2021: Demand and hiring trends

107 points by gru232 5y ago

nsonha 5y ago
I doubt these tests means anything, Autralian companies use standard tests way less than US companies, there is no reason for Australian devs to just be good at these spontaneoysly.
- deviation 5y ago
  Born and bred Australian here. In my ~10 year career I've never worked with nor worked for anyone who didn't advocate for (close to) complete code coverage. Can I ask where you've learned this?
  - nsonha 5y ago
    I'm not taking about that kind of test, I'm talking about coding tests for interview. Majority of mine has been either light pairing or take home, not the "standard" leetcode type.
sandreas 5y ago
Did you miss Bulgaria with its 91%?
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  Unless I missed something, Australia was at 93%
  - sgloutnikov 5y ago
    Either the map is wrong which has Bulgaria at 91.21% or the chart below the map is wrong which does not have it listed.
    - keithnz 5y ago
      It's missing quite a few, they may have omitted places which didn't have large sample sets?
shric 5y ago
> Switzerland $95,753 Australia $85,167 Denmark $73,017 United States $71,858 This is a bit misleading taken at face value as the US has loads of smaller cities with far lower cost of living whereas almost all of Australia's software jobs are in Sydney, Melbourne and smaller capitals. The Silicon Valley wages are at least twice as good as Sydney and nowhere near a proportional cost of living increase.
- jpgvm 5y ago
  Sydney is more expensive than Silicon Valley so if anything it's an even worse comparison than it seems on the surface.
  - smnrchrds 5y ago
    I find that hard to believe. Do you perhaps mean compared to local wages? https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+States&country2=Australia&city1=San+Francisco%2C+CA&city2=Sydney https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
    - andykx 5y ago
      I don't wish to refute your central point, but I've been told in the past that numbeo.com is not a reliable source.
    - schappim 5y ago
      As a Sydney-sider, these numbers are not matching my lived experience.
      - ImTheMaddest 5y ago
        Also from Sydney, felt they were fairly accurate. Which numbers did you feel were unrealistic?
  - nl 5y ago
    I read the comment this way too, but the OP is actually agreeing with you. They are saying that Silicon Valley salaries are much higher than Sydney, and the cost of living in SV isn't anywhere near double (as you point out, it's probably cheaper than Sydney).
iamgopal 5y ago
Tense and Stressed mind can not create art which software development is more or less. The results show that, and not the skill levels.
dfee 5y ago
So, uh, is this “devs killer” or “dev skiller” - “the automated technical screening & talent management platform”? Kind of a joke, but for the devs who are on the receiving side of this platform, maybe not really.
bori5 5y ago
Page not found for me
bonjourmr 5y ago
Do you know what is a real shame? This statistic doesn't really correlate with the highest quality output. Most of them who stay put in Australia never really get to put their skills to good use. Our digital landscape is quite conservative & somewhat arguably boring, consisting of mainly traditional finance/banking & insurance - and we all know how these companies work internally (digital as a cost centre). Don't get me wrong, there are a few startups floating around who are growing up e.g., Canva, Campaign Monitor, Atlassian (for which I'd argue is a US company), but even the bigger ones only hire a couple of thousand on-shore devs a piece. Most of the good devs with half an inkling go overseas when they finish Uni to earn good coin and work on far more shaping stuff. I think we are risk-averse in Australia due to life being pretty good on average here (so what's the point?), which is fine, but more jarringly; the Government do very little to assist or incentivise entrepreneurs. I wish they did more, we'd see way more talent remain here and plenty of more ideas come to life!
- shric 5y ago
  To be fair we have it far easier in Sydney than over in Silicon Valley. For example most (but not all) Sydney Googlers choose to stay in Sydney even though they have the chance to relocate to e.g. Mountain View or Sunnyvale for more than double the comp. This is because of the work life balance and culture here in Sydney compared to over there. (I worked at Google Sydney for 5 years)
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    What are the differences in W/L balance and culture between SV and Sydney?
    - shric 5y ago
      In Sydney It's generally fine to arrive at 9 and leave at 5 as long as you produce reasonable output. In SV I noticed almost everyone worked way over 40 hours per week, overtime was the expectation and the norm. I would assume this is not across all teams in all cases, just my first hand experience and also second hand anecdotes from colleagues.
harry8 5y ago
I am wildly suspicious of this data. How could it possibly be audited? The presenter of the data has obvious ulterior motives to make something up where the data is inadequate or flat out lie to support their business. The hook got them in here (that's not a dev test, that's a dev test), so well played. But shouldn't we just dismiss all of this as yet more BS until they can show otherwise. It's far, far too clean.
- yoz-y 5y ago
  I think their motive is to create buzz for their platform. You have a clickbaity article that will put people against each other, people will share it with snark remarks on reddit and so on. Not much reason to lie on the data though, it could very well be just pulled from some internal dashboard for less work.
- Bootvis 5y ago
  Me as well, if I understand this too 5 list per country lots of Dutch companies are hiring from Kenya. I’ve been to meetups, I’m on LinkedIn and I’ve never seen anyone from Kenya. I’ve seen a lot of people from all over Europe and India.
- strogonoff 5y ago
  > 94% of developers finished the coding test sent to them for recruitment purposes, up from 93% last year. This shows that candidates who are sent a relevant, stack-specific coding test are taking them more seriously than ever before. This could also say that they are now choosing to send tests to more desperate candidates than before. Either way, I see no way for stats like this to not suffer from selection bias, and after scanning the article I wouldn’t take the numbers too seriously.
pjmlp 5y ago
Portugal on 4th place! Might not be the headline, but surely warms my heart.
ggm 5y ago
I'm doing my best to drag the scores back. After all, regressiom tends to the mean.
mxcrossb 5y ago
> In other words, only 10% of developers from the given country scored higher in their coding tests than the results you see below. We made this change because the mean score includes outliers that often influence averages and skew results. That feels risky?
a-dub 5y ago
