Anatomy of a Developer: What Drives This Tech Pro?

When it comes to what tasks they like to do on the job, developers want to learn new technologies while building code, according to a recent survey from Stack Overflow. The resulting "Developer Hiring Landscape" report covers a wide range of developer-related topics, including salary information, job satisfaction levels, employment status and demographic information. With respect to compensation, engineering managers and developers who have attained executive status rank at the top. But data scientists and back-end Web developers are doing pretty well too. As for the demographics: The average developer is male, lives in the United States, is between 25 and 29 years old, and works for a company with 20 to 99 employees. Most are happy about the work they do: It helps that a majority of them actually get to check in or commit code multiple times a day, instead of just fixing bugs. The report also reveals how much formal education developers have completed, and how many consider themselves self-taught. It even includes a fun fact about whether these developers believe in aliens. More than 56,000 developers from 173 countries took part in the research.