At almost one in ten, the percentage of Dublin workers who can be considered programmers is higher than any city in Ireland and the UK.

Java, Python and Ruby are the dominant programming languages in Dublin, with the Irish capital home to the highest percentage of developers in the British Isles.

That’s according to Stack Overflow, reporting today (24 April) that 9pc of Dublin employees are also developers to some degree.*

That percentage outstrips London (7.7pc), Edinburgh (7.1pc), Bristol (7.0pc) and Belfast (6.8pc) in the top five cities across Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England.

The total developer population in Dublin is in excess of 60,000 people, according to Stack Overflow. London has six times that.

Important for recruiters

“With developers forming an increasingly large proportion of the UK and Ireland’s working population, it is becoming even more important for recruiters and HR professionals to understand what matters to these highly skilled employees,” said Kevin Troy, director of insights at Stack Overflow.

Across the region Python, .Net and Java are used by the largest number of developers; according to the study, in Dublin, the order is Java (10,448), Python (7,934) and Ruby (5,888) in the top three.

This need for developers makes for a competitive recruitment environment, with the report listing the key benefits provided by employers across the industry throughout the four countries.

The benefit that developers seek most is holidays, with working from home and expected work hours the other two that are ranked highly for more than half of the workers.

Interestingly, the study finds that the majority of developers in the UK and Ireland are not currently seeking a job, with fewer than 10pc actively on the lookout.

High demand

“This situation, combined with the high demand for technical talent, means that employers who focus their recruitment efforts solely on the active jobseeker population are going to struggle to meet their hiring goals,” it reads.

The report comes as news of a software developer conference in Cork on 16 June was revealed.

With global tech giants and local SMEs facing the same hiring problem in Cork, RebelCon will be held at Republic of Work.

In Ireland in general, software developers and project managers are among the most in-demand roles in the tech sector.

It continues

Hays Ireland found that one-third of all new tech sector job postings in Q1 2017 were for project managers and business analysts working on digital transformation projects, either with clients or through consultancies.

The second and third-most popular roles – software development and cloud infrastructure – tie in with the rise of these digital transformation projects.

“Ireland’s tech sector is a huge contributor to the economy and is a key driver of our GDP,” said James Milligan, director at Hays Ireland.

“Technology is by its very nature fast-moving, and Q1’s figures reflect the sector’s responsiveness to change, with positive growth in several important areas like digital transformation and cybersecurity.”

*Updated, 12.10pm, 26 April 2017: This article was updated to clarify the make-up of the developer population in Dublin. The 9pc is a percentage of workforce: those in work and seeking work.

Stack Overflow has provided a statement on how some of its figures were established:

“When developers interact with content on Stack Overflow, our proprietary machine learning platform tracks their behaviour over time – specifically, which technologies they’re interested in and their IP address. This allows us to show, in granular detail, which technologies programmers are using, and how many there are at a local level. It’s worth noting that the data that we track is real-time and — because what we capture is actual user behaviour — much more reliable than self-reported survey data. Our data is unique, specific and extremely accurate.

“It should be noted that the developer population numbers do include students and hobbyists, although the threshold to be considered a ‘hobbyist’ is very high (they interact with content on Stack Overflow a lot, ie this doesn’t include people who make one single visit to the website). This number also includes people who code as part of their day-to-day, for example, data scientists.”