Students’ Interests Related to Web and Mobile Technologies Study

Manuela Andreea Petrescu

, Adrian Sterca

and Ioan Badarinza

Department of Computer Science, Babes-Bolyai University, Str. M. Kogalniceanu, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Keywords:

Learning, Educational Study, Web, Mobile, Students, Interest, Challenge.

Abstract:

We explore in this paper the interests and challenges of students regarding web and mobile technologies. Our

study is based on a survey among undergraduate students, students that attend a Web Programming course. In

particular, we study the challenges students have in following a successful career in web or mobile develop-

ment and we have found that the most important one is the large effort required for keeping up to date with

the fast changing web and mobile technologies. Overall, the attitude of the surveyed undergraduate students

towards web development and mobile development is rather positive, as more than 60% of them said that they

are interested in a career in web or mobile development. We also found out that most of them prefer working

on back-end web technologies. As for the speciﬁc web technologies students are interested on, they are highly

varied. Overall, our study provides valuable insights into the interests and challenges of students regarding

web and mobile technologies, which can guide the development of effective teaching and learning approaches

in this area.

1 INTRODUCTION

Web and mobile development are essential compo-

nents of modern business, as they enable companies

to connect with their customers through digital plat-

forms. In today’s world, the global population stands

at 7.91 billion (KEMP, 2022), and is expected to reach

8 billion by mid-2023, given the annual growth rate of

1.0 percent. More than half of it, speciﬁcally 57.00%

of the world’s population resides in urban regions ac-

cording to the same report. The technology got into

urban areas, as into the most remote and inaccessible

locations. As a result, even the populations in under-

developed countries have access to technology so the

number of persons that are using the internet grew.

According to (KEMP, 2022), in the ﬁrst months of

2022, the number of global internet users has risen

to 4.95 billion, which is equivalent to 62.5% of the

world’s population. it is important to notice the sharp

internet penetration trend, as data indicates that there

has been a 4.0% increase, or 192 million new users,

in the past year. Some of the new users connected to

the internet using speciﬁc devices (laptops, comput-

ers, tablets), and mobile phones; mobile phone usage

increased sharply globally. More than two-thirds of

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9537-1466

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5911-0269

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8233-8264

the global population, 67.1% of the world’s popula-

tion now uses a mobile phone. The mobile phone

adoption trend is increasing because technology be-

comes more accessible in terms of price and perfor-

mance. Over the past year, the total number of mobile

users has increased by 1.8%, in fact, there are 95 mil-

lion new users compared to the same period last year

(KEMP, 2022).

Web and mobile development are essential com-

ponents of modern business, as they use the infras-

tructure and huge numbers of potential clients, thus

enabling companies to connect with their customers

through digital platforms. In today’s world, where

most people are using smartphones and other digi-

tal devices, web, and mobile presence are essential to

reach a broader audience. The market trends demand

for designing and creating websites for the internet is

increasing. Mobile development for applications for

mobile devices is also on an ascending trend. Both

web and mobile development play a crucial role in

promoting products, services, and brands online, en-

abling businesses to increase their target population

by increasing their online presence. Web and mobile

can provide a personalized experience for users, using

advanced technologies such as AI and machine learn-

ing, and can ﬁnd and adjust to the speciﬁc needs and

preferences of their customers. Subsequently, com-

panies can target their customers with speciﬁc adver-

242

Petrescu, M., Sterca, A. and Badarinza, I.

Students’ Interests Related to Web and Mobile Technologies Study.

DOI: 10.5220/0012174900003584

In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2023), pages 242-249

ISBN: 978-989-758-672-9; ISSN: 2184-3252

tising campaigns, increasing their sales. This helps to

build a loyal customer base and improve customer sat-

isfaction, which ultimately leads to increased revenue

and proﬁts.

According to market trends, web and mobile de-

velopment are crucial components of modern busi-

ness as more and more potential clients can be found

online, especially from mobile. Mobile usage over-

took other devices, as in 2020, 55% of website trafﬁc

came from mobile devices (Statista, 2022). The size

of information passed through the internet grew from

around 50 exabytes (1 exabyte equals 1 billion giga-

bytes) to more than 300 exabytes in 2022 according

to the global internet trafﬁc reports made by Statista

(Statista, 2022). The trafﬁc was mainly generated by

different applications usage, applications that offer a

range of beneﬁts, including personalized experiences

for customers, valuable data insights, and provide a

competitive advantage. The companies will continue

to invest in developing web and mobile applications,

providing a demand for specialized workforce pro-

grammers to develop the applications.

