Sydney Rides Business Challenge

We at 4mation Technologies are a healthy bunch, in fact a large portion of us ride our bikes to work. With that in mind, it was an easy decision to enter ourselves in the Sydney Rides Business Challenge – an event lasting about 4 weeks, designed to get people in the business world riding their bikes to commute to work. We entered as a company of 50-199 staff, and my team within the company also entered as a department of 3-6 people.

As it turned out, we did pretty well! Here are some results that I captured near the very end of the competition;

4m-overall

4m-advtech

And I’m very proud to say that our team (within the company) actually came 1st in the department rankings for Sydney. We got to attend the award ceremony at the Hilton with some nice appetizers and alcohol, and the Major gave us these;

bike-award

All in all, I’m pretty happy with our performance.

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2015

Stack Overflow just did their developer survey for the year, and there’s some interesting stuff. There’s also a lot of expected stuff… for example, very relevant to my industry, WordPress remains one of the most dreaded technologies.

Overall, developers are relatively an inexperienced bunch compared to other engineering disciplines (this is however nothing new). Javascript is the most popular technology. Everyone seems to LOVE Swift.

Compensation by Industry is very interesting – I wish they had figures for Australia. I kind of feel as though the US ones are skewed heavily by parts of California like the Bay Area where the cost of living is outrageous (hence the salaries are too). Australia is 4th best compensated, and there is actually little difference between it, US and Russia (amazing right?) according to the big max index of PPP salaries. The best remunerated country according to the same scale happens to be Ukarine. Salary rises with stack overflow rep (bit of self serving commentary, but I guess it’s well placed).

The weightings of different industry sectors in different parts of the world is rather intriguing, I’m guessing the US has a disproportionate amount of tech startups, and of course Asia has a disproortionate amount of traditional software engineering products.

People in Iran, are the most satisfied with their development jobs.

Overall, lots of cool statistics – I recommend you check it now.