What we are looking for through the career?

INFSCI2415 Final Project

Zhehao Guo Sichao Wang Qi Lu Jinpeng Hu

Dataset

Our dataset comes from the Stack Overflow 2018 Developer Survey feedbacks provided by the Stack Overflow team on Kaggle. The dataset contains multiple questions that cover domains from job position statistics to job satisfaction feedbacks. There are 98,855 responses in the public data release followed by approximately 67,441 qualified responses that completed the entire survey.

Link: https://www.kaggle.com/stackoverflow/stack-overflow-2018-developer-survey

Methodology

In general, we use some data analysis methods and plots to dive into our data. The critical python packages we implement are Plotly, Matplotlib and Lightgbm. To be specific, Plotly Python graphing library makes interactive, publication-quality graphs. Examples of how to make line plots, scatter plots, area charts, bar charts, error bars, box plots, histograms, heatmaps, subplots, multiple-axes, polar charts, and bubble charts. With the help of it, we create various fancy and meaningful plots, such as Sankey, Sunburst, word maps and etc. As for Lightgbm, we apply it to train a multiclass classification model to predict the salary level by the features we are curious about. What is more, we get to know about the importance of the features by Lightgbm, which provides us with meaningful information.

Significance

The IT industry is a very competitive and technology-oriented industry. For many people without a clear plan, they are always being pushed away by life. We implement this research to understand the salary level in various small areas of the IT industry and help those who are about to enter society or even have no clear goals. I hope that through our efforts, we can give them some small directions and help them have a better understanding of the entire industry. Better, we also hope that they can realize their life value through their own efforts after clearing their goals.

The dataset we used for this picture is what we used for our project. This figure reflects the relationship between job type and the salary level. Since each region has different job types, all the researches are also based on diverse regions. The figure on the left is an overall distribution that showing the job type distribution corresponding to each region and the salary level distribution corresponding to each job type. The picture on the right is a moving picture. At first, it only showed the regional distribution in the general situation. With the click of the mouse, each corresponding region will expand. Then we can see the job type and corresponding salary level of each region. What we got from these two pictures is that in each region, high salary type has the largest proportion in the management. Because no matter in which field, the middle-income type always has the most people, so we temporarily conclude that the salary of management jobs is relatively high.

DevType & Salary Level & Future Plan

Another point we focus on is the foresight of people from different types of jobs. As the discussion above, we are more care about the management, so we just separate the work types which people want to do in the future of 5 years as three categories which are technical, manager and neither of both. From the plot, we found that only the management type has the largest amount of high-level salary. Besides, the people who have plans to do manager in the future of 5 years also have the largest amount of high-level salary. We apply this plot and method to another 4 areas which are North America, Europe, China and India and we have a similar result. Therefore, people who intend to do jobs about management in the five years now have a high salary level. No matter what job types people are, if they are in a high-level salary, most of them would like to do the jobs about management in 5 years. As for those people who have now technical jobs and have a high salary level, most of them tend to transfer to management jobs.

Salary & Diverse Stack & Work Experience in North America

Salary & Diverse Stack & Work Experience in EU/CN/IN

Then we draw the left figure, which is the average salary trend of these two job types, although the management positions at their early career earn less than that of technical, it went up even more in the future. That explains why so many people are willing to job-hopping from technical positions to management.

DevType & SalaryLevel Amoung World

We look into the data about the programming language and the salary. Due to different development levels of different areas, we focus on those 4 areas of North America, Europe, China and India. And we count the number of programming languages of each person. Besides, the circle in the plot shows the median salary and with a higher salary, the circle becomes larger. Thus, we found that more programming language people obtain, more salary people may get. Nevertheless, we can’t simply make that solution. In other words, we should learn more advanced programming languages to catch up with technology, which means that we should not stop learning new languages or techniques.

Those two plots show the feature importance of the LightGBM we train. According to the plots, we know that the most important feature is the country, and therefore it is necessary for us to consider data as 4 areas which are North America, Europe, China and India. Other features shown in the plot above are considered in our analysis.

Findings

In the same industry, the development level among countries is actually similar. In the IT industry, most people are engaged in technical development work. Meanwhile, as a technology-oriented industry, individual wages are rising based on the year of entry.

Most of the technical staff will slowly transform into management work. In management work, the proportion of high-income people is also the largest.

Discussion

The research we first did was based on real life. We use wages to measure the quality of work, but we ignore many factors that exist today. For example, individual hobbies, the technical level of each person, and even the development level of the IT industry in various countries.

Employment opportunities and competitive pressures in the IT industry are obvious to all. We have not only the technological capacity of the advanced industry but also an opportunity to continuously break through our own technology.

Salary may be one of the criteria for measuring the quality of a job, but it can never be the only criterion. Our life is very long, and the meaning of life we are looking for cannot be simply measured by money.

However, at this stage, it is difficult for us to know exactly what kind of life we want. Too much attention to realizing the value of life is sometimes counterproductive. We need a small direction to help us adjust our horizons and reduce the curve of our life. Of course, we have many other issues that we can continue to discuss. Such as the IT industry's general career planning or technology transformation and other issues. But now, for many people who haven’t fully touched society, starting from reality is not necessarily a bad thing.

Here's my story...

I’m an ordinary student from China. In China, students in high school are going to choose a university based on their test scores after taking the college entrance examination, and then determine the undergraduate major for their future career. Since I didn't know too much about the current industrial fields, I chose computer science that was very popular at the time.

College life is fresh and unknown to me. Every day, I seem to be enjoying school life. I participated in a lot of campus activities with good grades and student activities. I thought I would live with the pride of "I'm actually excellent" until I graduate. The turn of events happened when I was a junior.

Everything seems smooth until I graduated that a lot of questions about my uncertain future came to my mind. At that time, I decided to pursue my further study in the United States to find the answer to my life. However, my classmates seemed still uncertain about the next stage of life. Some were looking for a job, some planned to continue their studies, and some of them have even switched to work that was completely unrelated to their previous major. Looking at their hard work, I started to ask myself: what kind of job you want to do in the future? What kind of life do you want in the future?

During this period, I also asked a lot of my classmates and there was no uniform standard for the answers. Most of them didn’t know what they were interested in, and some of them even didn’t have a clear career plan. Therefore, they are just pushed forward by life. After they graduated, they just do what most of the new grads do: read books, find the job that they feel Ok with and then continue to the next chapter of life.

Take these questions with myself, I started my life in another country that really far away from home. While adapting to my campus life, making friends and enriching myself, I eventually realized that the answer to those questions literally became less important than I thought.

Life is full of uncertain factors. None of us can predict what will happen next and the only thing we can do is to grasp this moment. Instead of planning each step in detail afterward, it is better to work hard and push yourself to become a better person. In time, sometimes I go a little on the road of life, but the direction is always right. After observing or talking with classmates I found that, nowadays, most people may have similar career goals, that is, to find a suitable job when they graduate, so now you have to improve yourself, but again, everyone is confused about career planning. Sometimes, if there is no way to understand your interests, it’s a better way to get started from reality.

What we are looking for through the whole life is a big question that is difficult to answer easily, but grasping the present and determining the goal, we have a lifetime to answer this question.