With this setup in mind, we wanted to ﬁnd out if

(1) the second year university students in computer

science are interested to have a career path in web or

mobile development and which technologies would

they like to work with, (2) what are the challenges

they are confronted with, and (3) what are the reasons

for which they choose to work or not in these ﬁelds.

The structure of this paper is as follows: Section 2

examines recent studies on related topics, Section 3

provides a comprehensive overview of the methodol-

ogy used for the experiment for data collection and

interpretation, as well as the set of participants. Sec-

tion 4 describes the data collection and analysis of

the research questions. Sections 5, 6 and 7 present

our ﬁndings after analyzing the collected responses to

our research questions. Section 5 describes the most

important challenges students have in following a ca-

reer path in web or mobile development, Section 6

analyzes the students’ interests in such a career and

Section 7 discusses their preferred technologies in

these ﬁelds. Possible threats to validity are discussed

in Section 8. Finally, Section 9 presents the conclud-

ing remarks.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

The industry of building web and mobile applica-

tions is growing every day and it has a huge demand

for skilled developers. Teaching students how to de-

velop web applications is a very important part of

their study years. There were multiple attempts done

by professors to structure the curriculum in such a

way so that the students understand the variety of

technologies and environments for web development.

For example, in (Jevremovic et al., 2018), the au-

thors present a centralized and collaborative approach

to teaching Web development. During their study,

they noticed that students have a lot of issues under-

standing and troubleshooting the environments used

for web applications and they have tried to build a

centralized solution for web development as a teach-

ing process. They noticed that students had a bet-

ter understanding of the web environments after this

change.

Many studies recommend adding team project

work to university courses as requirements for stu-

dents in order to better prepare the students for the fol-

lowing stage in their career as a junior software devel-

oper in a company (Iacob and Faily, 2019), (Heberle

et al., 2018).

Still, one of the biggest challenges that computer

science students are facing when learning how to

build a web application is the constantly changing

technologies (Park and Wiedenbeck, 2011). Despite

these challenges that students have learning the tech-

nologies, recent studies have shown that graduates are

well-prepared for the job market. They still need to go

through a training process at the beginning after they

are hired, but this is more for understanding the com-

pany’s culture and the way that their employees work

(Lundberg et al., 2021).

Previous studies have shown that IT industry is in-

terested in a few skills when they are hiring new em-

ployees. Among these skills, problem-solving skill

is the most important one (Radermacher et al., 2014).

The other very important ones are communication and

teamwork (Clokie and Fourie, 2016), (Begel and Si-

mon, 2008).

3 METHODOLOGY AND SETUP

To ﬁnd out the response to the paper’s research ques-

tions, we performed an online survey. The partici-

pant set was formed by second-year computer science

students enrolled in the Web Programming course.

The main purpose of the Web Programming course

is to teach the students how to build a web applica-

tion using front-end and back-end technologies. It

has an extended syllabus including more than a dozen

languages. On the front-end side, the course in-

cludes information about HTML and XML languages

for the web (e.g. XHTML, XSLT), CSS, Javascript,

Javascript libraries like jQuery and some Javascript

frameworks like Angular, and on the back-end side,

Students’ Interests Related to Web and Mobile Technologies Study

243

it provides foundations on how to use PHP, Java, and

.Net to build the back-end of an application. The stu-

dents have to work on a lot of assignments to get

some experience in all of these technologies so that

they can fully understand what they like and what

path they want to pursue. The course also focuses

on popular design patterns for web applications like

the Model-View-Controller and popular architectures

for web applications like the REST API architecture.

Another focus of the course if on the security of web

applications which is ever so challenging nowadays.

So the Web Programming course is quite abundant

in technologies. it is also one of the most dynamic

courses as the web technologies change at a very rapid

pace.

As a research method, we used the survey research

method, deﬁned in ACM Sigsoft Empirical Standards

for Software Engineering Research (Ralph, 2021).

