2020 Status of people who code around Latin America and the Caribbean
I consider myself a technology enthusiast, and I’m from Guatemala, a country located in Central America, which is part of Latin America. Then, I’m particularly interested in this world's region to perform data analysis related to Stackoverflow Anual Developer Survey 2020.
To know more about these results, you can check my Github repository to see the code and detailed analysis.
Note: In the following figures, the abbreviation “LAC” corresponds to “Latin America and the Caribbean.”
Why this region has this little amount of data? Maybe a reason could be English proficiency. Latin America and the Caribbean are countries where the main mother tongues are Spanish and Portuguese, and Stack Overflow is an English community. This could be a barrier to answering this survey.
1. How are developers’ demographics in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC): average age, country, level of education?
Gender, ethnicity, and age
The previous chart shows that more than 90% of developers are men (in the entire world), 93.58% in LAC, and 91.16% for other Regions. As expected in LAC, `Hispanic or Latino` is the predominant Ethnicity (53.21%). The second larger Ethnicity is `White or of European descent`, which is dominant in the rest of the world. `Hispanic or Latino` is part of a minority in the rest of the world; this also can be due to the language barrier explained earlier. The average age in LAC is 29.5 years old with a median of 28 years; it is very similar to the rest of the world.
Country distribution
There is a correlation between population and developers by country. However, there is a difference in the proportions of the population.
Education
It is interesting that in LAC for most of the people (29.76%) said that formal education, such as a university degree in computer science, is `very important` even this ratio is bigger in LAC than in other regions; however, checking in the figure `Highest level of formal education ratio` there are fewer persons with a postgraduate degree than the rest of the world.
The previous chart shows that more than 90% of developers are men, 93.58% in Latin America and 91.16% for other Regions, showing a little big gap between gender distribution in Latin America.
There is not much difference between LAC and the other regions; the biggest difference is related to Ethnicity and education levels.
2. Does it change the status of satisfaction related to the professional experience in Latin America?
Most professionals (40%) have less than 5 years of professional experience; it applies to LAC and the other regions. However, there is a slight difference between other regions. With the increase of experience in LAC, most persons keep as `Slightly satisfied` as the level of satisfaction in their current job and other regions. The level of satisfaction will increase with time, a reason could be how the monetary compensation will increase with the experience, and this factor is essential for the persons when they are looking for a new job opportunity as you can see in the following figure:
Due that better compensation is a key part of a person to search and switch to a new job, we will evaluate salary compensations in the next question.
3. What is the salary behavior according to years of experience, country, and Developer type?
As you see in the previous figure, there is a massive difference in salary for LAC vs. the other regions. In LAC, the annual mean ($ 23894.42) and median ($ 18060.00) is lower than the quartile 1 (Q1–25%) of other regions. In each country, it could change; there are different economies in LAC that can affect it; this is the data of salaries by country:
Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Panama have better salaries than Cuba, whose economy is different from the rest of the countries in the region. Especially for Guatemala, it is in fifth place with a mean annual salary of $ 22,338.88.
The manager positions are expected to have better incomes; they are also related to years of experience and expected to earn more. Typically it will be expected to switch from a technical role to a manager position, and this correlation can be appreciated in the following figure:
4. What skills are more valuable for the developers (technology you want to work in over the next year), and what skills generate more earning?
We will analyze only two categories, programming languages, and databases. The technology you want to work on over the next year are the following:
Those are the technologies that the persons desire to work with; however, they are not correlated to the technologies that generate better incomes as a person who codes.
For databases, Cassandra is more appreciated by the companies but not by the developers; this kind of discrepancy could be defined due to the different technology roles and specialization needed.
Conclusion
Despite that Stackoverflow Anual Developer Survey is the largest and most comprehensive survey of people who code worldwide, the data representation about LAC was tiny and a surprise for me. However, with the data collected, we could evaluate the demographics, satisfaction, and salary of the LAC related to the rest of the world.
Previous to the data analysis, I thought that there would be more demographics difference between LAC and the other regions; however, the bigger difference found was related to salary expectations and how the offer and demand of technology vary between the companies and developers, for example on of the most paid languages is Scala and it is not in the list of top 10 languages that the persons want to learn.
Please check my Github repository to see the code and detailed analysis.
Thanks for reading.
