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Which Programming Language Pays the Best? Probably Python
Nerval's Lobster writes: What programming language will earn you the biggest salary over the long run? According to Quartz, which relied partially on data compiled by employment-analytics firm Burning Glass and a Brookings Institution economist, Ruby on Rails, Objective-C, and Python are all programming skills that will earn you more than $100,000 per year. But salary doesn't necessarily correlate with popularity. Earlier this year, for example, tech-industry analyst firm RedMonk produced its latest ranking of the most-used languages, and Java/JavaScript topped the list, followed by PHP, Python, C#, and C++/Ruby. Meanwhile, Python was the one programming language to appear on Dice's recent list of the fastest-growing tech skills, which is assembled from mentions in Dice job postings. Python is a staple language in college-level computer-science courses, and has repeatedly topped the lists of popular programming languages as compiled by TIOBE Software and others. Should someone learn a language just because it could come with a six-figure salary, or are there better reasons to learn a particular language and not others?
Ada is paying me ~$140k
Should someone learn a language just because it could come with a six-figure salary, or are there better reasons to learn a particular language and not others?
Yes.
It's the problem domain, not the language. Front-end webdev seems more concerned with language fashion, and kernel work still scoffs at anything but C, but in-between language doesn't seem to matter that much.
I've most of my career writing no-UI usermode code, and employers haven't much cared which language I knew. It's sort-of moved from C++/C#/Java being interchangeable to Java/C#/Python, though many hiring managers still seem skeptical of Python as a "real language" (I expect that will change over time).
It's not your ability to bang out code in any language that will advance your career anyhow - whether tech track or management, it's one set of leadership skills or another that come to matter most.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Not a single programming language makes the best figures in a year for you..but the ability to adapt and learn new technologies as well as completing your task does.
Looking at this website I'm not that surprised you think they're the same thing.
A lot of big data work seems to be done or prototyped with Python. Storm, Spark and others treat Python very well, but Ruby (MRI, not JRuby) gets a lot less love there and big data is a market with big salaries.
You should program in Python because it's a great language.
I read that LinkedIn is a job website that will get you more than $100,000 per year. Meanwhile, LinkedIN was the one programming language to appear on LinkedIn's recent list of the fastest-growing tech skills, which is assembled from mentions in LinkedIn job postings.
Fuuuuuck Yoooooouuuuuuuu Dice!
Python? That's interesting - just a few months ago, a different slashdot article said that MATLAB is the one language you need on your resume (if you want a job at Google). It's nowhere to be found on this particular, list however!
Of course it did, if you combine the results of two popular languages it makes sense that the combined result might outshine the rest. But what about the results for Java and JavaScript as two separate languages, which they are? The link to the actual rankings was not provided in the summary... I can only hope that it's just written poorly and both tied as #1..?
Also, cost of living is vastly different around the world and the US. It does not appear to have been corrected for in this study, making it pretty much useless IMO.
But only in coins.
Sometimes, the more you learn, the more you understand you are not an expert.
and Java/JavaScript topped the list, followed by PHP, Python, C#, and C++/Ruby.
C/C++ is old, C#/C++ is tired, but C++/Ruby is so hot right now.
I thought maintaining legacy systems using COBOL was the road to riches. Is that a myth?
For the best reasons to learn Python, see The Zen of Python. If Python happens to pay more, that's just gravy.
That said, it seems hard to believe that people would get paid extra to work in such a pleasant language. If so, maybe Adam Smith had it all wrong when he said:
First, The wages of labour vary with the ease or hardship, the cleanliness or dirtiness, the honourableness or dishonourableness of the employment...The most detestable of all employments, that of public executioner, is, in proportion to the quantity of work done, better paid than any common trade whatever.
Perhaps florists soon will be making more money than plumbers. Which would really stink.
No, I probably won't make $100k/year coding in Perl but I don't care.
It's not about the money. It's about the love.
Not as tedious as C++; not as clunky as Java; not as lame as VB.
Scoff all you want! I feel blessed while coding in Perl.
Thanks Larry & friends!
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
"Past performance is no guarantee of future returns."
Learn as many languages as you can/want and try to find employers who recognize that adaptibility is much more valuable than existing capability with a specific tool.
Now where are all those $250k jobs requiring R ? :-)
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I hear that most fields use metric, but some really high-paying ones like petroleum engineering use imperial units. Should I focus my studies on imperial units if I want to make more money?
The truth is, until you have learned enough that the choice of units or choice of language is completely fucking irrelevant to the task at hand, then you aren't going to add much value to the process. Mastering one language qualifies you for the programming equivalent of the secretary pool.
