The pandemic has had far-reaching effects on organisations across a multitude of sectors, leading to major disruption in recruitment and employment. Luckily, the tech industry remained resilient thanks to increased demand for digital services as more businesses were forced to move online and accelerate transformation strategies.
Findings from Hired’s 2021 State of Software Engineering report confirm that the buoyant tech market over the last 12 months has significantly impacted sector salaries, skill requirements, and our ways of working. In this blog, we look at some of the key takeaways from the report and what they mean for the sector.
The hottest jobs
Mirroring the results of the 2019 report, backend, full stack and frontend engineering roles were in highest demand, receiving 58%, 57% and 30% of all interview requests for software engineers, respectively.
While demand growth remained relatively unchanged from 2019, mobile and embedded engineers saw a slight increase which is attributed to people spending more time on their mobile devices during the lockdown periods.
Salary increases
Despite the challenges of the pandemic, 2020 saw average London salaries for top engineering roles rise by 6%. Search engineers in London saw the most significant salary increase of 18% since 2019, followed by hardware at 15% and computer vision, machine learning and NLP at 8%. Embedded engineers saw the smallest rise at 2%.
In-demand skills
The previous two reports saw Go crowned as the most in-demand coding language, with candidates possessing this skill landing an average of 9.2 interview requests. This was echoed in 2020, with candidates proficient in Go receiving twice as many interview requests. Go skills were closely followed by those gained from Scala and SASS, which helped candidates to land 2.2 and 2.1 times more interviews, respectively.
Despite this, Python, Java and JavaScript remain the most requested coding languages from employers. The report states that React and Node.js are the most in-demand frameworks, and AWS is the top speciality skill, showing eight times the demand compared to Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure skills.
Additionally, employers are looking for mid-level software engineers with 6-10 years of experience, evidenced by these candidates receiving 33% more interview requests than other engineers with more or less experience.
Interview process
The traditional interview process for software engineers still sees candidates participate in coding exams, whiteboard sessions and behavioural interviews. However, more engineers are questioning the validity of such methods.
In the 2019 survey, 66% of software engineers said most coding exams and exercises are irrelevant to the day-to-day job, an opinion shared by 80% of respondents in 2020. Such sentiment echoes the trend of younger engineers moving away from acquiring skills through traditional university degrees and instead opting to take the self-taught route. So, while 45% of software engineers have a computer science degree, 24% are now self-taught, and 10% have learned to code via a bootcamp programme.
The report confirms that the pandemic has accelerated this trend of upskilling. Employers are increasingly hiring for skills instead of credentials as they seek to secure the talent they need in what has become a highly candidate-driven market.
You can view the full Hired 2021 State of Software Engineers report here.
If you’d like to discuss your recruitment needs and how you can widen your software development talent pool in 2021, get in touch and find out how we can help.