To construct an effective marketing strategy it’s critical that you understand who your audience is. To execute an effective marketing strategy it’s essential that you know where to find that audience.
Here at Developer Media we focus solely on the software development space and helping you connect with the developers you need to reach. We represent thousands of the most influential websites, online communities, blogs and projects serving the software and app development market.
But just who exactly are the millions of professional developers that visit our network each month? We recently conducted a survey of over 450 CodeProject members to garner greater insight into that very question.
94 percent of our devs are professional programmers
If you’re looking to reach experienced professional developers then you’ve come to the right place. When we asked survey respondents how long they’ve been working as a developer, we found that nearly half (44 percent) of our audience has been programming for over 15 years!
30 percent of respondents have been developers for between five and 15 years, over 16 percent have been developers for between one and five years and about 3.5 percent have been developers for less than one year. All told, 94 percent of those surveyed are professional programmers.
Our devs are working in all industries and verticals
While IT companies remain among the largest employers of software developers, the fact is that companies across all industries and verticals have a growing need to add more developer talent to their rosters.
Just over 37 percent of our developers are working for information technology companies, about 9 percent are employed by financial institutions, and about 7 percent are working in healthcare and manufacturing respectively.
Many of our devs also work in the engineering/construction and government sectors, which each employ about 6 percent of those we surveyed.
Over half our audience identifies as “Enterprise Developers”
Equally important as distinguishing the top industries that our audience members work in, is understanding the types of software they are developing and types of users consuming those apps.
When we asked our survey respondents what type of development they do, over 53 percent identified as Corporate or Enterprise Developers.
We also found that about 44 percent of developers in our audience are creating applications for individual or workgroup use, 26 percent develop software on a contract basis (freelancers) and about 14 percent are doing development work as consultants, value-added resellers (VARs) or independent software vendors (ISVs).
Desktop apps still predominant
Despite plenty of talk in recent years about the “death of the desktop”, our survey results clearly show that devs are still very actively writing desktop applications. In fact, we found that 66.5 percent of our developers are currently writing desktop apps.
Web apps and sites optimized for mobile were the second most popular category of current development projects among our developers (46 percent), followed by server applications and services (42 percent), and then native mobile apps (25 percent).
Devs using a wide variety of programming languages
While our flagship site CodeProject.com has grown today to include articles and content on all aspects of computer programming and software development, when it began over 15 years ago it was primarily a community and resource for .NET developers.
These roots still shine through from time-to-time and our recent survey found that C# (selected by 72 percent of respondents) remains the most commonly used programming language among our devs.
Here’s a breakdown of some of the other most commonly used languages:
- JavaScript – 47 percent usage among those surveyed
- HTML5 – 40 percent usage among those surveyed
- CSS – 38.5 percent usage among those surveyed
- C++ – 34 percent usage among those surveyed
- Visual Basic – 27 percent usage among those surveyed
- Java – 23.5 percent usage among those surveyed
Top job titles
Given our focus on developers it’s not surprising that “Software Developer” is the most predominant job title in our audience. That said, sometimes the title on your business card and resume doesn’t quite communicate all the different roles and responsibilities you have in the workplace.
Developers are no different and they often wear many different hats within their organizations. In our recent survey, we asked respondents to select their current job title (or titles) and the graph below outlines the top ten responses.
Our devs work at companies large and small
The majority of developers in our audience work at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). 56 percent of respondents said they work for companies with anywhere from 2 to 1,000 employees (more granular breakdowns can be seen in the pie chart below).
Following these, we found there’s a large segment of “solopreneurs” among our audience. Over 20 percent of the devs we surveyed said that they work alone. Clearly the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well among developers!
The remainder of our developers are, naturally, working for large corporations and enterprises. Just over 10 percent work for companies with between 1,000 and 9,999 employees and another 10 percent work for companies with over 10,000 employees.
Summary
The developers in our audience wear many different hats and are employed in many different industries. They work at organizations that range in size from one-man shops, to SMBs, to multinational enterprises. And they use a variety of technologies to produce a wide-range of different types of applications for different use-cases.
No matter what kind of developer you’re looking to target with you next campaign, we can help you find them.
Notes on Methodology
All statistics not otherwise noted are from proprietary Developer Media surveys, based on a sample of over 23 million unique quarterly developers who visit our sites. Data presented above (except for data in the “Number of Employees at Current Company” graph) was collected in a survey of 460 respondents between 1 April 2015 and 7 May 2015. Data presented in the “Number of Employees at Current Company” graph was collected in a survey of 2007 respondents between 1 April 2015 and 1 May 2015. Projecting those samples against a population of approximately 4 million unique monthly visitors, we estimate about a 4.57% margin of error at a 95% confidence level and a 2.19% margin of error for a 95% confidence level.
Developer Media is a trademark of Developer Media and CodeProject is a registered trademark of CodeProject Solutions, Inc. All other trademarks used are the property of their respective owners.
