Well over one-third (37%) of respondents to a recent industry survey reported that recruiting developers with the needed skills would continue to be a challenge through 2023. More than 2,000 developers and IT professionals participated in the Infragistics survey from December 2022 to January 2023.

The survey also found developers and IT professionals are just as concerned (37%) when it comes to their organization’s ability to keep employees safe. The survey also found respondents believed they are working with limited resources (36%).

“Over the past three years, workers have been faced with a series of unexpected challenges—the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic downturn and a volatile work environment–which is pushing employers to do more to assure workers are protected. Employers that take steps to protect their employees will be more likely to retain them, especially in light of the developer shortage,” the report said.

The three technical jobs survey respondents said were the most difficult to recruit are DevOps engineers (16%), data analytics developers (16%) and IT security engineers (13%).

The report found that while nearly all developers (89%) worked with a designer or design team, less than half of a developer’s time (43%) is spent on actual application coding. In most cases, low-code/no-code tools are filling in gaps left by vacant roles and helping organizations keep up with the necessary pace of development. “The lack of skilled developers challenge is being solved by the use of low-code/no-code tools in [more than] three-quarters (77%) of organizations,” the report said.

Looking ahead, the survey found that software developers planned to improve project management (30%), improve designer/developer collaboration (30%), use software that will work for citizen developers (27%), use remote staff (25%) and incorporate a data catalog/analytics catalog (25%).

“The biggest software development challenges in 2023 will be the inability to keep pace with innovation in developer tools (28%), difficulty with third-party integration (267%), struggle to manage workload (26%), security threats (26%), project management (26%) and client expectations that are too high (26%),” the report said.

Despite the rough patch that rattled the industry throughout the second half of 2022, the survey results indicated developers are optimistic for the rest of this year. According to the survey, the software development industry plans to:

• Adopt new technologies/applications (38%)
• Expand into new markets (35%)
• Take on new projects (32%)
• Increase revenue (31%)
• Increase requests for proposals (31%)

Finally, the survey found business intelligence and embedded analytics are increasing in usage. More than 80% of developers currently incorporated these tools into their products, up 3% from the previous year’s survey.

Embedded analytics in apps is also on the rise. Almost half, or “48% of developers were embedding analytics into client apps in 2022, compared to 31% in 2021. And 75% of software developers expected their organization’s focus on business intelligence to increase in 2023,” the report stated.

The top three reasons software developers incorporate embedded analytics: Improving customer satisfaction (32%), gaining a competitive advantage (30%) and making data-driven decisions (25%).

According to the report, customers included embedded analytics in their requirements in the hope they would improve productivity (42%), increase sales/revenue (39%), understand business problems (33%) and make better business decisions (32%).