We had open questions, to allow students to express

themselves and to be able to get a clearer in-site into

their interests. We also had closed questions, to be

able to check exactly (and measure with accuracy)

some aspects of their stated interests. We paid atten-

tion to the order of the questions in the survey, for ex-

ample, we asked them ﬁrst what technologies are they

interested in (the last questions were not visible on the

page), and only after they completed the answer and

get to the last questions we provided them with a list

of technologies to choose from (to mark which tech-

nology are they particularly interested in). We chose

this approach to ﬁnd out what are they interested in

without inﬂuencing their answers, and only at the end

of the survey after they mentioned their technology

interests, we suggested other possible options.

We send the survey link to the students during the

laboratory and asked them to complete it at their own

will, during or after the laboratory. Around 47% of

the responses were completed after the lab was over.

When we sent the link, we also mentioned the anony-

mous and optional character of the survey as the pur-

pose of collecting the data.

3.1 Participants

The target participant set that took part in this sur-

vey was formed by second-year university students

enrolled in the Web Programming course; the students

were aleatory allocated to have laboratories with two

of the authors of the study. The allocation process was

formed by two steps, in the ﬁrst one, the students were

alphabetically sorted after the last name, and based on

this list, they were allocated to a group. In the second

step, the groups were aleatory allocated to the authors

of this study by third parties (when the timetable was

created). The total number of students that were asked

to participate in the study and got the survey link was

85. The number of answers was 61, we considered

it was a good percentage that allows us to have valid

results, results that correctly reﬂect their perceptions,

ideas, and interests. When deciding to pursue analyz-

ing the responses, we validate their number against

the number of answers in other published studies (Pe-

trescu and Motogna, 2023; Motogna et al., 2021) in

computer science (with less or a similar number of

participants). We concluded that the participant set is

large enough and representative to have a valid study.

4 DATA COLLECTION

Data was collected using Google Forms. We opt for

this tool due to its usability, friendliness, and because

it was most probably already used by students. Stu-

dents trust the tool to provide anonymity. For us, it

was useful as we could see responses in real-time.

The survey remained open for ten days. This period

allowed us to send it to the students from different

groups (that had classes at different times during the

week); so they would have a three days grace period

after the last laboratory to answer the survey (if they

wanted to do it).

For this research, we used quantitative methods,

and more speciﬁcally questionnaire surveys as they

were deﬁned by community standards (Ralph, 2021),

and for interpreting the test we used thematic anal-

ysis as deﬁned by (Braun et al., 2019). This re-

search survey method, where collected data was inter-

preted using thematic analysis, was previously used

in other computer science-related papers (Motogna

et al., 2021; Redmond et al., 2013). The standard

mentioned a procedure that implies steps that should

be followed, so one author performed the following

activities when analyzing the data:

• collected the data

• performed a brief analysis of the open answers

with the purpose to reallocate them to other survey

questions (if they were better ﬁtted elsewhere)

• determined the keywords and grouped them into

classes

• the other author veriﬁed the keywords classiﬁca-

tion,

• the other authors performed some observations

• the observations were analyzed by all authors and

the decisions were incorporated into the results.

The opened answers sometimes contained more than

one keyword, some answers contained one keyword

WEBIST 2023 - 19th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

244

and we had questions for which we did not get an an-

swer. Due to this aspect, the number of identiﬁed key-

words is larger than the number of answers. To have a

clear idea about the key items’ prevalence, the results

are expressed as a percentage between the number of

key items and the number of answers. Due to this

fact, the sum of percentages will exceed 100%. The

questions asked in the survey can be visualized in Ta-

ble 1.

Table 1: Survey Questions.

Q1. Would you like to pursue a career in web develop-

ment? (Choose from Yes or No options)

Q2. Please mention your reasons.

Q3. What technologies/topics do you want to learn?

Q4. Which technology do you think is best in a long

run (if you choose between web and mobile)?

Q5. Which are in your opinion the main challenges for

a web/mobile software developer?

Q6. What type of web technologies do you want to pur-

sue in a future career: front-end technologies or back-

end technologies? (Choose front-end or back-end op-

tions)

Q7. Which technologies are you interested in? Multi-

ple choice of PHP, JS, React, Ajax, jsp/servlets, Angu-

lar, .NET, Client-server architecture, Site performance,

Site reliability, Site security, Python ﬂask, node.js,

Java Springboot, Real-time communication over web

(WebRTC), Micro-service architecture for web applica-

tions, REST API web servers.