But it's not the language, it's the domain knowledge I bring to the table. I was hired to write embedded software for scientific instruments. As a former research scientist and current software engineer I can understand the problem, the solutions, and write code to do what the device needs to do. C/C++ just happens to be the tool I use to build the device. Python, Java, and so on just wouldn't cut it.
$100k and sharing a rented hovel in silicon valley with seven other brogrammers ?
Or are we talking $100k in a mansion on the golf course in Arkansas?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm pretty savvy with all the listed languages except Objective-C (only maintenance on existing apps), and have used them all at one time or another in a job. My linked profile garners around 3-4 recruiter contacts a week, and in my own little silo, I can say that while there may be 6 figure salaries out there for the Python and RoR, they are few and far between. The salaries I'm seeing on the top end for those development jobs rarely crest 70k.
On the other hand, there's bigger salaries for Java or C#. It's not too hard to find a 100k-110k senior Java or C# developer position.
Anecdotal evidence is not scientific data, but their results just don't match my personal experience in 2 decades of doing this.
However, I think I can see how they got the numbers.
According to the article, the data was retrieved by searching job ads, as opposed to taking a survey of people actually working at those jobs, and then permuting and filtering it. Given that:
- Development job availability, especially with new technologies, is heavily skewed towards the west coast, where the cost of living is higher. From Austin to San Jose, the cost of living increase is between 50 and 75 percent - the 100k job is at least a 150k.
We can make a reasonable assumption that there will be more positions open, and that more of them will be higher paying relative to the entire US job market, likely breaking the 100k cap, as 100k is low relative to the cost of living.
- Established development languages already have a majority of their positions filled, as opposed to emergent technologies which have more open positions
This will naturally result in a higher number compared to a language with less open positions, if the bar (100k) is low relative to the cost of living.
- Emerging technologies lack experts simply because they haven't been around long enough to develop as many
So positions will be open longer, and more aggressively marketed by recruiters, meaning that they're more likely to double- or triple- count job postings that are unknowingly for the same job
&
Employers using recruiters often prefer to using a limited number of recruiters who themselves maintain a pool of direct-contact individuals with experience in a given field, meaning that those jobs are less likely to be publicly posted, whereas the new technologies require public announcement and investigations.
So in summary: I don't doubt the statics they used, but I think their methodology may be affected by a heavy bias, and therefore invalid.
The salary data is taken from the subset of job ads that list compensation. I don't know the last time I saw a want ad in the software industry that said anything beyond "competitive compensation" or the like. That suggests that they are only looking at a very skewed subset of jobs, my guess would be much greater representation from government, academic, non-profit, and non-tech companies looking for developers.
.NET stack, which is a very low-expertise, low-standards type of job.
Getting into speculation here, but I would guess that the higher premium on things like python would be because non-tech firms hiring python devs probably need scripts for efficient data mining, analysis, and reporting, a skill requiring far more expertise than run-of-the-mill software development.
C#, which I don't think anyone would argue is vastly more marketable than python, Ruby, or Objective-C in the highly lucrative tech sector, is likely so low because the sort of want ads they are looking at are mostly going to be positions that build web-based business management sites on the
Beyond the stupid methodology of only looking at want ad compensation (a better - though still suspect - method would be to look at something like glassdoor for salaries and then correlate those to the skills asked for in want ads for the same position and company), they should really be including the full requirements list for this to be at all meaningful. If one ad asks for "python, plus 7 years of experience working with large scientific datasets, strong understanding of statistics, and experience with one or more data visualization libraries" and the second asks for "c#, knows what a website is", then saying the first one is better paying because of python is silly.
Smart programmers pick up new languages very quickly. I'd rather hire someone smart who doesn't know Python, than someone mediocre and only knows Python.
Someone may make $100K today in Python, but what about a few decades from now. I know COBOL, and still know people writing COBOL supporting legacy code. But the majority of the ones unwilling/unable to learn a new language are out of a job.
I'd rather be learning new things and have several tools in my belt than just one and be limited.
And easily replaced.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Which Programming Language Pays the Best?
Seriously, just one? I use several languages, on the same project:
I'm 51 and get paid over $125K (in southeastern Virginia) and generally work when and on what as I please. There are 3 senior and 1 junior people on my team and we develop/support a ~300k lines of code for our cross-platform application.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Do you want to write kick ass firmware that even runs faster than code generated with C ? Learn to write assembler code. My first programming gig out of college I wrote firmware for a networked door controller. I started with a semaphore driven multitasker. One level of the multitasker functioned as a main loop just checking to see if semaphore flags are set. if a flag is set, run the subroutine and return to where I jumped from. There were also interrupt driven subroutines.. for instance a card reader, communications controller, alarm bus, all driving sub routines by interrupt. The processors were only running at 6mhz then but the code was actually quick. I even wrote a routine that compresses the card data in the database.