"australian developers score the highest on coding tests administered by companies in new zealand that refer to all software development as IT and are most popular amongst people who run windows and work for IT outsourcing companies like thoughtworks" - should be the title. australians actually do cool stuff, they invented and commercialized the cochlear implant! as mentioned in comments here though, a lot i think get relegated to consulting or IT type stuff to support existing business.
- deviation 5y ago
  As a ThoughtWorker I can confirm that the IT space here is pretty heavily influenced by strong coding principals. The quality of work I do on a day-to-day basis is under high (but very open and friendly) scrutiny that I've learned to love.
maeln 5y ago
Isn't it more like "more company in country X use our product therefore, more developer in country X train for our specific test" ?
jjjeii3 5y ago
Please also note that German software engineers have much less money comparing to almost any other country. The average salary is 4900 Euro and after tax this will be 2900 Euro !!! Even software engineers in a poor country like Ukraine make more money after tax than that and they also have much lower expenses comparing to Germany. So why someone living in Germany will spend a lot of time for study, learning all the technologies etc if you will only earn 15% more money than a cleaning guy without any education and who can spend all his free time with friends instead of improving qualification? So Germany is a failed state for software developers.
- kessma 5y ago
  100% agree. unless you get a fully remote job, you need to really really love germany to stay there as a software developer. A friend of mine topped out at 90k with 10y experience working in a bank (which tradtionally already pay higher salaries) and that is a number for which I could find exactly zero skilled developers here in California. It would be perceived as a borderline insult. And no, that money isn't eaten by healthcare. I paid far more for healthcare for my family in Germany than I do here in the US.
- etripe 5y ago
  > Please also note that German software engineers have much less money comparing to almost any other country. It's hilarious to me that most people in European countries will think this about their own country. I should know, as a Belgian having lived in Sweden with friends all over. A 40% overall tax rate is among the highest, but about the same level as Belgium or Denmark as far as I understand. 4900€ gross as an average definitely isn't bad, though - that would probably be more like 3500€ here. As to your conclusion of a "failed state": am I correct in assuming that like in Belgium, France, Holland and to a minor degree Sweden, the valuation of management types is much higher than any technical functions (i.e. engineers, programmers, devops) in Germany?
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  It's not great but that kind of salary is still higher than most of western Europe. Young software engineers in France or Spain don't earn as much.
bbromhead 5y ago
This comment is super flagrant self promotion, but if you are an Australian developer who wants to stay in Australia and work at a scale only usually available in the US. Check out https://www.instaclustr.com/careers https://www.instaclustr.com/careers We work with companies like Doordash, Atlassian, Sonos and Dream 11 running some of their most important databases at massive scale.. and these are just the ones we can mention. On top of that we are in Canberra :) Though if you wanna stay in Sydney or Melbourne that's cool to!
tomsyouruncle 5y ago
This statistic actually says nothing at all about 90% of the people who took the test so the headline is pretty misleading. You can’t really talk about “Australian developers” (or indeed any other nation’s) and ignore 90% of the distribution ! It’s a bit absurd to say you’re not using the mean because you’re worried about the effect of outliers and then instead choose a statistic that largely focuses on outliers! Why not use the median?
Borrible 5y ago
Congratulations! Well done AusDevs! But the more interesting metric is, is this correlated with having the highest pay? Cost of living normalized of course.
shruubi 5y ago
As a fellow Australian I have to agree with some of my fellow countrymen when they say that compared to the US, our tech industry is much more conservative and focused on banking, insurance and real-estate. From my perspective, we have a number of great developers, its just that most of us (myself included), don't work in places where our tech and work is announced almost like an advertisement. Something that, at least for me, is a weird thing to watch happen so often from US tech companies. I think a big contributing factor to such a conservative tech industry comes from a general lack of investment in start-up businesses either due to a lack of interest from the government, or from risk-adverse investors who would rather put their money into safe bets like real-estate.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
meetismurder 5y ago
I'm guessing because Australian bugs are more dangerous.
RobertoG 5y ago
I don't understand the colors in that map. For instance, Germany and France, colors vs. percentages, don't make sense to me. Are my eyes the problem? It would be kind of ironic that it was a bug.
hobos_delight 5y ago
I run an engineering group at Microsoft in Australia, we have a reasonable though not (IMO) difficult screening / interview process. However despite this, we find it hard to get candidates through our pipeline - even to the point where interviewers have been told "I have 15 years of programming experience, why do you expect me to code now". Now, I'm positive we could improve the screening and process we have in place for this - but by the same token it's not terrible... Yes, MSFT is not a FAANG and maybe there is some selection bias in the people who apply - but we also do manage to attract and retain good people who get through the process. We also offer a competitive package for Sydney, with the ability to take that and work remote from anywhere in Australia, if anyone is looking for a SWE role :)
- twalla 5y ago
  If you have 10-15 years experience you probably also have commitments outside of work that preclude you from wanting to sink multiple hours into doing toy problems and practicing STAR responses to behavioral questions. Most whiteboarding is just a legal, thinly veiled age filter.
  - hobos_delight 5y ago
    I don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation to have a candidate write some code in a screening interview for a software engineering position. When a candidate flat out refuses to, then this is a huge red flag. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best one we have. I don’t agree with your whiteboarding assertion.
- nsonha 5y ago
  From memory I remember most roles in MS AU are of Solution Engineer types, do you guys have any product development done here in Australia?
  - hobos_delight 5y ago
    Yes we’re only a small SWE office, working on Azure Infrastructure. Though we are hiring and growing :)

