Each CEO, who leads a digitization company, depends on technological talent availability and tech recruitment, which makes it a major factor in the success of the company. Because of lack of skilled workers, it is a challenged market. You have to attract them with what matters really to them to get the best developers. I got to know seven things about the happiness of software developers.
What pleases developers of software?
In the last five and a half years, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering this question. Luck is a fascinating topic; it drives so many of our lives, from health to wealth, but we often don’t understand or prioritise it.
We have asked 4,000 developers from 98 countries to assess their happiness through four key fields: career, quality of life, social liberties and the community to give more weight to this issue.
And so the Happiness Index for Developers was established. Here are just seven of the stuff I learned from working on the report about developer happiness.
Happiness affects many developers — including their quality of code.
Whether you believe it or not, developer happiness is a field of study, a tiny niche for a broader study of happiness. Through researchers we know that happy developers of software are more productive, better code is written and better decisions made.
Whatsmore, their self-confidence is influenced positively: increased motivation and achievement, increased creativity, commitment and self confidence are all results of greater happiness. Unhappiness, by contrast, causes low cognitive performance, mental discomfort or disturbance, low motivation, withdrawal and broken flow.
Unemployment is damaging to human well-being
Since we work a lot, work inevitably plays a key part in shaping our levels of happiness: work can make us happy or unhappy, and our happiness affects our achievement.
Perhaps less appreciated is that the welfare of the population can only be affected by unemployment itself. This is one of the most robust findings for the study of gladness — according to the World Happiness Report, it is true across age, sex and location.
Employees are happier and experience less negative in their everyday lives. Non-monetary employment aspects such as social status, social relations, day-to-day structure and goal.
The happiest developers worldwide in Northern Europe
We have found that Northern Europe developers are the happiest on earth. Scale is dominated by Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden are among the top 10. The only non-EU country among the top 8 is Canada with Germany.
work-life balance is important for the happiness of the developer
Over all 20 indicators of happiness, work-life balance is the most important predictor of happiness for developers. Developers’ work-life balance is not just about shorter working hours — it does help.
The happiest developers in Northern Europe are also working the shortest hours. Nevertheless, the second-and third-happiest in Western Europeans and North Americans work longer hours — much longer for the Americans.
Confidence and flexibility make the developer happy with the balance of work and life. Cultures in Northern Europe excel in collaboration, decision-making on a basis of consensus and strong trust among colleagues.
We found it essential to promote and live a healthy work/life balance to maintain happy developers. Employers should train and encourage supervisors to play a positive role and provide practical and emotional support on issues of balance between work and life.
Women developers are happier than men—but they still receive less payments
Women developers are happier than overall male developers. They are also happier with their salaries than male developers. This is despite the fact that they pay much less than their male counterparts.
In all territories for which we had sufficient information, we found evidence of the gender pay gap. In North America and South America, the biggest pay gaps are, respectively, 21 and 35% between male and female developers.
The age of tech begins at the age of 29, and the older developers are happier
The older the developer, the happier it gets, especially in the workplace and corporate culture factors.
Maybe not surprising because a good part of the culture of technology companies is built around younger groups. Research shows that the average age in technology professionals is 29 years, as opposed to an average in industry of 41 years.