When you read my assembler code, due to the labels I used for the subroutines, semaphore flag names, interrupts.. the code looked like a unique programming language, except for the assembler on the side. You could clearly read the code and understand what what going on even a year after the development.
From Assembler I learned C. I wrote interfaces to my firmware in C. From C to C++. C++ to Java, from Java to Perk, From Perl to PHP. When I learned that Mars Rovers run Python that motivated me to learn Python. I built a small robot based on the BeagleBone.. originally I used node. Eventually I got the robot to run on Python.
As far as pay goes. I found C scripting (you need to know how to script to glue Unix based applications together), C, and PHP to pay the most.
There are far too many java programmers out there so most java developer postions don't pay over $80k. C is still king for salary. Especially if you
are not afraid to design your own algorithms. I think as long as you know how to take input data, process it, store it in a database, generate reports from it, or take sensor input, control servo output you will earn decent money.
Worpress will eventually be so easy to use a monkey can do it. Right now you can still earn $5k or more by creating a website for a business. Eventually that would erode. Writing the killer web application well there's still money in that. You can actually write your own ticket if you do that.
I would never of thought that facebook would generate income. Who in there right mind would publish personal information about them for the world to see ? Governements all have facebook data mining tools. What do you think they use to train face recognition system. I saw the software in the wild so I do not have a facebook account. The only social media account I have is LinkedIn.
Python isn't so bad.. I don't know how far a python application would scale because the python applications I wrote are for a robot controller running on a BeagleBone Black. I have written C applications that would spawn over 1000 threads on an IBM Power AIX system and can say applications written the correct way on IBM Power scale very well. I have also seen 32 bit Websphere java applications on similar hardware scale poorly, mostly due to the way the code was written... and partly due the java garbage collector busy using 80% CPU even with GC tuning set properly. Java needs more hardware with a smaller memory footprint to run fast. I think it's because java was written by a hardware vendor. note when I say scale I mean 2100 threads processes incoming loan requests from all over the country.
Anyway enough ranting. If you are a hippie just write in the code that you enjoy. If you have a family and financial obligations I suggest hardcore C.
I love Python because it maps very neatly onto how I model problems in my head. I'm not averse to using other languages, but Python is my comfort zone because Guido and I apparently think about algorithms in the same ways. As it turns out, I make a decent living with it.
So, do I have a good job because I know Python, or is it because the thought patterns of the people who are drawn to Python are the same ones that companies want to pay for, regardless of language? If the former and you want a good job, then by all means learn Python. But if knowing Python is just a side effect of the properties that employers are actually looking for, then it's probably not going to help you all that much.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I hate this comment.
I probably hate it because I make about $90k (plus one of the best benefits/retirement packages in the United States...you can suck your 401k, I gots me a pension!)
But really, I hear this all the time. "Oh, you only make $90k? You must suck. Any mid-level programmer can make more than that."
First, it really isn't just about the take-home. The benefits are really important.
Second, there are sooo many other factors, it is incredible. I live about 70 miles from Silicon Valley. My salary *is* something to scoff at by the denizens of the Valley, but for quality of life? I have most of them beat.
I live in a beautiful house that I can easily afford. I average 40 hours per week- with the variance being about 3 hours each way. A 'crazy' time means that I come in at 7:30, and maybe stay as late as 5:30 if I have some process running.
I get to lift my head out of the screen and go do REAL things during my work. I am consulted on many different business processes- my opinion is valued well beyond the technical side of my job.
Someone else mentioned 7 brogrammers huddled together in some Santa Clara shit-shack, all making $150,000. That's a miserable existence that I want no part of- no matter how great they are at programming, or how many Google logoed items they own.
It isn't all about the dollars- don't let some HR firm tell you it is! Don't base your career/life trajectory on your paystubs.
**As an aside, I have visited the Google campus a few time for different projects- meeting with 'fairly high level' employees. We typically compare quality of life notes...I haven't talked to any Google employees over the age of 35 who thought they had made a good life decision to be there. Except for the former CEO's of companies Google has purchased...those guys are happy as shit.
No reason to lie.
