Over the last couple of months, we have been getting the results of our Developer Community survey, and I would like to thank all the developers who participated. The purpose of the survey was to get an understanding of how our developers use and value various online communities and activities.
Even though our pool of freelance developers is not technically a community, since the purpose of the pool is to allow us to route work and projects to the developers in the pool; we do some community activities and we are planning to do more in the future. This survey will help guide us in our efforts to provide community activities and resources for our developers.
What developer communities are you currently a member of or participate in? The top 5 are: (Most popular first) LinkedIn, Github, Facebook, Stack Overflow and Upwork
The top 5 reasons why developers are staying in these communities is for: (Most popular first) Learning new things, finding projects, sharing information and news, discussion work and networking with other developers.
Some of the more important questions were about how our developers thought of ScreamingBox and our activities. Our developers like the work flexibility, interesting projects, work and communication style, ease of finding projects, and pay rate. As far as our activities and what we can offer our developers, the most important ones are more projects, learning opportunities, open job browser page, payment tracking, and co-working office spaces.
A majority of our developers think it is important for us to have recurring community activities, and feel that a “Better and stronger community makes the company a better place where people like working,” “ To keep the community connected, especially if they are a remote team,” “It keeps everybody together,” and “Because we are freelancers, most of use may have our own community. It is more important to have great quality if we do an event or something.”
Some of the other important suggestions were to have seminars or training related to managing your finances as a freelance developer and best practices for development and business. Another great suggestion is to focus on the quality of the event/activity, and not the size or number of times we do it.
Again, I would like to thank all our developers who participated in our survey, and it is such a good feeling to get your input and feedback on what we can do to improve the lives and work experience for all our developers. We will use this survey to help us build our community activity plan for next year, and look forward to having great activities for our developer community.