Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2016 on self-taught developers

Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It is a privately held website, the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network, created in 2008 by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. It features questions and answers on a wide range of topics in computer programming

ENWIKIPEDIA

Software development is a well known field to be specially suitable for self-directed learners and self-employment. Unlike law or medicine, one can work in the field having skills but no credentials (certificates, credentials, etc).

Education

40,183 responses from non-student developers reported that 69.1% of software developers appear to be self-taught, being the top education profile. This fact is misleading if one does not read the small print, which states that out of this 69.1%, only 13% report themselves as self taught only. That means that the remaining 56.1% did self-directed learning at some extend complementing their formal education, not by replacing it. 13% is nowhere near 69%, although the reading is positive: almost 1 in every 9 developers are excursively self-taught.

Motivation

Almost the same percentage of developers who self-taught at some extend reported that the motivation to ask or answer questions in Stack Overflow is due they learn because they love it, being just second to getting job-related help. So 61.9% report they use Stack Overflow for their own fun and is not necessarily attached to their jobs, in the sense that they could learn different programming languages or technologies as a hobby.

Salary

All developers with five or more years of experience salary is above average. Self-taught developers have a mean salary of 110.1%, more or less in between the middle of all possible levels of formal education. In USA, all developers with five or more years of experience salary is slightly lower than the global results.

Special mention to the graph caption: "Stay in school, kids". Woo in their healthy mind would spend years in the formal education and spend huge amounts of money just to get up to 15% more salary? Do you think it is worth it? First you would need years (or even decades) of increased salary to break even all the investment in tuition fees. The salary for self-directed developers is already high. I do consider the light increase in income does not compensate the harm.

References

Stack overflow 2016 survey.