The Pursuit of Happyness as Service Developer, A story that probably will make you cry
I have been working for a long time in Web Services and I’m at that point where I need a change in my career path to feel more satisfaction in my Job, that’s why I’ve started to learn about Data Science. So, like most of you, I’m taking an online course.
And there is a “strategy” called CRISP DM (Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining). A set of actions to deep dive in a particular context given a data set. In this case a StackOverflow survey. After reading the survey many times, I was very interested in the data because it fit like a glove to my current mood.
I decided to investigate more about which factors affect the most to the job satisfaction.
The first question I had was, What are the benefits that people who have been coding for the longest time enjoy the most? And, Do them change over time? (because maybe this was what happened to me). And this is what i found after working a little bit with the dat
At first glance it seems that the preference of the benefits that a company offers to their developers does not change too much with the years of coding, however there are three that definitely change: Professional Development sponsorship, Education Sponsorship and Meals.
And this makes me think: Are developers the laziest to learn the more experience they have in a particular field? Well that, at least is not my case.
Then, since I was not satisfied, I thought that probably the Salary is a key factor here. But what are the things that affect the Salary?What are the skills a Developer thinks influence the more the Salary, or in other words, the better paid?
I tried to get the data in my Data set for trying to answer that and the best solution I came was to analyze the recommendations for hiring that the developer has.
I based this analysis in the assumption that if you want to give hiring recommendations is because you feel that there are important aspects in a developer that will make it more desirable to a company and if so, companies will need to pay more for hiring them.
It was very interesting for me to know that effectiveness, communication followed by Tech Experience were the most important aspects and that there is a little correlation with the Salary.
But is not the Technical Experience the most important? After a moment of reflexion, It started to make sense to me. It is east to teach things to other if the communications is good and… according to my experience most of the time is more important to do the things fast and good, than slow and perfect.
Finally, and after not responding to my initial question, I just “got lazy” and I thought it was time to let the computer do the job.
I created a simple Linear Regression model with all the fields relevant to a company/job environment, to try to predict (and find correlation) with the Job Satisfaction. And after some “data wrangling”.
I ran the model and… Yeah, I know it, Career Satisfaction was strongly correlated but… i though… Maybe for some people Career satisfaction and Job satisfaction are just the same things, so I decided to remove it from my dataset to not bias it.
I ran the model again and… the same thing. There was not a heavy correlational with anything, and my model was not able to predict the Job Satisfaction given the information.
However, it was interesting to see that for instance, more hours or weeks have a negative impact on job satisfaction, as well as the feeling of being underpaid.
And also that makes sense that if you are satisfied with your job you don’t want to change it. Or that if you feel satisfied with the equipment your company has provided you, you are also more motivated to work.
At the end, probably the answer to my depresion (lol) was in row number 8 (remember true developers always start at 0). It seems that the experience I have coding, is just a negative factor to my job satisfaction, bad for me.
As me, I really want you dear lector, to try to find via science the reasons of your feelings, there is always a solution and the correct data set for that.
You can find the source code here: https://github.com/jc2/udacity_datascience_p1
