Software has become the multiplier for business growth: When tech teams are working on what matters, companies thrive. When they aren’t, it can cost millions. But in our fascination with tech’s potential to change the world, it’s easy to overlook the people behind it. In the tech industry, we often say that ‘software is eating the world’ which makes it sound like it’s a passive thing that just happens. In reality, it’s a very active process that’s driven by people who spend their days building the future.
Ultimately, people are the foundation of winning software teams. So even if companies know how to build great tech, and know how to navigate the tech industry, it really matters to know what the people in tech want, need, and look for in their careers.
As a tech talent marketplace, our Talent Advisors speak to hundreds of individual software makers every week. In these one-on-one conversations, software makers share their dream jobs, what they want from their work life and how they are hoping to progress in their tech careers.
In order to shed light on what we see playing out in our marketplace every day, we sent out a survey to the developer community. Thousands of developers responded, and shared with us what it’s like to work in South Africa, what programming languages and tech stacks they most enjoy working with, and what's most important to them when looking for a job.
We’re super excited to share these survey insights with you in this report. We’ll be deep-diving into other key insights over the coming months, so make sure to subscribe to our newsletter if you want to stay in the loop. You can also share your thoughts with us in-person at our MERGE conferences in Cape Town and Johannesburg where we’ll be exploring these insights even further.
I hope you find the survey results as fascinating and insightful as I did!
Malan Joubert
OfferZen Co-founder and CEO