5 STUDENTS’ CHALLENGES IN

A CAREER IN WEB / MOBILE

DEVELOPMENT

By far, as can be visualized in Figure 1, the highest

challenge reported by students was the rapid change

of technologies and the need to adapt to them.

Figure 1: Reported challenges.

The largest group of students 32.79% reported this

aspect: ”Constantly adapting to newer and newer

versions of everything”, or ”Keeping up with the

evolving technology”. It seems that even for the

younger generation, perpetual adaptation is perceived

as a stress factor. The next reported challenge is

tightly connected with the industry: client needs/ is-

sues ”Understanding what the client needs.”, ”Deal-

ing with customers”, or ”Agreeing with the client

on the project”. Writing clean, consistent code and

maintaining the quality of delivered code are other

challenges reported by a rather large group of stu-

dents: 11.48%. There are mentioned challenges

tightly related to soft skills: teamwork and com-

munication appear in 11.47% of the total answers:

”working on a team and communication”. Other two

challenges are related: stressful/burn-out mentioned

by 8.20% and time constraints mentioned by 4.92%:

”Time pressure. ”Checklist” things (for example - do

5 tickets per week)”, ”Communication and the ﬁght

to show results but do not burn out.”, ”Overcoming

the burnout”. Students seem to be confronted with a

lack of experience, and 8.20% of them perceive it as a

challenge: ”Having experience”, they also mentioned

the difﬁculty to work on ”other’s people code”. The

documentation proved to be a difﬁcult to use tool,

some students mentioned that is hard to look for a so-

lution in thick and too overwhelming documentation.

Other emerging technologies are perceived as direct

competitors, a ﬁght between men and machines, be-

tween programmers and AI. AI is perceived as a com-

petitor by 3.27% of them: ”Also - at this moment, a

huge challenge especially for juniors are the develop-

ments of AI technologies (for example, at this moment,

ChatGPT is better than me)”.

In conclusion, the main challenge is the fact that

they have to keep up with rapidly changing technolo-

gies, and the soft skills challenges represent an impor-

tant part (even if it is for communication, teamwork,

or understanding client needs). Time constraints and

burnout are other main challenges. AI concurrence,

learning process, lack of documentation, or too thick

documentation are other challenges mentioned by stu-

dents.

6 STUDENTS’ INTEREST IN A

CAREER IN WEB / MOBILE

DEVELOPMENT

To ﬁnd out the students’ interest in following a career

path in web or mobile development, we analyzed the

answers provided to three questions: the stated inten-

tion (ﬁrst question), their reasons (answers from the

second question), and if they prefer working on front-

end side or back-end side of web applications.

Students’ Interests Related to Web and Mobile Technologies Study

245

More than half of the students (around 60.7%

from the participant set) mentioned that they would

like to have a career path in web or mobile develop-

ment as can be visualized in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Stated web-related work intention.

When we asked the students if they prefer work-

ing with front-end technologies or with back-end, we

allowed them to select one option, both options, or

neither one of them. Almost all the students (93.20%)

would like to work in the back-end, around half of

them (44.20%) mentioned they would like to work

in the front-end and 3.94% did not answer this ques-

tion - Figure 3. Based on their answers, the students

do not want to work in front-end in a large percent-

age, some of the reasons being detailed as answers

to the second question: ”I do not like frontend” or

”Not particularly in web development because you

need to pay attention to small stuff like the proper

margin/alignment, I prefer to make things work (back-

end).”.

Figure 3: Students’ preferences.

Students’ Reasons for Choosing/Not Choosing

Web or Mobile Development

The most prevalent reason for choosing a web/mobile

related career path is related to its trendiness 16.39%,

web technologies, and their usage are perceived as

worth learning because they represent: ”A continuing

growing industry” and ”Everyone wants a website”.

