According to a fairly recent report, there are around 4 million software developers in the US, but this number doesn’t account for the seniority level of the devs or their years of experience in the field.
To get a decent approximation of that data, we can look at this Zippia report, which puts the number of senior developers (in the United States) at around 165K.
Using the magic of some simple math, it turns out that out of the entire pool of developers in the States, only around 4% of those are senior developers. This kind of makes sense in hindsight, but it’s still intuitively a lot less than a lot of managers would lead you to believe.
In Europe, some time ago, there were 5.5M software developers, and that number has grown significantly by 2022. Germany leads, while the UK and France trail behind as the top 3 countries that have the largest number of developers on the old continent.
Globally, the numbers are a little different. According to a recent survey, the number of developers worldwide is a little more than 26M, and it features 13.5M full-time, 7.8M part-time, and around 5M non-compensated developers.
Loosely speaking, a senior developer is a professional with at least 5 years of experience in backend, frontend, or fullstack development, or sometimes even more than that.
Therefore, if finding quality software developers is hard, getting (and specifically retaining) senior devs within the delineation of your company is even harder.
Thankfully, I took it upon myself (again) to get some actionable tips on how to motivate and retain your most experienced developers and make them enjoy the work environment without breaking a sweat.
Create the right environment
Just like any other working environment, senior developers will want to work in a place where they feel appreciated, comfortable, and productive. The only problem with this assumption is that every individual’s ideal working environment is different.
This is why your office needs to become “the promised land” in order to motivate and retain employees, or in this case, senior software developers.
But, how to create an environment like that?
A Stack Overflow survey may shed some light on the issue at hand, and delve a bit deeper into these related topics.
In it, generally, they asked professional developers to compare jobs with almost identical offers and choose one or the other, and/or list reasons for staying or leaving a company. However, the most important reason for the respondents in the survey was the availability of tools, frameworks, and other technologies to accept a job offer. Correspondingly, also, one of the reasons for staying was the salary, even though not a primary reason at all.
The second reason, according to the same respondents, was the office environment or the company culture, closely followed by a flexible schedule, options for remote work, and how impactful their work output would be (generally speaking).
After that, the developers listed the industry, the financial performance of the organization, the specific department they’d be working on as a team member, and the company diversity as the last job factor that would make them take up the job offer or stay working at the same company. Now more than ever, developers do their own research about a company's reputation before they decide to move forward with applying at all.
Now, truth be told, this took into account all developers and not just senior developers; however, we can assume that those that responded to the survey were the ones that were most interested in contributing and were most open to improvement and change.
Above all else, developers won't have the need to look for a job elsewhere if they are given opportunities for flexibility, good income, and learning.
And, given all this so far, we can conclude that the same job priorities would also apply to senior developers as well.
