It's funny. I'm seeing this, while I'm thinking about dropping out of this career. I don't want to be one of those girl dropout stats, but lately I'm feeling a desire to start a family.
fwiw I just passed 32 and I don't know if I want to do programming/software engineering jobs anymore. I'm hoping its just a phase.
I know code camps are usually web focused, but I'm really surprised about the lack of any lower level, desktop, or non web back end options for "which roll are you most interested in". Coming from a CS background I was also surprised that more people were interested in front end web development than back end web development, because most of the people I interact with hate front end web development with a passion.
I was surprised to see no mention of game development as what drew one into coding. Half the cats I've worked with got bit by the programming bug initially wanting to make games.
> Most of them are already applying for developer jobs, or will start applying within the next year.<p>I think the possible answers for this question bias towards that conclusion. Out of the five options, four refer to a time frame between now and a year from now.<p>Also, for the "Which learning resources have you found helpful?" I'm surprised that the official documentation for the language one is learning and "random tutorials I found on Google" aren't options. I know that's how I initially learned to code, and I was under the impression that it was somewhat common.
In the Demographics and Socioeconomics section, I see 1% of respondents speak Chinese, and no data shown for China in country of citizenship. Also it says 8% have served in the military and a picture showing what I presume are soldiers in the Chinese military (I could be wrong).<p>Is it that there are few survey respondents from China? Is the survey accessible from China or blocked by the great firewall?<p>Just curious since the numbers seem very low and I presume there should be a far greater percentage of Chinese respondents purely by population demographics.
On a tangential note.<p>I've spoken to a few hiring managers who have expressed disappointment with some of the hires that they have made straight out of bootcamps (w/o prior CS knowledge or fundamentals).<p>Specifically, the bootcamp graduate are smart, motivated, and know their specific toolsets well. However, they tend to struggle a bit if you place them outside their comfort zone.<p>Is this a sentiment that others have heard through their work colleagues or friends as well?
The full open dataset here: <a href="https://github.com/FreeCodeCamp/2016-new-coder-survey" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/FreeCodeCamp/2016-new-coder-survey</a>
I Wish their data set wasn't so biased. 72% of respondents found freecodecamp helpful? Well that answers almost everything about who they're talking to!<p>Doesn't seem like a fair representation of people who are learning to code. There are 40,000 computer science graduates per year. So perhaps 160k to 200k CS majors at any given moment. Those people learning program doesn't seem to be represented at all in this survey.
By wanting to do something, then finding out how I need to do it. I never learned anything just to learn it, it was always for direct use. Once I made a bunch of Renoise plugins in LUA. Never had used LUA before, never used it since, I don't know any LUA. I know what I use while I use it, so to speak. So I don't really know if I ever "learned programming", I probably wouldn't call myself "programmer" and surely not developer.. I just do things until I have what I want and it works. With things I make up and expand as I go along, until I realize I need to restart from scratch with a better structure. And of course, that I like simple things helps :) The code always has some (<i>cough</i>) messyness to it.. but the next thing I start, is usually a bit cleaner and better organized from, because it incorporates what I learned in the previous adventures.
I'm surprised at the education numbers; out of the respondents who attended university, 22% studied either Computer Science or IT.<p>Reading their 'how we made the survey' piece (1), it looks like they asked for responses across a wide variety of media and only branded it as a 'New Coders Survey'.<p>So I have to wonder if they caught a bunch of people with traditional computer science education in their net. That would definitely skew the data considering the sort of conclusions that they're trying to draw about coding bootcamps.<p>(1): <a href="https://medium.freecodecamp.com/we-just-launched-the-biggest-ever-survey-of-people-learning-to-code-cac81dadf1ea" rel="nofollow">https://medium.freecodecamp.com/we-just-launched-the-biggest...</a>
<a href="https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*HsD7w8Y1rQL9qIMP1B426g.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*HsD7w8Y1rQL9...</a><p>Looks like my job is secure, then