107 points by gru232 5y ago

I doubt these tests means anything, Autralian companies use standard tests way less than US companies, there is no reason for Australian devs to just be good at these spontaneoysly.

deviation 5y ago
Born and bred Australian here. In my ~10 year career I've never worked with nor worked for anyone who didn't advocate for (close to) complete code coverage. Can I ask where you've learned this?
- nsonha 5y ago
  I'm not taking about that kind of test, I'm talking about coding tests for interview. Majority of mine has been either light pairing or take home, not the "standard" leetcode type.

sandreas 5y ago

Did you miss Bulgaria with its 91%?

alfiedotwtf 5y ago
Unless I missed something, Australia was at 93%
- sgloutnikov 5y ago
  Either the map is wrong which has Bulgaria at 91.21% or the chart below the map is wrong which does not have it listed.
  - keithnz 5y ago
    It's missing quite a few, they may have omitted places which didn't have large sample sets?

shric 5y ago

> Switzerland $95,753 Australia $85,167 Denmark $73,017 United States $71,858 This is a bit misleading taken at face value as the US has loads of smaller cities with far lower cost of living whereas almost all of Australia's software jobs are in Sydney, Melbourne and smaller capitals. The Silicon Valley wages are at least twice as good as Sydney and nowhere near a proportional cost of living increase.

jpgvm 5y ago
Sydney is more expensive than Silicon Valley so if anything it's an even worse comparison than it seems on the surface.
- smnrchrds 5y ago
  I find that hard to believe. Do you perhaps mean compared to local wages? https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+States&country2=Australia&city1=San+Francisco%2C+CA&city2=Sydney https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
  - andykx 5y ago
    I don't wish to refute your central point, but I've been told in the past that numbeo.com is not a reliable source.
  - schappim 5y ago
    As a Sydney-sider, these numbers are not matching my lived experience.
    - ImTheMaddest 5y ago
      Also from Sydney, felt they were fairly accurate. Which numbers did you feel were unrealistic?
- nl 5y ago
  I read the comment this way too, but the OP is actually agreeing with you. They are saying that Silicon Valley salaries are much higher than Sydney, and the cost of living in SV isn't anywhere near double (as you point out, it's probably cheaper than Sydney).

