A 2023 annual software developer survey report released by Reveal pointed out that the developer shortage has become the industry's biggest challenge for the second consecutive year.
The report is based on survey data of more than 2,000 software developers and IT professionals. More than a third of respondents (37.5%) said that skilled developers will be in short supply in 2023, with DevOps engineers, data analytics developers and IT security engineers considered the most difficult positions to fill.
The survey notes that some organizations are trying to overcome skills challenges by adopting new technologies that reduce the need for developers, such as low-code tools. Three quarters (76.8%) of organizations are addressing the lack of skilled developers by using low-code/no-code tools. "This approach helps ease the need for developers by reducing the need for heavy hand-coding in areas such as screen design, UX flow, theme design, and branding, and can completely eliminate the need to manually tweak HTML and CSS."
The survey found that software developers plan to improve project management (30%), improve designer/developer collaboration (30%), use software suitable for citizen developers (27%), utilize remote workers (25%) ), and consolidate data or analytics catalogs (25%) to better utilize resources.
Some of the other top challenges for 2023 include inability to keep pace with developer tool innovation (27.7%), difficulty with third-party integration (26.70%), difficulty managing workload (26.2%), security threats (26.10%), project Management (26.10%) and customer expectations are too high (26%).
Embedded analytics and business intelligence continue to gain popularity, with 80.8 percent of software developers planning to incorporate these analytics tools into their products in 2022, up 3 percent from 2021. The need for embedded analytics in applications developed for clients is also growing rapidly, with 48% of developers embedding analytics in client applications in 2022, up from 30.8% in 2021. 74.9% of software developers expect their organizations to increase their focus on business intelligence by 2023.
In terms of revenue, the data shows that only 18.8% of the respondents indicated that they will achieve revenue growth in 2022, compared to 25% in 2021. The percentage of developers taking on new projects will drop slightly (33.3%) in 2022 from 36.22% in 2021. Only 25% expanded into new markets, an 8% drop from the previous year. Requests for proposals are also down in 2022, down 12 percent from 2021.
More details can be found in the full report .