Overview of the 2019 HackerRank Developer Skills Report

The latest version of the HackerRank Developer Skills Report is live and it brings invaluable insight into developer and employers’ trends. In this article, we have a look at the most interesting highlights of the 2019 HackerRank Developer Skills Report.

The 2019 HackerRank Developer Skills Report is here and offers insights into a huge range of topics from which technology developers find the most promising to which skills employers are interested in and what developers look for in a job and during the interview process.

One of the most interesting highlights is that Go and React are at the top of the developers’ to-do list for 2019.

Without further ado, let’s have a look at the highlights.

The technologies

Starting off with the most popular languages, the HackerRank report reaffirms what numerous reports have shown so far – JavaScript was the absolute winner of 2018. When we compare the 2018 results to those of 2017, we see that JavaScript managed to surpass Java, which was the most popular language for 2017.

Another interesting point that comes through these results is an increasing interest in TypeScript which jumped from 15% to 24%! Other than that, there are no huge discrepancies between 2017 and 2018.

However, moving on to what developers have on their to-do list for 2019, Go rises of the charts with the vast majority of the respondents being eager to learn it.

Kotlin and Python are also among the developers’ top choices for what they want to get more into during this year following a general hype around Kotlin’s popularity.

Another interesting topic that we should go over is the most popular frameworks in 2018. Following the same trend in 2017, Angular remained number one on developers’ list, followed by Spring and React going toe to toe in the second and third place respectively.

Speaking of React, as you can see in the figure above, it gained significant momentum since 2017 with an increase of almost 6% and this trend doesn’t seem like going anywhere anytime soon with almost 33% of the respondents stating that want to learn React in 2019. Angular and Vue.js follow in the second and third place respectively.

But what do hiring managers have their eyes set on? It looks like, developers’ wants and employers’ demands are not that far apart with both agreeing that Angular is the skill to go with.

However, despite the trend shown in the previous figures with React’s popularity significantly rising in 2018 and 2019, the percentage of developers that know React versus the percentage of employers looking for developers with React skills do not match. Hiring managers evidently want more React skills than developers’ have to offer. Contrary to this, developers appear to have more Spring skills than what hiring managers require.

The soft topics

Moving further, let’s have a closer look at what developers had to say on more soft topics like what they look for in a job and during the interview process.

Answering the question on what turns developers off from employers, 68% of the respondents seem to rank the lack of clarity on the role or position they would be assuming as the number one deal-breaker.

When it comes to what developers are looking for in a job, professional growth and learning is by far the most important factor, especially for junior developers.

Interestingly enough, diversity priority if really low both in what turns developers off and what they are looking for in a position. Despite a number of efforts to make diversity topics in the developer community more relevant, it seems that we are still far away from achieving that goal.