I read a blog post about DevSkiller report analyzing some trends and I read the original report and I have some comments to make.
“Companies from Israel are the most selective”
According to the post, companies in Israel are considered the most selective since they consider only 12.26% of the developers they test. Another point of view is that Israeli companies give less weight to résumés and would rather test the applicant skills. This can increase the diversity and give a chance to more people. I think that it is a good practice for an industry that lacks more than 10,000 professionals (see here)
“72% of companies are looking for JavaScript developers and JS is the most popular IT skill developers are tested in (40%)”
JavaScript is used both front-end (e.g. react) and back-end tool (e.g. node.js) and I think that the popularity
. I think grouping it together is too broad. Also, the SQL skill is somehow a side requirement of many positions and is almost worthless on its own. The big gap between JavaScript (40%) and HTML\CSS (20%) is weird, specifically when they compare it to the StackOverflow 2019 report where they were JavaScript had 67.8% and HTML\CSS have 63.5% and they were one after the other. The numbers themselves do not matter, just the gap and the order.
On a side comment, interpersonal skills such as team player, leadership, responsibility are ignored in this report and that’s a shame. They are sometimes more important when hiring someone.
“React, Spring, ASP.NET, MySQL, HTML, Data Analysis, and Laravel are the most popular technologies in their respective tech stacks”
CSS is a tech stack? Weird analysis from my point of view, maybe web development would have been a better title.
Is it a surprise that HTML and CSS are tested together? I find it hard to believe that an employer looks for an employee that is skilled only with one of those, they are tightly coupled.
In this section in the post, I miss a mention of NoSQL technologies.
General comments
Obviously, they use their data which is great but there might be a selection bias to pay attention to. For example, companies that look for JavaScript developers are not able to screen for themselves and therefore use their services. Comparing to companies the loop for Python developers. In the section about technologies tested together, they point out that the most common combination last year was Java+SQL and this year it is JavaScript + CSS. Maybe their screening service for Java+SQL is not as good as their screening for JavaScript + CSS and therefore companies do not use it.
The completion rate of the test is impressive (93%).
There is a detailed analysis of the geography of the hiring companies and the candidates’ origins. I am also interested in demographics such as age, gender, marital status. I know that not everything is legal to have or ask. But I wonder if parents are more likely or less likely to complete the tests (or even start them). Are women as likely as men to pass the tests? Are there feminine and masculine technologies?
Data about years of experience and the correlation to technologies used and the probability passing the tests would also be interesting.
Tom Ron 