What skills does a front end need to become a middle? Research HTML Academy
Vacancies are filtered by the following parameters:
The company that posted the job is developing one or more products.
Work experience indicated in the vacancy falls within the range of 1-3 years.
Salary ≥150,000 rubles after taxes.
These parameters included 460 vacancies posted in early September 2021. This was a key sample that was analyzed first, but we also selected vacancies based on similar parameters.
The same sample, but with requirements for experience from three to six years – 542 vacancies.
With more than six years of experience – 36 vacancies.
With a similar requirement for the company, but without a salary filter, for specialists with experience from zero to one year – 48 vacancies.
The samples were pre-cleared from duplicate vacancies at different sites and from identical vacancies in different departments of the same company.
Thus, more than 1000 vacancies were analyzed in total.
How was the data analyzed?
Our task was to understand how many times one particular skill is mentioned in each specific sample, and to look at the dependencies, growth or decline of a particular skill.
Below you can see an example of the resulting raw table with data that was analyzed in the next step.
The interviews with the developers were carried out in parallel with the analysis of vacancies, since we did not want to adjust some intermediate results to others.
Two groups were selected for interviews with developers:
Teams and tech leads of food companies who hire and work with middlemen.
Middleles with two to five years of experience.
We wanted to collect as many opinions as possible, so we could not expect to be able to communicate personally with everyone, so we conducted the collection of skills as follows.
We talked with team leaders and tech leads – about 40 people in total.
Based on the results of the conversations, we formed an average competency map by skills and compiled a survey on the use or non-use of skills on its basis.
We sent out a survey to three groups of experienced developers:
HTML Academy mentors, of whom we have a lot.
Academy graduates who graduated from two to five years ago.
Twitter and social media groups with experienced developers.
We spoke by voice with twenty middle ones to get an approval of the results.
In total, taking into account the team leads, polls and voice interviews with middlemen, we collected data from almost 500 people.
Important clarifications
All received data reflect the state of the market at a particular point in time. We do not pretend to have a zero error, since our task is to find the main pains and market requirements.
There is no personal opinion in the results obtained, even where you wanted to add it.
Research results
As I said above, our task was to understand what skills are required in order to become a middle in a food company. After collecting all the data, we put them into tables and built graphs to build dependencies and see patterns.
Below is an example of a graph that shows in what percentage of vacancies, for each experience group, a particular skill is required. If you wish, you can draw conclusions yourself, but we want to highlight the most important and interesting ones.
Detailed charts on JavaScript frameworks and selected skills
Most Popular Middle Skills
React – 61%.
TypeScript – 58%
Vue – 31%.
Webpack – 30%.
Understanding of OOP, MVC, patterns – 30%.
Unit tests – 25%.
Redux – 24%.
Based on the results of interviews with team leaders, it turned out that it is not enough just to know these skills at the term level. It is necessary to understand the principles of working with a technology or tool, and to understand it deeply.
It is also worth noting that if we consider all vacancies for all analyzed groups, then TypeScript will be in the first place, but taking into account the margin of error, we can say that they are on the same level with React.
Interestingly, Vue is twice as low as React, and Angular is mentioned in only 15% of vacancies.
The demand for fundamental knowledge grows with experience
If you look at the graphs above, you can see that over time, the demand for the foundations and foundation, in which we have placed
Algorithms and data structures.
Understanding of OOP, MVC, patterns.
Understanding the operation of networks and data transfer protocols.
Understanding the principles of databases.
This is an interesting observation that shows that despite the low threshold for entry into the frontend, for a developer to grow, it is necessary at a certain stage of development to take on the study of the fundamentals.
Skills that need to be trained first to grow from June to middle
With such a sample on hand, we couldn’t help but compare the skill requirements for Middle and Jun. We collected them in a separate graph to compare and understand which skills are worth learning first.
According to our statistics, the top looks like this
TypeScript – the demand is growing by 56%.
Unit tests – 27%.
React – 24%
Redux – 22%
Webpack – 17%
Fundamentals group – 17% on average.
There are other skills that are not showing such growth, but they are – Angular, State Management, GraphQL, Agile, CSS-in-JS, SSR, CI / CD.
At the same time, there are skills, for example, Vue.js and knowledge of popular CSS frameworks, the demand for which falls when moving from June to middle.
There is one skill, the results of which in the studied vacancies and interviews diverged – this is an understanding of the basics and principles of UI / UX. Jobs say that middlemen rarely need it, but hiring team leaders think otherwise. So knowledge of the principles of UI / UX can be considered a hidden advantage when hiring.
Comparison of average salaries
Of course, it was impossible to look at so many vacancies and not count the money. We compared the average salaries of the three main groups and got the following.
1-3 years of experience. The average salary is 219 thousand rubles, the maximum is 480 thousand rubles.
3-6 years old. The average salary is 255 thousand rubles, the maximum is 500 thousand rubles.
6+ years old. The average salary is 342 thousand rubles, the maximum is 700 thousand rubles.
Taking this opportunity, let me remind you that the sample included vacancies of grocery companies with a salary of 150 thousand rubles or more, and the data was collected in the fall. This means that by the current period, the average numbers can be safely increased by 10-15%, if you believe the trends in the market.
conclusions
The main findings of the study are presented above.
I would like to once again focus on the fact that when a company requires a certain skill, it wants to get not only superficial knowledge, but also an understanding of the principles, experience of using and solving typical problems using a technology or tool.
It should be remembered that the frontend is developing very quickly, which means that by the middle of next year, these results may be completely different. We will try to repeat the study to compare the results.
In the meantime, based on the information received, we have collected comence mapthat shows front-end developer skills averaged across the market and scaled down as needed at each stage of the experience.
Thank you for your attention and don’t forget about development.
