Prashanth Chandrasekar

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to all of you today. My name is Prashanth Chandrasekar. I am the CEO of Stack Overflow.

I am here to talk to you about the increasing talent gap that exists in our industry today, and how you can address that by thinking about the knowledge gap, which is much more in your control.

You might know Stack Overflow. We are the world's largest software developer platform and community, serving close to 100 million monthly visitors from all around the world. We have been around since 2008, and we have close to 50 million questions and answers on every possible technology topic and programming language on our platform. That has been accessed by the developer and technologist community over 50 billion times since our inception.

The pace of questions being asked on our site is quite staggering. A new question is asked every 13 seconds. I love this stat because it shows how quickly and frequently challenges arise for technical teams. Clearly, the problems they are solving are so complex that there is always a new challenge they need to solve.

Developers and technologists rely on each other to work through these challenges, to learn from each other, whether by asking a global community on Stack Overflow or turning to their teammates. Obviously, this is very much a team sport in this industry.

Technology is evolving very, very quickly. Over 70% of developers are learning a new technology at least once a year. That means that by the time someone graduates from college or university, the latest developer language or technology could have changed at least four times. That is really, really fast.

We see this happening all the time. Of course, this is some Stack Overflow data that you are looking at, and you can see the rapid innovation of technologies and the change that is happening in our space. Technologies change, and languages and frameworks are constantly evolving. More importantly, it is evolving faster than any traditional curriculum can do at the same time.

This is some data from our annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey. What is interesting is that because technology is changing so quickly, people are seeking out languages that are easy to learn and are avoiding those that are not.

These are the top 10 most loved languages from our Stack Overflow Developer Survey in 2021. As you can see, Rust, Clojure, or TypeScript: you can see 87% of the community loves Rust, 81% of the community loves Clojure, and 73% of the community loves TypeScript. The most popular coding languages and frameworks are also known for being easy to learn and can be applied across industries.

What is fascinating is that not only are people becoming experts in what they know, but they are also looking to learn a lot more. I love this shot, again from our survey, because it shows the variety of technology and languages that technologists know, but also shows their hunger for learning technology that they just have not had a chance to work with yet.

Let us walk through a few examples. There are over 10,000 JavaScript developers that want to start or continue developing in the languages of Go or Rust. The majority of developers that want to use Dart are currently using JavaScript. We also see the only developers that want to work in PHP are SQL developers.

It is ultimately unrealistic to expect traditional educational institutions to keep up with this level of innovation. As a result, 60% of developers are learning to code from online resources. As an organization, it is not scalable to expect every employee to learn in traditional settings, especially when it comes to technologies.

At the same time, nearly every industry is experiencing hiring or staffing challenges right now. In the tech industry alone, there are over 70,000 job listings. The skills gap, specifically in technology, is only expected to grow in the years to come, all fueled by what has happened around the world these days with digitalization that has become central to companies trying to be relevant and to be innovative for the future.

We are hearing chatter about the Great Resignation, which I am sure you are aware of, which has been induced because of the pandemic, resulting in a massive reshuffling across industries. Resignations in the tech ranks are amongst the highest. We have seen a meaningful increase, I think 5%, of departures in 2021 compared to 2022. That is a 5% increase year over year, that is.

And yet the research shows that developers just do not actually want to quit. They actually want to learn. Given our very broad reach in serving 100 million monthly visitors, we spend a lot of time thinking about how developers think and how we serve them in the best way possible. Part of our effort is also to speak to them and engage with them through things like surveys.

For over a decade, we have done what we call the Stack Overflow Developer Survey that has become an industry benchmark. That survey is sent out to close to 75,000 to 100,000 developers and technologists a year. Throughout the year, we also include additional pulse surveys that go out to the same technologist community. Some of this data that you are seeing here is from these very credible and high-scale sources.

The data suggests that over 70% of developers surveyed say that they are happy at work. When we dig into that further, we find that flexibility, productivity, and growth opportunities are all about 50% in terms of contributing to their happiness at work, and they are all within the top five reasons. Those three factors are quite surprising if you think about flexibility and productivity being at the top of that list, and growth opportunities and learning opportunities also being at the top of that list.

Furthermore, when asked what they are looking for in current and future jobs, developers said that they are seeking opportunities to learn at work. Over 50% of developers that we surveyed look for opportunities to learn when they are evaluating current and future employers. And 40% of developers say opportunities to learn from people outside of their team makes a company more attractive to work for.

Instead of discussing the talent gap, which obviously is receiving a lot of attention, I believe we need to start reflecting on how we are enabling learning within organizations.

Addressing the global knowledge gap is two-pronged. Number one, we must build a culture of lifelong learning at work. By that I mean, how are we enabling people to learn from each other, advance their skills, and grow?

Second, we need to democratize knowledge for all. Technology is changing faster than curriculum can keep up. We need to democratize knowledge so that the tools needed to become a subject matter expert are at the tips of our fingers. We need to share what we know and consume what others know so we can grow expertise rapidly.

A team is only as strong as its weakest link. When your strongest team members are carrying the rest of the team, they are going to burn out, and they will leave, and they will take all their knowledge with them.

We no longer have the luxury of hiring specialized skills anymore. We need to hire agile thinkers, lifelong learners, and empowering your team to learn from each other is essential to upskilling and reskilling teams.

We have all heard the phrase, knowledge is power. Perhaps what rings truer is the fact that knowledge is powerless if it cannot be found.

Stack Overflow, as I have already mentioned, is obsessed with communities. We are blessed to work with developers and technologists to create a community that is teaching and learning and growing every day at pretty much a massive scale, as I explained previously.

Community-based learning, we believe, is the only way to keep up with the speed of technology.

Democratizing information unlocks innovation we can all benefit from. This is not just about making information freely available. It is about making sure people know where to find what they do not know.

Here is an example of a simple question asked to the developer community on Stack Overflow nearly 13 years ago. Today, the question has been upvoted on Stack Overflow nearly 24,000 times and has been viewed over 10 million times. Now, that is impact. All because the person who had a question asked it in public so that someone could answer it in public.

Over 21 million questions have been asked on Stack Overflow, and answers have helped developers over 50 billion times to date. Democratizing knowledge helps team members get the answers they need when they need them at scale.

As a leader of a company, I get asked all the time what keeps me up at night. I also speak to CIOs and CTOs every week as part of my job. I can tell you that this issue we have just talked about today is very much at the top of people's lists: my list, and the list of CIOs, CTOs, and CEOs. But the good news is that this is a lot more within our control than you would expect.

We spend far too much time talking about the never-ending talent gap, but we just do not spend enough time talking about the knowledge gap within our organizations. Building a culture of lifelong learning at work is the only way to upskill teams. You should not have to disrupt your flow state to learn, and it should be second nature.

It all starts with democratizing knowledge so everyone can innovate faster.

Thank you again for your time, for listening to a few of my comments, and hopefully this was useful to you. We would love to continue the conversation with all of you, and Stack Overflow hopefully is a great resource for you, both in terms of our survey data and our products that help a lot of the community-based learning that I explained, and really ultimately allowing us to solve this problem of the talent gap by looking at the knowledge gap. Thank you very much.