Another academic year has recently ended, bringing with it a new season of graduations to celebrate and a new crop of freshly-minted graduates entering the software industry. The 2017 Stack Overflow Developer Survey provides context and data for understanding developers who are just entering the workforce compared to more experienced developers. Let’s use this year’s survey results to gain a deeper understanding of these new graduates.
Not all professional software developers go to college, but most do. In our survey, 77.5% of professional developers had a bachelor’s degree or higher, and 92.4% had at least some college or higher. For this post, we want to look at new developers at the beginning of their careers, so we’ll look at professional developers with less than 1 year of experience (or in some cases, 1 or 2 years). The vast majority of these developers have college degrees or some college education, but it’s important to keep in mind that a university degree is not the only path to a career as a developer.