October 2018 - Developer Nation Blog

Data scientists need to make sense of the big picture, rather than the big data

The web echoes with cries for help with learning data science. “How do I get started?”. “Which are the must-know algorithms?”. “Can someone point me to best resources for deep learning?”. In response, a bustling ecosystem has sprung to life around learning resources of all shapes and sizes. Are the skills to unlock the deepest secrets of deep learning what emerging data scientists truly need though? Our research has consistently shown that only a minority of data scientists are in need of highly performing predictive models, while most would benefit from learning how to decide whether to build an algorithm or not and how to make sense of it, rather than how to actually build one.

Infographic: What are developers up to in the State of the Developer Nation 15th Edition?

Did you get a free copy of our latest State of the Developer Nation 15 edition? If you haven’t yet, you should! It highlights the most interesting findings from our Developer Economics survey which ran this summer in May-June this and reached over 20,500+ devs in 167 countries.

What’s new in the State of the Developer Nation 15 edition?

We asked developers, among other things, what kind of skills they’d like to learn or improve in 2019. We compared developer interest in twelve different skill sets, spanning from data science and machine learning to business/marketing skills to cloud-native development, DevOps, and hardware-level coding. The results were somewhat surprising. Data science and machine learning will be the most highly sought after skills in the next year – 45% of developers want to gain expertise in these fields. 33% of developers want to learn UI design, 25% cloud-native development. Other common tech skills, such as learning a new programming language, rank lower.

When it comes to programming language communities, JavaScript still reigns as the most popular language, with over 10M users globally. Python has reached 7M active developers and is climbing up the ranks. 62% of machine learning developers and data scientists now use Python.

Big data has been hyped for several years. In addition, a race has begun to design processors capable of crunching large sets of often unstructured data and to produce real-time predictions. The question is, to how many in the rapidly growing Data Science and Machine Learning (ML) community are large datasets and real-time predictions relevant? Scroll down to find all the highlights in the infographic!

Don’t forget to share the infographic & download the full report!

The Developer Economics 17th Edition is now LIVE. Take the survey and shape tomorrow’s trends.

Liked it? Take the survey and share with us your ideas for the future of development.