Ham/Hamburger
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeah. I'm totally going to change my career path based on a Dice article. Unless my horoscope tells me otherwise, of course.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Well if Dice.com said it, then it must be true!
Realistically speaking if you want to make the Benjamins then you need to be a Senior level developer in a widely adopted language and 1099 corp to corp bill through a smaller consulting firm. You will likely make $100+/hr and be able to do it while living in relatively inexpensive fly over country. No need to bunk of with half a dozen Brogrammers in the Valley.
Just to give you a bit of a data point, at my last consulting gig, in the midwest, WiPro told them their H1B contract Business Analysts were going to be over $100/hr.
Hey, in the 1980's, C was supposed to pay the best. What happened?
A more interesting metric would be how many languages and frameworks one must learn per year in order to maintain compensation in inflation-adjusted dollars, and then chart that over time. I suspect a) it would come out as an exponential and b) that this indicates our acceleration toward the singularity.
Python might have the higher average, but Java is more popular, and I would guess more people are making big money in Java. I think Java has a very high ceiling. Many of the people making big money in Python probably have significant non-software engineer skills.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
In Germany embedded systems make up 22 billion eur while information systems are only 8 billion. In embedded sys. you need c and that ISO language bundle.
In both cases entry is 30 or 40 k eur. And real good figures normally involve an architectural or management role where only little programming is left.
I'd rather work with a language that paid a little less than one that I found hard to use.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Everyone knows that.
Note, I did take a COBOL class once, but I don't code in it, even if I have done code audits of it.
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A lot of that is the Security Clearance and nature of the work you do with Ada. Not the language per se, but what you're doing code for.
You can make a mint on certain embedded assembler coding for highly classified projects.
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Once you learn a certain number of programing languages it becomes really easy to pick up new ones in the same style. Python, C, C++, Perl, Java, Ruby, etc. are all very similar and there's a point where you'll know enough that you'll just have to google the 'if' and loop syntax and you're good to go. After that you can learn different programming paradigms like functional programming or how assemblers work. And once you're there, you can pretty much pick up any programming language or API you need to use in a couple of days. It doesn't really matter where you start so long as you are committed to lifelong learning that's how you make the big bucks.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Java and javascript are totally unrelated. So why join them with a slash as though they are somehow one and the same?
A recent survey in the Dutch IT marketplace on Tweakers.net confirmed that COBOL is the highest paying programming language. Not because it is hot, but because the average age of programmers with COBOL skills is so much higher. There are no COBOL programmers on a starter salary, so obviously the average is higher
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Having many years in python, I am constantly being contacted from people across the country for python jobs. In all python jobs that I've worked, almost every other developer has very low skill, and little to no experience as well, so it's a very easy market to succeed in. When I am actively looking for work though, Java and PHP jobs way outnumber the python jobs, and Java always has the highest salary associated (this is Baltimore/DC area)
I'll bet it was easier than hunting down the invisible bugs from mixed tabs/spaces or introduced by your editor mangling indentation while moving bits of code around.
Which is easily solvable by setting spaces-for-tabs in your editor (and which I do when working in Python, ... or Java... or C/C++... or pretty much everything because that really solves a whole bunch of issues.)
And violations of spacing/indentation rules are trivially caught by with automated testing/CI, which I do with Jython... or Java... or even C/C++ .... or pretty much everything whenever possible because it is the sane thing to do.
I've only been doing Python for 2 years, including C-to-Python bindings using Python 2.7x, Java-to-Jython/WLST integration (with Jython/WLST being based on Python 2.2), and a tiny bit of Windows automation with IronPython.
Most of my background is Java for enterprise development and C/C++ for embedded/system-level development.
As such, I initially I stumbled across some of the nuisances with Python, the spaces, the lack of a stack trace on exceptions, or the fact that exception hierarchies are slightly, but oh-so-different between Python 2.2 and 2.7. But past those stumbles, I simply use tool configs, procedures and coding standards to deal with them.
And that is the same when I do Java or C++. Each has their own gotchas and effective Java/C++ developers simply do the same - use tool configs, procedures and coding standards to deal with them.
Why would anyone mix tabs with spaces. Use one or the other, regardless of whether you do Python or not. If I see a code base in any language that has that shit mixed up, I know I'm bound to find some other stupid shit in the code.
Why? Because mixing tabs with spaces all over the place, like spelling errors, lack of meaningful comments and/or deeply nested code (arrow anti-patterns), these are all proxies for bad coding practices.
I originally found Python indentation rules to be annoying. After all, how hard is it to auto-indent from an IDE or a command line (or force an auto-indent of code before checking in, or en mass before merging back to the trunk)?