Students are well connected to the market trends,

their replies suggest a positive correlation between

their working intention in a speciﬁc ﬁeld and market

demand. The interest in technology (14.74%) and

passion (6.55%) are other reasons that attract students

to web/mobile development: ”I guess it’s cool”,

”Yes, but I’m not sure, for a moment I am a mobile

developer but I had an Internship on web dev which

was very engaging”. In the front-end back-end

comparison, students prefer to work on the back-end

(their preference is enforced by detailed explana-

tions), and the back-end appreciations are positive: ”I

like back-end more I don’t like the front-end part of

it, but the back-end is alright”. 9.83% of the students

mentioned speciﬁcally that they like front-end ”I

don’t like frontend” and other 11.47% stated they like

back-end: ”You need to pay attention to small stuff

like the proper margin/alignment, I prefer to make

things work (back-end).”. As opinions are divided,

there was a percent of 9.83% of students who clearly

stated they like front-end: ”I grew way more fond of

front-end development than back-end because I ﬁnd

it more entertaining ”, ”I like colors, shapes, and

animations and designing things”, ”I like designing

pages and it doesn’t seem that stressful”. Other stu-

dents just wanted something else, and they speciﬁed

it: AI was the most mentioned option. ”Other areas

of programming are more interesting.”, ”I am more

interested in different topics such as AI”, ”AI is more

interesting to me.”

In conclusion, students are relatively interested in

a career path in web or mobile development, but they

would prefer to work mainly in the back end. Front-

end is perceived to require a lot of attention to detail

and to be ease replaceable by new technologies such

as AI. Some students prefer the front end because it

is more entertaining, it implies page design, and is

perceived as less stressful.

6.1 Job Taxonomy/Market Demand

To gain insights into the job market, we look into

studies referred to computer science literature and

technical reports, including (Gallagher et al., 2022),

and (Djumalieva1 and Sleeman, 2018), which evalu-

ated job requirements based on job postings. A web

developer or mobile developer job position is usually

at the top when it comes to the market needs.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics prospects that

the market demand on web developers in the US is

projected to increase by 23% in the 2021-2031 period,

much faster than the average increase of all other oc-

cupations.

A general taxonomy of career paths in web devel-

opment would be the following:

• front-end developer

• back-end developer

• full-stack developer

WEBIST 2023 - 19th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

246

• UX designer

• web designer

• mobile web developer

• DevOps engineer

• security engineer

But each of the above career paths can further be

specialized into more speciﬁc paths, especially the

ﬁrst three of them (e.g. a back-end web developer

can be a Python web developer, a Java web developer,

a C# web developer etc.).

7 STUDENTS’ INTEREST IN

TECHNOLOGIES

To ﬁnd out what is student’s genuine interest in tech-

nologies, but also to take into account their current

knowledge, we used the answers provided by students

to the questions ”What type of web technologies do

you want to pursue in a future career”, ”Which tech-

nologies are you interested in”, and, ”Which technol-

ogy do you think is best in a long run”. The last ques-

tion was the simplest one from this set, 37.70% of the

students mentioned that mobile is the best in a long

run, as the greater percent 62.29% appreciated that

web is best in long run. All the students answered

this question. However, when we asked them to write

which technologies are they interested in, the results

were variate, and the percentages quite different com-

pared to the answers when they had to choose a tech-

nology from a predeﬁned set. For example, for React,

only 18.03% mentioned it compared to 54.10% of stu-

dents that choose it from the predeﬁned set. We con-

sider for the web course we should take into account

the predeﬁned set, but their answers (no predeﬁned

answers) are more accurate to ﬁnd out their overall in-

terests in computer science technologies. It was also

interesting to notice that when students were asked to

mention themselves technologies, 9.83% did not an-

swer, but in the case when the technologies list was

predeﬁned, all of them answered by selecting more

than one technology. A comparison of the percent-

ages for each technology is displayed in Figure 4.

Except for the technologies mentioned above,

when asked to answer by themselves, a very small

percentage of students’ answers contained speciﬁc

technologies ”Kafka”, ”Google services”, ”Vue.js”,

and ”Java”. A larger group of students, 13.11% pro-

vided generic answers: ”Web” without specifying ex-

actly what technology, ”Backend” was mentioned by

9.83%, and ”Game Development” by 6.55%. ”Server

development” appeared only in 3.27% of the an-

swers, as ’mobile” in 1.63%. ”AI” was mentioned

Figure 4: Students’ interest in technologies.

by a larger percentage, 16.39%, but in this case, we

got generic answers like ”AI” and very speciﬁc an-

swers ”AI, Inverse Kinematics, procedural genera-

tion, marching cubes algorithm, Perlin noise”, ”Deep

learning, machine learning”. Some students do not

want a speciﬁc technology as long as it could pro-

vide good growing options: ”Whatever is used in the

present in the industry.”.

