What Skills do IT Companies look for in New Developers? A Study with Stack Overflow Jobs

TL;DR

This study analyzes 20,000 IT job listings to identify the most sought-after hard and soft skills, emphasizing programming languages and interpersonal skills like communication and problem-solving.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of skill demands in IT hiring, highlighting the importance of soft skills alongside technical expertise.

Findings

Programming languages are the most requested hard skills.

Communication, collaboration, and problem-solving are the top soft skills.

Soft skills are frequently mentioned in job descriptions.

Abstract

Context: There is a growing demand for information on how IT companies look for candidates to their open positions. Objective: This paper investigates which hard and soft skills are more required in IT companies by analyzing the description of 20,000 job opportunities. Method: We applied open card sorting to perform a high-level analysis on which types of hard skills are more requested. Further, we manually analyzed the most mentioned soft skills. Results: Programming languages are the most demanded hard skills. Communication, collaboration, and problem-solving are the most demanded soft skills. Conclusion: We recommend developers to organize their resum\'e according to the positions they are applying. We also highlight the importance of soft skills, as they appear in many job opportunities.