1-Year, 3-Year, and 10-Year Goals of 63 Coders in the Finxter Community

What are the short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals of coders in the Finxter community? Let’s find out!

Overview

Here are some meta stats about our survey:

• How Many? 63 survey respondents
• When? Survey date is January 2022
• Who? Finxter Email List of people generally interested in programming
• Survey link: https://forms.gle/cbfCH9mxRYtH8SrS9 (feel free to participate before reading on—I’ll write a follow-up article on the updated results in a year or so)

I have categorized the goals into different categories. Here’s how the raw data looks like:

If you visualize it, you obtain the following interesting figure:

Understanding the Data

Here are a couple of interesting observations regarding goal setting of programmers in our community:

• Make the World Better: Goals in this category are relatively unpopular (2%) in the short- and mid-term but significantly become more popular (14%) in the long-term.
• Job: Goals in this category are relatively popular (18%) in the short- and mid-term but become less popular (11%) in the long-term.
• Freelancing and Business: Goals in this category are slightly less popular than job-related goals (17%) in the short-term but gradually increase in popularity to 20% in the mid-term and 25% in the long-term.
• Money: Goals in this category are relatively unpopular (7%) in the short-term but become more popular (13%) in the mid-term and (27%) in the long-term.
• Learning and Growth: Goals in this category are super popular in the short-term (48%) but significantly reduce in popularity in the long-term (16%).

But what does this mean? Let’s try to extract some insights from the data next! 🙂

Interpretation of Data

• Do Good — Later! Respondents want to spend their energy to make the world better in the long-term but are too busy chasing success in the short-term.
• Job? No Thanks! Respondents want to create their own business, more than they want to work in a job, because they seek the independence and monetary advantages that are associated with it.
• Be Rich! Money is a very popular 10-y goal of many respondents — and they want to acquire it by learning, finding a coding job, or creating their own business.
• Why Money? Freedom and Purpose! Creating a business and advancing the career, as well as learning are only a means to an end: make more money and reach more independence and freedom to achieve happiness.

Raw Survey Data

Do you want to get your own insights? No problem here’s the raw data:

Feel free to share your insights with me via our email academy: