Last year, I came across Stack Overflow’s 2017 survey which asked developers various questions including their programming background, their work roles, and other things. It was a great source of information and provided some great insights about developers around the world.
I realized that there wasn’t much information on developers in Ghana. So I decided to send out a survey to get information about the Ghana developer landscape. I was hoping to get a large sample size for the survey.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get that large sample size.
I used Google Forms to build the survey to emulate the Stack Overflow survey. I posted the survey link around October of last year. I posted it on my Twitter feed, my Facebook timeline, WhatsApp groups and other social networks.
From October to January, I had only 94 respondents. To me, that’s really sad. The survey isn’t complex. It’s a simple form which would take a person between 5–6 mins to fill out.
There are a lot of developers in Ghana. To get only 94 respondents actually makes me sad. Maybe my social network is not big enough or I didn’t advertise it as broadly.
Or maybe Ghanaians aren’t as enthused about sharing or participating in survey studies. Believe me, getting data and information for my Masters research paper wasn’t as easy as well.
Survey Results
Regardless, here are the results. 94 respondents aren’t the largest size as I would have hoped but it’s still a good enough representative size. So here are a few tidbits from the survey:
- 94.7% of respondents to the survey were Male
- 62% of respondents are self-taught when it comes to programming.
- Javascript appears to the most popular language among developers with 80% of respondents being familiar with it.
- 45% said they were neutral when it came to being over or underpaid.
- For monthly incomes, the highest number of respondents (24%) stated that they were paid between 500–1000 GHC per month while 14.1% received 3000–5000 GHC and above.
I’m still accepting responses for the survey. If you know any Ghanaian developer, spread the word and let them fill out the survey (please!)
https://goo.gl/forms/R3rls0kJxBjbb1fw1
Survey Tidbits (Click To Enlarge):
Full Survey Results can be found here.
