Bio:

Frank Neffke is professor of Economic Transformation and Complexity at the Interdisciplinary Transformation University (IT:U) in Linz (Austria) and a member of the faculty of the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna (Austria), where he leads a team studying how skills, knowledge, and technologies evolve in modern economies. After earning a PhD from Utrecht University, he held positions at the Erasmus School of Economics and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he served as Research Director of the Growth Lab. His research examines how individuals, firms, and regions develop new capabilities, using large-scale data, network science, econometrics, and machine learning.

Abstract:

Recent waves of technological transformation are reshaping work in uncertain and hard-to-predict ways. However, jobs at the forefront of the digitizing economy offer an early glimpse of these changes and leave rich activity traces. We exploit such traces in tens of millions of Question and Answer posts on Stack Overflow for the creation of a fine-grained taxonomy of software skills to analyze human capital in the global software industry. Constructing a software skill space that maps relations among these skills reveals that real-world software jobs demand highly coherent skill sets and that programmers learn through a process of related diversification. The latter process often  leads to the acquisition of lower-value skills. However, when programmers use Python they preferentially target higher-value skills, offering a potential explanation for Python's successful rise as a dominant general purpose language. 

Link 

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.03581