Stack Overflow published results of its yearly developer survey. It contains a lot of interesting data. I recommend at least taking a look at those charts. Some of them should get your attention. The one that made me stop scrolling the page was priorities change with experience. At the beginning of the career path job title, making or influencing decisions, remote work options and tech stack are almost equally important. Each of them have 10-15% of votes.
What is actually interesting is what is happening to those priorities when developers gain experience. Interpretation of the survey result is my own so I might be wrong but it all makes sense to me.
Technology stack
Importance of tech stack grows rapidly with experience.
Developers understand how crucial it is for their career to work with the right technologies. When you stuck with legacy code for a few years and you do not have much time for self-development, changing a job will be harder to you than to your colleague from a startup using fancy technologies. Somewhere after 10 years of experience, people probably are getting tired of constantly chasing new trends. Perhaps their life priorities changed - have families and are no longer so interested in changing their job. Job security might be more important than it was before. It could be a reason of a slight drop of the tech stack priority.
Remote working options
Increase in priority is not so big in the first two years but later it goes up faster and faster. I think it is that way because beginners want to learn from others. It is difficult when working from home. Additionally, again, devs with greater experience have children who get sick and remote work options become really priceless.
Job title
That is my favorite.
The more experience you have, the less important your job title is. I have two theories about it. The first one is that you slowly come to a conclusion that the title does not say much about the person. You meet more and more people with great titles that you have little of respect to their knowledge and you work with excellent professionals that does not have any fancy title.
The second theory is less idealistic. Perhaps, people who cared about their job titles are now CTOs, directors, managers and do not participate in the Stack Overflow developer surveys anymore :)
