1.Overview

Since its founding, developer circles Morocco community aims to be the place for Moroccan developers to learn new things, share knowledge and move the IT community forward. We were always thinking about how to best serve the community, and along the way, we needed to understand it.

This year, we had our first "State of Dev Survey", centered around software developers in Morocco. Why? Because analytics doesn't give us all the needed feedback, so we built a survey. 49 questions grouped into 4 main areas: Education, Work, Tech and Community. Ultimately, we wanted to know how we can help and support each other, and overall, be able to better respond to developers’ evolving needs.

Launching was strategic. What better time and place than an online tech conference? In October, BlaBlaConf 1.0 gathered thousands of viewers during 5 days. We believe this momentum was key to the survey.

A month after that, a total of 2287 submissions were received. That's from Morocco only and it's close to the 2532 submissions from Stackoverflow's first survey back in 2011. This number only speaks volume about how vibrant our community is.

Needless to say, with such tremendous success, we intend to make it a yearly event!

Key results

Average software developers from Morocco are young, highly educated, with 2 to 3 years of experience. They work on modern frontend and backend web stacks.

They practice side-projects and continuous learning on a regular basis.

Remote working has been a positive step in their career, as well as being part of a local community.

A word about methodology

As part of our core principles, all collected data is anonymized. Raw results are also available under the BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. Same thing for the website code, we put everything on GeeksBlaBla GitHub organization.

It’s important to note that not all fields were mandatory, so the results and graphics may not reflect the respondents’ total number for every question.

We want to thank all our amazing contributors and everyone who helped share the survey to get more submissions. We’re looking forward to your feedback and for you to share the results with your network.

2.Profile

The objective of this first section is to get insights about the profile and the skills of the people working in Software Engineering in Morocco. The majority of the people that answered the survey are men. Also, the majority of the respondents are junior developers with less than 3 years of experience and most of them are living in Morocco with plans to work abroad in the next 2 years.

Gender

The first objective was to get the gender of the developers in the country. More than 80% of the people that filled this survey are men.

Age

The majority of the respondents are between 20 and 24, which represents either university graduates or junior developers. The second category of respondents were people between 25 and 29.

Location

87.9% of respondents currently live in Morocco. The rest are located in Europe or other countries.

Highest degree

More than half of the developers that answered this question have an equivalent of a Master's degree. The other represented category were people that took a 2-year training after their high school degree (BAC), while a few respondents hold a PhD.

Years coding professionally

The majority of the responses were from people that have been coding for less than a year. The second group of people are developers that have been coding for 1 to 3 years. Based on this data, we can assume that the majority of the people who answered this survey are therefore junior developers. However, it's important to note that seniority is not only based on the number of years of experience.

Coding as a hobby

Coding is a hobby for the majority of the respondents.

Plans to work abroad

74% of the people that answered this question have plans to work outside Morocco in the next 2 years. The rest wants to stay in the country.

Plans to come back to Morocco

Surprisingly, more than half of the people that are working abroad have plans to come back to Morocco.

Favorite drink

Coffee is the favorite drink of developers, followed by water.

3.Education and Learning

There is a lot to be said when talking about the educational system in Morocco. We asked the community about their thoughts, opinion, source of learning and potential solution. Additionally, more than 70% of all respondents confirm that English is not an obstacle to learning new things anymore.

Learned concepts vs Professional requirements

Almost a split here! A little over 50% of participants think that the IT courses in universities do not give them enough concepts to start their professional career.

Contributors to the problems in our educational system

This confirms the previous finding, where more than 80% of respondents claim that university learning materials needs to be re-thought/refreshed.

Read/Written languages

With no big surprise, Arabic, English and French are the top 3 languages that the majority of respondents can read/write.

English in the IT World

As you probably know, English is the number one language when it comes to learning IT. Unfortunately, around 30% confirm that it's an obstacle for them to learn new technologies.

Content in Darija

More than 75% of all respondents identify the need for more Darija content in some form or another.

Preferred platforms for learning

YouTube's educational resources are the preferred learning platform for the majority of the Moroccan community.

Learning new languages or frameworks

More than 83% try to keep up-to-date with new languages and frameworks, at least once a year.

