Someone who attends the awesome developer user group (DUG) is: 26-35, a senior C# developer, who is not looking for a new job and is working on websites or mobile apps at company of 10 people or less. Statistically speaking. This is what came out in the recent DUG annual survey. This was the second time we ran the survey (2014 can be found here) and we tried to keep the questions similar so we can compare. The goal of the survey is ultimately to understand the audience better so that we can give the audience a better event.

Satisfaction

For us, as the leads of the group the  sat numbers are very important, and we are very happy to see a small uptick in these numbers.

As for complexity of sessions that is still near the middle but is higher, meaning they are slightly more complex than last year.

Start Time

Going into last years survey the start time for Johannesburg was a big discussion point, what time should the group start at and last year 49% of people wanted it to remain where it was, 6% earlier and the remaining 45% later. This year that has changed with 57% of people wanting to keep it as is, no one wanting it earlier and 43% wanting it later.

This year we have Pretoria data too, and it is a very different picture with only 37% happy with the current time and 63% wanting an earlier time. There is no clear winner with an earlier time as 16h30, 17h30 & 18h00 all got the same number of votes. This group will be shifting earlier going forward so hopefully we see an improvement next year.

Why do you attend?

Attendance is largely to skill up and network. For the most part these numbers are similar to last year. The only interesting changes are around employment those wanting a job is lower (down 6% since last year) while those looking is higher (up around 5%).

Demographics

Breaking down the details of the people at the group, starting with age:

• 18 – 25:    10%
• 26 – 35:    58%
• 36 – 45:    26%
• 46 – 55:    4%
• 56 – 65 :   2%

Skill level:

• Senior    67%
• Intermediate    18%
• Junior    14%

We have seen a increase in juniors over 2014, which is a great trend!

Languages:

Compared to 2014, the losers are

• C# – down 3%
• C++ – down 1%
• Python, PHP, Scala, SQL – all losing 1% and dropping away completely

The winners are:

• Java – up 1%
• JavaScript – up 9%
• Objective C – up 5%
• VB – up 1%
• Ruby, Haskell and Meteor – all new at 2% this year

What work do we do?

There is a trend away from web technology, with internal websites losing 8% and public facing websites losing 7%. Mobile dev is up 9%.

Company size:

• 1-10    28%
• 11-20    12%
• 91-200    8%
• 41-80    8%
• 21-40    2%
• >200    0%

Role in purchasing:

• I can suggest/influence purchases    40%
• None    42%
• I make the final say    18%

Comments

The majority of the comment were positive and supportive of us - thank you so much! There was one trend that popped out around video recording the sessions. This is something we are investigating and we do want to offer the videos and we want to make sure we have a good reliable system for that. This is not an easy problem to solve but we are working on it.

Raw data

If you would like to play with the data yourself you can get it below.