How to satisfy your stakeholders?

A data based approach using Stack Overflow’s developer survey data from 2017.

Introduction

There are various methods on how to satisfy your stakeholders, such as your boss, your employees, your customer, and even yourself. Satisfaction is a positive power leading to success.

To satisfy someone, you needs to know what he/she is thinking, and what the true needs he/she has. There are tons of theories and frameworks about satisfaction, but I would like to introduce a data-driven method of finding the factors affecting satisfaction.

Therefore, I used data from Stackoverflow’s 2017 Annual Developer Survey, to take a closer look at this question.

The survey data collected over 64,000 reviews, mainly aims to understand multiple aspects of jobs related to software development and data analytics. There are 3 indicators of satisfaction: the job satisfaction, the career satisfaction, and the StackOverflow satisfaction.

I would like to introduce some findings from my analysis of the data.

Part I: How the coding life span affects the ex-coders’ opinion regarding coding

There are some interesting questions asked to those used to work as a coder. The question is: You said before that you used to code as part of your job, but no longer do. To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements?

The reviewers are supposed to answer strongly disagree, disagree, somewhat agree, agree as well as strongly agree to the following categories.

Table 1: Questions asked to ex-coders for the extend of agreement

From Fig 1 below you can how ex-coder’s attitude towards the question above changes with the life span as a coder. Note the y-axis value means the average score of agreement, 0 means strongly disagree and 4 means strongly agree.

Fig 1: How ex-coder’s attitude change with the life span as a coder

You can see as the coder experience of an ex-coder increases, he will more likely to return to coding work, however disagree that developer wasn’t a good fit for him. The longer the coder experience a ex-coder has, the more likely he will consider that he has a better work-life balance and the career goes exactly as what he expected 10 years ago. This tells us, the experience affects the extend of satisfaction of current life.

Part II: What part of the StackOverflow contributes to the users satisfaction?

I also analyzed the questions regarding the StackOverflow and the satisfaction from the users.

From the chart below you can see that the top 3 facter affecting the satisfaction of StackOverflow is whether it’s helpful, whether the moderation is fair, and whether the community is strong.

Fig 2: Important features affecting the user satisfaction towards StackOverflow

So to improve the user satisfaction, StackOverflow should maintain or improve its performance on the 3 aspects below:

The usability: Try to make the platform more easy to use and more helpful.

The moderation: To make the moderation as fair as possible.

The community: To make the community more united as a home to all the developers.

Part III: What factors are related to the job satisfaction?

The questionnaire also collected the reviewers’ personal information and the job satisfaction. Using these data I was able to get some insights of what factors will affect one’s satisfaction towards his job.

From the table below, it seems the biggest factor of job satisfaction is whether the employee get overpaid. Also employees in Startups seems to be more happy. People working in smaller companies tend to be more happy, while those who work in bigger companies tend to have a low job satisfaction. Also the more it’s allowed to work from home, the happier will the employees be.

Table 2: Coefficients affecting the job satisfaction

From the insights above, we can conclude that the job satisfaction comes from challenge and freedom.

Conclusion

In this article, we took a look at how to break into the field of becoming a developer according to Stack Overflow 2017 survey data.

1. We gathered the reviews towards coding work from the ex-coders of various length of coding experience. It teels us the experience affects the extend of satisfaction of current life.
2. We then looked at the factors affecting the StackOverflow’s user satisfaction. We learned that to improve a platform’s user satisfaction, we should try to improve the usability, the moderation and the community.
3. Finally, we looked at the factors affecting one’s job satisfaction. We found that startups, smaller companies, and companies allowing more freedom, tend to have better satisfaction from employees.

Here are the last question for you:

How will YOU achieve the satisfaction from your stakeholder?

To see more about this analysis, see the link to my Github available here.