Netherlands Developers Report

suitophobia

Recently worked with our team to put this together in the hopes that it sheds some light on what developers in the Netherlands are thinking about their careers. Please check it out and let me know if you have any feedback or if you spot any bugs 🙏

Here's how we went about it - would love to know if you would have done it differently or if you have any other feedback 😀

Surveying

Typeform

Data

Redshift
Looker for BI and Visualisation Tooling (Including t-testing)

Design and QA

Figma
Miro

App and Front End

We started with AMCharts for the charts and ended up moving them all to D3.js for performance and nicer animations.
NextJS (React, JavaScript) with static generation (so it's just a simple pre-rendered HTML page)
SVG SMIL for the animation at the top

Open Data###
Data made available under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (OBdl)

Please also play with the data and see if you can spot anything we missed

Jasper

Thanks for sharing this! It's super nice to see all information nicely insightful, very interesting too. How long did it took to put everything together? Seems like a lot of data in total (I've read 501 of Dutch devs have responded from the 888 people that took the survey).

I really like the part that the Perl devs don't like their own programming language haha 😂 They probably hate their job 🤣

Also, I've just checked AMCharts and D3.js, they both look awesome and never heard of them before.

I was wondering, was there any data what you were surprised about (or did not expect)?

suitophobia

Jasper Yeah I think we learned our lessons with AMCharts 😬

For me the most interesting thing was the dramatically increased interest in Python - we saw the same thing in South Africa, and it seems it's a global phenomenon. If you've read Homo Deus, it's a potentially scary sign of how fast we're moving into the data realm (but that's the paranoid in me).

Other than that what's been quite interesting is comparing the data to South Africa (we have a big community there). Notable for me is that in South Africa, people call themselves "Senior" or "Tech leads" with a lot less experience. We don't have the data for other regions, but I know a lot of developers in the Netherlands come from other countries. If this is true, then comparing a Dutch Senior dev to a ready-to-import Polish Senior dev may not be comparing apples with apples. That poses some interesting questions in my mind. This data is not in the report BTW.

Distribution of seniors:

Distribution of tech leads:

Shout if you have other things you want me to look into?

Jasper

suitophobia Interesting, thanks for sharing that too! Seems like some statistics a similar to eachother, that's cool to see.

When comparing the two pages, a thing that I noticed is that the Dutch devs are using JavaScript frameworks much more then the African devs, considering that the African devs like React and Angular too, but the languages aren't in their most-used frameworks.

Did you find any reason why they did not move to frameworks they liked more yet?

JoshN

Jasper

Hallo daar, ik denk dat ik een antwoord heb op uw vraag.

Ik heb aan het rapport gewerkt en nog eens naar de gegevens gekeken.

Ik vermoed dat het bedrijf van een ontwikkelaar hier invloed op kan uitoefenen. Uw bedrijf werkt misschien met één raamwerk (het raamwerk waarmee u het meest werkt), maar u wilt misschien met een ander werken. Ik kan me voorstellen dat niet alle ontwikkelaars hier veel zeggenschap over hebben.

Ook de loopbaanplannen op korte termijn van een ontwikkelaar kunnen hierop van invloed zijn. Hun meest gewenste raamwerk zou kunnen aangeven wat ze hierna willen leren of naar welke rol ze willen overgaan.

Mijn Nederlands is niet erg goed en ik weet niet zeker of Google Translate correct is.

Jasper

JoshN No problem, thanks for replying though! It's allowed to speak English on DevNL if there's no other way 🙂

suitophobia JoshN So the main reason might be that the bigger companies stay at the frameworks they're used to due to bureaucracy... I think the same is for Dutch companies, probably for all big companies over the world, changes/improvements are scary of course 😐

When looking at the industries on the South Africa survey page, I do see that the SaaS, Web dev and Cloud-based solutions are becoming quite big, so I think this it will improve there 🤔

suitophobia

I think another thing here is that in South Africa a lot of the developers are concentrated at bigger, slower-moving companies like banks and financial services. These kinds of companies adopt new languages and frameworks slower than smaller, newer companies. In SA there's less infrastructure to support start ups and scale ups, so there are less real options for developers to join great new, more modern companies.