The demand for developers is expected to increase at the fastest rate of all other professions combined
The tech industry has seen explosive growth over the past several decades with more and more companies relying on top-notch development talent for their day-to-day operations. Programmers are playing an increasingly critical role in many organizations. Despite the hundreds of thousands of tech graduates entering the job market every year, there is a vast shortage of development talent.
The idea of a “full-stack” developer is currently obsolete. You need people with expertise in a specific technology for numerous reasons, from backend to frontend to Android to iOS. There are simply too many technology stacks for any single person to be an expert in them all. To fully leverage the technology, you need people who can work with it from any angle, in and out. Security, patching, updates, automation, and other development activities also require people who are experts. Big tech companies hire specific people for backend, frontend, mobile, etc., for their expertise and ability to leverage the technology entirely. As technology becomes more complex, the people who implement it in an environment must fully understand it. Without expertise, you run the risk of having issues and performance degradation from poor implementations. It can also lead to vulnerabilities and data breaches from an application being compromised.
It used to take a minimal amount of time to bring a developer up to speed within the organization, but the complexity of technology has increased this time. On average, it can take a developer three or four years before taking on an important role, either maintaining an application or developing a new system. Part of this issue comes from universities teaching older technology, so students do not have hands-on experience. The organization then becomes responsible for training new developers on technologies and maintaining a complex environment.
The thing is technology never stops evolving. It is rapidly evolving at a faster and faster pace. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science are hot careers at the moment. Developers are hungry to learn these new technologies and are happy to take on new challenges. Because technology continues to change, it is hard for organizations to keep up with the rapidly changing pace. For example, when the iPhone was first released in 2007, Objective-C was the primary coding language for app development. Then, in 2014 Apple introduced its new standard, Swift. When standards change, developers must be trained, new resources are necessary to support technology, and new staff to manage it.
Hiring new staff for emerging technologies is expensive, but so is training new employees. Good developers know that they are in high demand. In the development world, it’s becoming less and less common to stay with the same company for ten years. Instead, developers know that they can move on after a couple of years for better pay and benefits. They can also obtain additional experience as leverage to boost their careers. The need for developers has shifted the market to an employee-driven one. Developers can demand better pay, flexibility, benefits, and bonuses. Organizations must evaluate their current employee package to ensure that it is competitive in today’s market. Because of the change to a remote workforce, companies needed software to support the change in productivity. Lockdowns ramped up the need for developers and applications that helped remote workers. Developers leaving for new careers left projects delayed and extended the timeline for updates and maintenance on existing applications.
Especially after the pandemic, companies have difficulty retaining developers and attracting the best talent available on the market. Unfortunately, there’s no simple solution. The reality is that more companies need to invest in training alongside great benefits and wages. The best answer is to establish a relationship with a reliable development team – whether that is through hiring internally or with a development company. The world, as with technology, evolves rapidly. High demand for quality developers will ultimately lead to higher development costs for your business but understanding the reasons why, can help you make the best decisions when it comes to training, hiring, and resourcing. Among the recruiters surveyed, 35% said they plan to hire more than 50 developers this year. The percentage of those who aim to hire 201 to 500 developers more than doubled from 2021, while the number looking to hire more than 500 professionals jumped by 50%. To pay for the new hires, more than half of the recruiters said they’ll have more money in their budgets in 2022. These higher budgets may also be a result of higher salary demands by developers, a factor mentioned by several recruiters in the survey. But to win those open jobs and higher salaries, developers need to be on top of their game. Almost half of the recruiters said that finding qualified developers to fill jobs was their top challenge. The two positions cited as the most challenging to fill were a full-stack engineer and back-end engineer, both of which will be in high demand for 2022.