iamgopal 5y ago

Tense and Stressed mind can not create art which software development is more or less. The results show that, and not the skill levels.

dfee 5y ago

So, uh, is this “devs killer” or “dev skiller” - “the automated technical screening & talent management platform”? Kind of a joke, but for the devs who are on the receiving side of this platform, maybe not really.

bori5 5y ago

Page not found for me

bonjourmr 5y ago

Do you know what is a real shame? This statistic doesn't really correlate with the highest quality output. Most of them who stay put in Australia never really get to put their skills to good use. Our digital landscape is quite conservative & somewhat arguably boring, consisting of mainly traditional finance/banking & insurance - and we all know how these companies work internally (digital as a cost centre). Don't get me wrong, there are a few startups floating around who are growing up e.g., Canva, Campaign Monitor, Atlassian (for which I'd argue is a US company), but even the bigger ones only hire a couple of thousand on-shore devs a piece. Most of the good devs with half an inkling go overseas when they finish Uni to earn good coin and work on far more shaping stuff. I think we are risk-averse in Australia due to life being pretty good on average here (so what's the point?), which is fine, but more jarringly; the Government do very little to assist or incentivise entrepreneurs. I wish they did more, we'd see way more talent remain here and plenty of more ideas come to life!

shric 5y ago
To be fair we have it far easier in Sydney than over in Silicon Valley. For example most (but not all) Sydney Googlers choose to stay in Sydney even though they have the chance to relocate to e.g. Mountain View or Sunnyvale for more than double the comp. This is because of the work life balance and culture here in Sydney compared to over there. (I worked at Google Sydney for 5 years)
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  What are the differences in W/L balance and culture between SV and Sydney?
  - shric 5y ago
    In Sydney It's generally fine to arrive at 9 and leave at 5 as long as you produce reasonable output. In SV I noticed almost everyone worked way over 40 hours per week, overtime was the expectation and the norm. I would assume this is not across all teams in all cases, just my first hand experience and also second hand anecdotes from colleagues.

harry8 5y ago

I am wildly suspicious of this data. How could it possibly be audited? The presenter of the data has obvious ulterior motives to make something up where the data is inadequate or flat out lie to support their business. The hook got them in here (that's not a dev test, that's a dev test), so well played. But shouldn't we just dismiss all of this as yet more BS until they can show otherwise. It's far, far too clean.

yoz-y 5y ago
I think their motive is to create buzz for their platform. You have a clickbaity article that will put people against each other, people will share it with snark remarks on reddit and so on. Not much reason to lie on the data though, it could very well be just pulled from some internal dashboard for less work.
Bootvis 5y ago
Me as well, if I understand this too 5 list per country lots of Dutch companies are hiring from Kenya. I’ve been to meetups, I’m on LinkedIn and I’ve never seen anyone from Kenya. I’ve seen a lot of people from all over Europe and India.
strogonoff 5y ago
> 94% of developers finished the coding test sent to them for recruitment purposes, up from 93% last year. This shows that candidates who are sent a relevant, stack-specific coding test are taking them more seriously than ever before. This could also say that they are now choosing to send tests to more desperate candidates than before. Either way, I see no way for stats like this to not suffer from selection bias, and after scanning the article I wouldn’t take the numbers too seriously.

pjmlp 5y ago

Portugal on 4th place! Might not be the headline, but surely warms my heart.

ggm 5y ago

I'm doing my best to drag the scores back. After all, regressiom tends to the mean.

mxcrossb 5y ago

> In other words, only 10% of developers from the given country scored higher in their coding tests than the results you see below. We made this change because the mean score includes outliers that often influence averages and skew results. That feels risky?

a-dub 5y ago

"australian developers score the highest on coding tests administered by companies in new zealand that refer to all software development as IT and are most popular amongst people who run windows and work for IT outsourcing companies like thoughtworks" - should be the title. australians actually do cool stuff, they invented and commercialized the cochlear implant! as mentioned in comments here though, a lot i think get relegated to consulting or IT type stuff to support existing business.

deviation 5y ago
As a ThoughtWorker I can confirm that the IT space here is pretty heavily influenced by strong coding principals. The quality of work I do on a day-to-day basis is under high (but very open and friendly) scrutiny that I've learned to love.

maeln 5y ago

Isn't it more like "more company in country X use our product therefore, more developer in country X train for our specific test" ?

jjjeii3 5y ago

Please also note that German software engineers have much less money comparing to almost any other country. The average salary is 4900 Euro and after tax this will be 2900 Euro !!! Even software engineers in a poor country like Ukraine make more money after tax than that and they also have much lower expenses comparing to Germany. So why someone living in Germany will spend a lot of time for study, learning all the technologies etc if you will only earn 15% more money than a cleaning guy without any education and who can spend all his free time with friends instead of improving qualification? So Germany is a failed state for software developers.

