Central & Eastern Europe Developer Landscape 2017 - a report by Stack Overflow

I am really proud that, based on Stack Overflow data, we can present, for the first time, such a comprehensive study of the software developer market in the CEE region. This shows that countries in the region have a real talent pool in the IT industry that can help their economies to take the advantage of either attracting the biggest internationaltional tech companies or building strong local software challengers. Additionally, these numbers also support rising startup ecosystems.

We are seeing a huge concentration of developers in their capital cities

Another interesting point is that, in the majority of the CEE countries, we are seeing a huge concentration of developers in their capital cities, reaching up to 93% in Latvia. In contrast, Poland’s, capital Warsaw accounts for only for 29%, and in Ukraine, Kiev numbers 43%.

If you look at software developer density, the number of software developers compared to the labor force as a whole, we see that Slovakia and Estonia are true leaders, achieving 3.7 and 3.0, developers per 100 working people respectively, versus a regional average of around 1.3.

Poland is the biggest, most diversified country in the region with 254 thousand developers and seven hubs (Warsaw, Kraków, Wrocław, Katowice, Poznań, Gdańsk and Łodź) each with at least 10 thousand developers. Being based in Poland I find this quite satisfying, but on the other hand I see that there is still at least 50 thousand employees missing on the market. Therefore, the national and local governments should treat this seriously, constantly looking for opportunities by improving educational models and building relocation incentives for experts from other cities and countries. Because, in the face of the Industry 4.0 revolution, and with the almost total digitalization of every aspect of our lives, the potential of developers can act as the most important competitive advantage for their economies.

Key findings

There are roughly 1 million professional-grade software developers across Central & Eastern Europe (CEE)

• One-quarter of these are in Poland
• Across CEE, there are approximately 1.3 developers for every 100 people in the work force

Across CEE, 15% of Web developers are using the Java Web stack

• Most popular Web development language in the region is PHP
• Java market share of Web developers has been steady over last 4 years

Methodology and data sources

The bulk of the data in this report are based on developers’ interactions with content on the English-language version of Stack Overflow

• Stack Overflow is the world’s largest website for software developers, with more than 50 million unique visitors a month. These visitors come to Stack Overflow to ask and answer technical questions with their peers in our community, which make up 95%+ of developers globally. The average visitor comes seven times a month to either consume or contribute to content. The sum of this activity is more than 20 million page views a day during the average work week
• When developers visit Stack Overflow, our database records their IP and MAC addresses, and their web browser is offered a cookie to track their visitation history. By combining this information, we’re able to build a user history that spans multiple devices and working locations, regardless of whether the user is logged in during a particular visit (or, for that matter, has registered for a login at all).
• At the same time, we record which technologies are tagged on the questions each developer is visiting. Our machine learning platform uses the history of tags a developer has interacted with over the last 30 days to assign probabilities that he or she is of a particular ‘kind’ (such as a mobile developer, or systems administrator), and working on a particular stack (such as the .NET stack).
• This allows us to understand exactly how many professional-grade software developers are in a given area, where they are based (for home and work, so sometimes also their commute between the two), the types of developers they are, and the technologies they use.

.NET LOSING DEVELOPERS TO NODE, PYTHON IN CEE

Developer market shares of common Web development stack in CEE, 2012-2016

NODE.JS GAINING DEVELOPER SHARE THROUGHOUT CEE

Node.JS gaining developer share throughout CEE, 2012-2016

Fastest gains and highest penetrations in Ukraine, Belarus

PYTHON USAGE FOR WEB DEVELOPMENT GROWING THROUGHOUT CEE

Percentage of developers who use Python for Web development Central & Eastern Europe, 2012-2016

Strongest adoption growth in Estonia, Slovakia

Although we might say that PHP is rather not sexy, it still holds the position of the most popular web language, not only in Poland, but also across the CEE region. It is worth noticing that Python is favoured in North America, the British Isles, the Nordics, Western Europe and even Russia, but not in Eastern Europe. This will probably change soon due to the dynamic increase of Python usage in the region.

JavaScript is the most approved programming language of the world

JavaScript is the most approved programming language of the world, used by nearly 62% of developers. A large variety of frameworks and libraries, such as ReactJS, AngularJS, Vue.js or Node.js make this language more and more in demand every year. This is what’s happening in Poland – PHP remains at the same level, but Node.js is growing dynamically.