4.Work

Around 60% of Moroccan developers are employed, either full-time, part-time, or as freelancers. About 28% of all participants say they're students. Surprisingly, more than 70% of respondents reported that the Pandemic did not have a negative impact on them. On the contrary, more than 56% claim they have been more productive during the lockdown!

Current role

More than 80% of all respondents qualify themselves as developers, and more than 43% of them are full-stack developers. While new emerging roles start gaining popularity in the market, should we expect a shift in the upcoming years?

Employment status

Almost 13% of respondents are looking for a job opportunity. Keep in mind that this survey's data was collected during the Pandemic (Covid-19), which impacted many jobs.

Working overtime

Almost 79% of participants claim that they work at least occasionally overtime. Why is that? Is it by passion, dedication to results or under estimated scheduling?

Job satisfaction

Around 80% of respondents reported they're somehow happy with their current job. This is consistent with Stackoverflow's own data on developers, feeling happy with their jobs.

Side projects

Almost 60% of respondents work on side projects to improve their skills, strengthen their knowledge, and invest in themselves.

Unemployment after graduation

More than 80% of all respondents reported that they found a job after just a couple of months of their graduation.

Salaries

Given the fact that around 30% of respondents are either students or unemployed, it explains why the lowest salary came in the first place. Keep in mind that this survey covers all Morocco, salaries vary across cities.

Choosing a job offer

Salary, technical stack and culture are the top three motivators for Moroccan developers to consider a job offer. Data shows industry and work impact have the least weight in career decisions.

Preferred company types

More than 34% of respondents prefer to work in a multinational company.

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on companies

Moroccan IT companies promptly adopted a remote policy during the pandemic, with more than 83% of developers working remotely.

Productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic

More than 70% of respondents confirmed that the pandemic did not impact their productivity. Almost 25% of them even saw their producitivity boosted.

5.Technology

JavaScript is the most popular and loved programming language, in front of Java, Python, and PHP.

Python takes the top spot for programming languages that developers want to learn next. Going further down the list, we also see Typescript, Golang and Kotlin as most wanted programming languages.

Web frameworks & libraries

Focusing on web frameworks & libraries, we see that React.js is the king of the hill. We also noticed that over 25% of respondents still use jQuery on a daily basis.

Almost half of the respondents want to learn React.js, Additionally Vue.js comes next as the most wanted framework.

Platforms and tools

Mobile cross-platforms React Native and Flutter are the top platforms developers want to learn next. Going further down the list we see TensorFlow and PyTorch.

Primary operating systems

57% of respondents use Windows as their primary operating system. The rest were almost evenly split between MacOS and a Linux-based OS.

IDE & Code Editors

Unsurprisingly, VS Code is the most used code editor, 70% of respondents use it to write their code. Jetbrains IDEs are second by 34% and only 11% are Vim users.

6.Community

Open-source culture and sharing knowledge are gaining a lot of popularity in Morocco lately(African countries are the fastest growing GitHub contributors). More than 80% of respondents have at least contributed to an open-source project. Also, around 75% are sharing their findings and learning through blogging.

Local Developer Communities

We don't know if people misunderstood this question or that it's actually what the reality is! But more than 70% claim that they're not part of any developer communities. Which is odd, because the majority of respondents claimed they are part of the Dev Circle Morocco community ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

Open source participations

Moroccan developers contribute more and more to open source, with more than 50% maintaining their own projects.

Blogging

While 25% of respondents are not interested in blogging, three-quarters of respondents are already bloggers or trying to make their first steps.

Tech events attended in 2019/2020

More than half of the respondents attended at least one tech event in the past two years!

Talks given in 2019/2020

15% of respondents have already spoken at some IT event!

Online vs in-person events

The Moroccan community is eager to learn and discover new things. Almost 70% said that the event format doesn't make a difference ("Li ja" for the non-dialect speaking meaning "whatever").

Moroccan Facebook Developer Circle

This survey is an initiative from the Developer Circle Morocco community. More than 55% of respondents are already part of it!

Moroccan Tech Community

More than 93% of all respondents think that the Moroccan community is quite good!