kessma 5y ago
100% agree. unless you get a fully remote job, you need to really really love germany to stay there as a software developer. A friend of mine topped out at 90k with 10y experience working in a bank (which tradtionally already pay higher salaries) and that is a number for which I could find exactly zero skilled developers here in California. It would be perceived as a borderline insult. And no, that money isn't eaten by healthcare. I paid far more for healthcare for my family in Germany than I do here in the US.
etripe 5y ago
> Please also note that German software engineers have much less money comparing to almost any other country. It's hilarious to me that most people in European countries will think this about their own country. I should know, as a Belgian having lived in Sweden with friends all over. A 40% overall tax rate is among the highest, but about the same level as Belgium or Denmark as far as I understand. 4900€ gross as an average definitely isn't bad, though - that would probably be more like 3500€ here. As to your conclusion of a "failed state": am I correct in assuming that like in Belgium, France, Holland and to a minor degree Sweden, the valuation of management types is much higher than any technical functions (i.e. engineers, programmers, devops) in Germany?
benhurmarcel 5y ago
It's not great but that kind of salary is still higher than most of western Europe. Young software engineers in France or Spain don't earn as much.

bbromhead 5y ago

This comment is super flagrant self promotion, but if you are an Australian developer who wants to stay in Australia and work at a scale only usually available in the US. Check out https://www.instaclustr.com/careers https://www.instaclustr.com/careers We work with companies like Doordash, Atlassian, Sonos and Dream 11 running some of their most important databases at massive scale.. and these are just the ones we can mention. On top of that we are in Canberra :) Though if you wanna stay in Sydney or Melbourne that's cool to!

tomsyouruncle 5y ago

This statistic actually says nothing at all about 90% of the people who took the test so the headline is pretty misleading. You can’t really talk about “Australian developers” (or indeed any other nation’s) and ignore 90% of the distribution ! It’s a bit absurd to say you’re not using the mean because you’re worried about the effect of outliers and then instead choose a statistic that largely focuses on outliers! Why not use the median?

Borrible 5y ago

Congratulations! Well done AusDevs! But the more interesting metric is, is this correlated with having the highest pay? Cost of living normalized of course.

shruubi 5y ago

As a fellow Australian I have to agree with some of my fellow countrymen when they say that compared to the US, our tech industry is much more conservative and focused on banking, insurance and real-estate. From my perspective, we have a number of great developers, its just that most of us (myself included), don't work in places where our tech and work is announced almost like an advertisement. Something that, at least for me, is a weird thing to watch happen so often from US tech companies. I think a big contributing factor to such a conservative tech industry comes from a general lack of investment in start-up businesses either due to a lack of interest from the government, or from risk-adverse investors who would rather put their money into safe bets like real-estate.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

meetismurder 5y ago

I'm guessing because Australian bugs are more dangerous.

RobertoG 5y ago

I don't understand the colors in that map. For instance, Germany and France, colors vs. percentages, don't make sense to me. Are my eyes the problem? It would be kind of ironic that it was a bug.

hobos_delight 5y ago

I run an engineering group at Microsoft in Australia, we have a reasonable though not (IMO) difficult screening / interview process. However despite this, we find it hard to get candidates through our pipeline - even to the point where interviewers have been told "I have 15 years of programming experience, why do you expect me to code now". Now, I'm positive we could improve the screening and process we have in place for this - but by the same token it's not terrible... Yes, MSFT is not a FAANG and maybe there is some selection bias in the people who apply - but we also do manage to attract and retain good people who get through the process. We also offer a competitive package for Sydney, with the ability to take that and work remote from anywhere in Australia, if anyone is looking for a SWE role :)

twalla 5y ago
If you have 10-15 years experience you probably also have commitments outside of work that preclude you from wanting to sink multiple hours into doing toy problems and practicing STAR responses to behavioral questions. Most whiteboarding is just a legal, thinly veiled age filter.
- hobos_delight 5y ago
  I don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation to have a candidate write some code in a screening interview for a software engineering position. When a candidate flat out refuses to, then this is a huge red flag. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best one we have. I don’t agree with your whiteboarding assertion.
nsonha 5y ago
From memory I remember most roles in MS AU are of Solution Engineer types, do you guys have any product development done here in Australia?
- hobos_delight 5y ago
  Yes we’re only a small SWE office, working on Azure Infrastructure. Though we are hiring and growing :)