In conclusion, the students can be grouped into

two categories: well prepared and documented stu-

dents, which know exactly what they want to study,

and a group of students that want to study but prefer to

be told what to learn (they selected a lot of predeﬁned

options). In general, students have a large interest in

AI; regarding web/mobile related technologies they

are interested in REST APIs, .Net, Java SpringBoot,

React, JS, Angular, site performance, and security.

8 THREATS TO VALIDITY

During the elaboration of our study, we carefully con-

sidered the guidelines and recommendations for sur-

vey research outlined in (Ralph, 2021). We identi-

ﬁed several potential threats to validity that we tried

to mitigate the risk associated with them. We paid at-

tention to the target population and participant selec-

tion, drop-out rates, authors’ subjective approach, and

research ethics. To address the concerns related to the

target population and participant set, we sent the sur-

vey to all the second-year, computer science students

enrolled in the web course that were randomly allo-

cated to speciﬁc teachers (authors of this paper). Due

to this aspect, we did not engage in any participant se-

lection, as everyone was automatically involved. All

students were given the opportunity to participate if

they so chose. The target participant set was randomly

allocated, and the teachers did not have any involve-

ment in the allocation process. We also took steps to

mitigate drop-out rates by limiting the survey to one

Students’ Interests Related to Web and Mobile Technologies Study

247

online questionnaire and keeping the number of ques-

tions manageable to enable participants to complete it

quickly. We also considered the participant set size,

and compared to the size from other computer sci-

ence published studies (Motogna et al., 2021; Gerster

et al., 2020), our conclusion was that we have a sufﬁ-

cient number of participants to generate valid results.

We recognized the possible bias that the students re-

sponded positive, and in order to mitigate the risks we

announced them that all the responses are anonymous,

validate them (we had answers stating they they do

not like WEB, or want to work in AI). We also com-

pared to similar study (same university, similar partic-

ipant set - second years students from computer sci-

ence aleatory selected), in which students stated that

are not interested in database and SQL related jobs

(Pop and Petrescu, 2023) (congruent with our results).

Based in these facts, we concluded that the students

replied honestly regarding their intentions.

We recognized the potential for subjectivity in

our approach and we mitigated this risk by following

recommended research procedures and guidelines for

text interpretation. To ensure ethical research prac-

tices, we informed students that participation was vol-

untary, and we made it clear about the anonymous

nature of the survey. We also provided information

on the purpose of the data collection and how we in-

tended to use the information gathered.

9 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORK

This study was performed with the purpose to ﬁnd

out if second-year computer science students are in-

terested in a career in web or mobile development, in

technologies, and what are their main challenges. The

participant set was randomly selected, the research

method was a survey questionnaire and we applied

thematic analysis to interpret the open questions. We

took into consideration the scientiﬁc guidelines for

this type of research mentioned in (Ralph, 2021), and

we took measures to eliminate possible author subjec-

tivity. We found out that students are interested in a

career in web or mobile, even if when they were asked

to specify exactly which technologies are they inter-

ested in, the larger set of technologies was not web

or mobile-related. However, when students were pro-

vided with a ﬁxed set of technologies, they selected

much more technologies compared to the questions

when they were asked to answer by themselves. This

proves that they were not exactly sure, but are willing

to learn. The main reason for pursuing a web/mobile

related career was related to the ”trendiness” and per-

ceived market requirements ”Everyone wants a web-

site”. This aspect is correlated to the fact that the sec-

ond option related to career path (except web) is AI,

another technology perceived to be ”in trend”. Specif-

ically, some answers mentioned the ﬁnancial aspects

and the fact that students expect to ﬁnd well-paid jobs

in this domain. In terms of working on the back-end

or front-end, the larger majority preferred back-end.

Even if it was not the purpose of this study, we

found out that the students that already work (having

part-time or full-time jobs) stated they feel stressed,

they are ﬁghting with time and pressure to deliver and

they experience burnout or they fear they would get

in that state. Moreover, they feel it is hard to cope

with the rapid changes in the computer science do-

main, with changing technologies.

Other studies should be performed to ﬁnd out the

degree of correlation between the ”trendlines” of a

domain with the student’s stated intention to have a

career in that domain.

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