The Software Developer Cycle: Career demographics and the market clock: or, is SQL the new COBOL?

The software development community includes people from a wide spectrum of age and experience. While the industry itself is constantly evolving with new languages, tools and methods, developers themselves are advancing through their careers. A consequence of these two paths of change is that future demand for software-related skills is unpredictable, leading to challenges for educators, trainers and strategists. In order to gain some insights into the impact of such changes, we gathered a snapshot of a set of demographic and profile data from 443 developers who attended a global day of coderetreat. We analyzed the data to seek relevant patterns in the demographics, software development skills and activities of our respondents. Then, using the concept of the IT market clock as a framework for analysis, we identified trends from this dataset to formulate informed predictions about how the software development community may evolve, as a result of generational changes over time, and what impact that may have on the legacy systems of the future.