A report published by CodinGame has shown how demand for DevOps experts has skyrocketed in the past year as Covid has pushed employees to remote working. The developer recruitment platform interviewed more than 15,000 developers and HR professionals from around the world for its 4th annual developer report.
It found that while most companies allowed staff to work remotely some of the time, almost half (48 per cent) of those surveyed said their developers worked away from the office full-time in 2020, compared to just 4 per cent of those companies surveyed during 2019. However, figures suggest any trend towards tech telecommuting may be short-lived, once the virus has been beaten, as less than a quarter (23 per cent) of developers questioned said they would prefer to work remotely full-time.
The switch to remote working also saw a sudden rise in demand for DevOps experts, as businesses have experienced increased needs in managing their cloud infrastructures or migrating their operations to the cloud during the pandemic. This trend is likely to continue in 2021 putting pressure on tech recruiters. More than four-out-of-ten (43 per cent) HR professionals surveyed admitted they will struggle to find qualified DevOps for their tech teams this year. DevOps has jumped ahead of Back-End and Full-Stack developers as the hardest positions to fill.
When it came to hiring, tech recruiters turned to virtual interviews during the pandemic. More than half (52 per cent) of the developers recruited in 2020 were interviewed and hired remotely. However once again this trend could be short-lived as only 15 per cent of developers and 1-in-4 recruiters had a preference for this kind of contact.
The tech sector has been one of the success stories of the pandemic, and that’s reflected by the confidence levels within the developer community about their job prospects in 2021. Programmers were asked how easy they thought it would be to change jobs in 2021, on a scale from 1-10. Confidence was reasonably high, with respondents scoring seven on average, the same as in 2020.
“Our latest report on the developer profession highlights the rise of telecommuting and virtual hiring in 2020 and the strong demand for DevOps experts as businesses adapted to working in the cloud,” commented Aude Barral, co-founder of CodinGame. “Although Covid has largely been behind this shift, it will be interesting to see if these trends continue in 2021.
“We’ve also seen more tech recruiters hiring developers who haven’t followed the traditional academic route,” Barral added. “A computer science degree is no longer a must-have if you want a career as a programmer.
“With the wealth of online and offline resources available to everyone, coders of all levels of technical competence can improve their programming skills, opening up job opportunities in the booming tech sector.”
