What skills do IT companies look for in new developers? A study with Stack Overflow jobs

• Published in: Information and software technology Vol. 129; p. 106429
• Main Authors: Montandon, João Eduardo, Politowski, Cristiano, Silva, Luciana Lourdes, Valente, Marco Tulio, Petrillo, Fabio, Guéhéneuc, Yann-Gaël
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.01.2021
• Subjects: Hard skills; Hiring; Soft skills; Stack overflow; Hiring; Hard skills; Stack overflow; Soft skills
• ISSN: 0950-5849; 1873-6025
• DOI: 10.1016/j.infsof.2020.106429

•We reveal how hard skills are distributed among 14 IT positions.•We reveal which soft skills are most requested by IT companies.•Expertise in programming languages is required for new candidates in every IT position.•Expertise in libraries & frameworks is required only for development-based jobs.•Communication, collaboration, and problem-solving are the most required soft skills. Context: There is a growing demand for information on how IT companies look for candidates to their open positions. Objective: This paper investigates which hard and soft skills are more required in IT companies by analyzing the description of 20,000 job opportunities. Method: We applied open card sorting to perform a high-level analysis on which types of hard skills are more requested. Further, we manually analyzed the most mentioned soft skills. Results: Programming languages are the most demanded hard skills. Communication, collaboration, and problem-solving are the most demanded soft skills. Conclusion: We recommend developers to organize their resumé according to the positions they are applying. We also highlight the importance of soft skills, as they appear in many job opportunities.