Stacking Up builds upon the insights revealed in the Brookfield Institute’s previously released report, The State of Canada’s Tech Sector, 2016, which used an expanded definition of Canada’s tech sector to shed light on its growing reach and economic impact. The report complements and supplements Statistics Canada data by drawing from the 2017 Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey of over 50,000 developers worldwide, as well as traffic to Stack Overflow’s website. The survey provides insights into education level, salary, scope of work, as well as other key employment, demographic and geographic distribution information. It allows readers to better understand the Canadian developer landscape, including how they work, how to recruit them and how they compare to developers around the world. Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey is an annual, voluntary, English-language survey. In 2017, 51,392 developers were surveyed worldwide, of which 2,223 were from Canada. To gain more personal insight into who Canada’s developers are, we also asked industry experts including company founders, Chief Technology Officers (CTOs), developers, and user experience (UX) designers for their perspectives on the profession. Insights from these interviews are captured in quotes throughout the report.

In the aim of transparency, reproducibility, and collaboration, all the code and public data used for the analysis in this report can be found on GitHub. We encourage you to review our work and build off our analysis to develop further insights.