Tech, Tools and Talent – Developers Survey 2023
What is the Developers Survey?
Modernising, innovating, and accelerating business transformation using technology is at the heart of what Version 1 does. Our software development teams are central to our success, and we were keen to understand better how they learned new skills, collate their technical capabilities today and learn about the skills they want to acquire tomorrow. To collect this information, we conducted our first-ever company-wide survey of software developers across Version 1. In all, almost 600 of our developers provided detailed responses to the survey.
The survey has enhanced our understanding of our current capabilities, highlighted trends in emerging technologies and provided actionable insights on tech, tools and talent that will benefit our employees, organisation, and customers.
Breadth and depth of experience at Version 1
Version 1 has over 1,100 developers (including Cloud, DevOps, Platform Engineering and SRE experts) primarily in the UK, Ireland, India, and Spain. The survey has allowed us to identify the depth of knowledge these developers have and the expertise we can offer to our current and potential clients.
Over 40% identified as full-stack engineers
Professionals who are competent in all layers of software development. They can work on both the front-end (client side) and back-end (server side) portions of web applications. Our full-stack engineers allow our customers to benefit from the versatility, comprehensive understanding, and flexibility our people provide. By integrating them with our more specialist team members, Version 1 can successfully deliver complex projects and greater value to customers across multiple industries. An example of this was the Digital transformation we carried out for Harrow Council.
25% of respondents have experience with low-code
That is, using tools such as OutSystems and Microsoft Power Platform. Up to 43% showed interest in working in low-code over the next 12 months. These platforms offer the potential to streamline application development, reduce project timelines, respond to market changes swiftly and deliver value in a more cost-effective way which is beneficial to each of our customers.
Almost 95% have worked with database technology
At Version 1 we are continuously evolving our technology landscape to produce solutions that are more scalable, flexible and optimised for the diverse business challenges faced by our customers. That is why we are happy to share that almost all of our developers have experience with database technology. This covers relational database tools such as Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL server. It also extends to modern NoSQL database solutions such as MongoDB, CouchDB, KDB+, Neo4J, CosmosDB, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis and others.
All the partners and languages you need
Our teams have skills to deliver solutions in the cloud (Azure, AWS and Oracle Cloud) and on-premises using mainstream languages like Java, C#, C++ and Typescript. We also have skills in 20+ other specialist languages such as Rust and Go which we use to solve problems in specialist domains. This demonstrates our team’s wealth of knowledge and experience. As an end-to-end service provider, we start with our customer’s challenges and can build the perfect solution to suit their needs.
80% + skilled in one or more Cloud Service
Primarily we work in AWS, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud, just a few of the strong technology partners we have worked with for many years. This means we can undertake innovative cloud application modernisation and business transformation projects with our customers. This was demonstrated with the work we completed for SMBC Aviation Capital where we used emerging AI technologies and Microsoft Azure solutions to transform and automate aircraft utilisation reports.
Version 1 CTO Brad Mallard, says that even he was surprised by the breadth and depth of knowledge across the team:
It was fantastic to see the level of response from across the communities. It was fascinating to see that in addition to the core of our DevOps and Cloud expertise, over 80% of our community have skills and experience in either Microsoft or AWS. The extent of the team being full stack engineers, low code specialists, python experts and those already working with modern languages like Go and Rust surprised even me. It was also super interesting to observe the extent of highly experienced Java, C++ and .NET developers.
What’s next?
The survey isn’t just about today but also about what our developers see as important in the next 12 months. This has allowed us to identify growth areas like React, Containerisation and infrastructure as code to focus training resources.
Containerisation emerged as a key area for additional training. 33%+ of our developers have experience in containerisation with Docker and/or Kubernetes and a 50%+ would like to expand their skill level in these technologies over the next 12 months. Containerisation is the process of encapsulating an application and its dependencies into a self-contained unit called a ‘container’, ensuring it runs consistently across various computing environments.
The other area we are looking to expand on is React as 39% of our developers expressed their interest in working in this area and secondly, Python. This programme is currently used by roughly 20% of the respondents but with training and support, we are looking to grow this to nearly 40% over the next year.
Brad has high hopes for the future of the Version 1 Developers Survey:
[The survey] has certainly given us lots to consider and our plans to continue to grow and shape our development workforce for the future have been accelerated with this insight. Exciting times for sure here at Version 1 as we embrace AI in all aspects of our business and development initiatives. I can’t wait for the next survey as we have welcomed hundreds more talented developers and look forward to their insight.
Insights for the future
Our first-ever Developers Survey has allowed us to gain more insights into our teams across the business and will help us to shape the future of Version 1. At the same time, this work will benefit our current and future customers by exploring and expanding on our technical skills to provide better solutions.
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