But you know what, people are idiots, and I've learned IN GENERAL not to expect them to write clean code (nor tell clean code from apple pie.)
It is still possible to write horrible Python code, but it is a lot harder to do so in it than in Java or C++ or C#. I would still have preferred to see Python having start and end markers for blocks (a-la begin/end or curly braces) on top of indentation rules.
But it is still a good compromise. Hard to see where code blocks end? Increase indentation. Better yet, refactor that shit out. If I see I have a harder time telling the end of a block, chances are that block is already large (time to refactor out), or that there is a lot of code around it (time to split it into better levels of abstraction).
You know, the kind of stuff we are supposed to do in any language anyways.
Besides, accidental violations that render Python code invalid, those things are trivially solvable by doing shit we are supposed to be doing anyway (namely, avoiding mixing tabs and spaces, automated testing, keeping code small and at least dry-run your shit before committing it to source control.)
I'm not saying programming in Python is Nirvana (for some things, it truly sucks.) But some of the things people complain about, they are just asinine complains for shit that broke because, on a fundamental level, they are not following good industrial practices IMO.
Corporations and programming languages are people too. --Rom Mittney
Table-ized A.I.
I think that the problem is not the choice of language but the presence of something that can be expressed with it. Persian language, for instance, is known to be the language of classical poetry, but if you think that you should study Persian to become a classical poet, you are clearly wrong.
I am not a programmer, I am a scientist. I use some microprocessor and I program it with old good assembly language. I know what to express with this assembly. There are complex amplitudes, Fourier transforms, rotation of coordinate axes, PID regulators and other craziness. As a result, a diy 8-bit PIC18 device that costs about US$40 in parts gave the same 16 decimal digits of precision as a US$40'000 box made by famous German company. Really. I live in Russia and nobody will be able to pay me more than US$1000, but at least nobody will ever think about firing me.
No knowledge of programming language will ever give the same results. Here are some professional programmers who write the professional programs which sometimes work after multiple kicks but they look so professional, with buttons, graphs, widgets and all that stuff.
And the necessary Soviet joke:
Q: Why is the Soviet food program named "complex"?
A: Complex things consist of real and imaginary parts.
Should you be telling people that?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Word.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Never take programming or programming-career advice from someone who doesn't know that Java and JavaScript are completely different languages.
Once you earn more than your living expenses, more money is not attractive, more time (and an interesting job) is the real benefit.
BTW, I was a Perl programmer/project leader, and am now a Drupal developer, which makes me a PHP programmer. Amazing similarities between Perl and PHP ;-)
I programmed professionally for 20+ years and have written code installed on over a billion devices and used every day. I found that software engineers are either excellent programmers in every language or half assed if every language.
The simple fact is, language is irrelevant. Computer science is computer science in any language
Don't forget to take into account the cost of living, where they want you to move to. I can live better here on 60,000 than you can live in New York City on 150,000.
Also, the best paying Computer Language is the one they use at the company you want to work for. Study how to learn computer systems and languages quickly. And learn more than one. 8-)
You will be the most important factor in getting that 6 figure salary, not the language you use. All decent programmers should be able to break down complex problems into smaller pieces and use whatever tools are at hand to solve the problem. It doesn't matter the tools you choose to use so long as you can adapt to the situations, learn how to use new tools, and get the job done well. I find the many people allow recruiters and HR departments to tell them what they are worth; based on prior budget meetings, market value, and what they feel the job is worth. A job interview is a sales presentation; you are selling yourself to them and they are selling you on their company. Plain and simple. Once they are sold on you, and you are sold on them, then its about negotiating a price that benefits both parties. Mind you that interviewing at these companies can be quite laborious task; some interviews can be hours in front of a white board writing code in response to questions, then answering a bunch of S.T.A.R. questions, multiple rounds of interviews, etc. By the time it is done and over with, as soon as they toss that old "market value" bit, i toss that out the window. The market isn't in this room writing code for you on the white board, answering silly college questions about algorithm run times, and self-evicting maps. Then start negotiating, if you have the experience, you showed them you have the knowledge, you can negotiate much higher salaries. The language is just a tool. You are what they are paying for, you have to be worth the money. For the record, I do make almost twice the salary you were asking about as a lead java developer, i know and have used many other languages, and the post someone made about quality of life should probably trump you want for a 6 figure salary. What good is it to make the salary you want, only to have to work 60 hour weeks and then your spouse leaves you and you paying them half your check plus child support anyways?
I do not think salary directly maps to the programming language a particular project at a particular company is using. Of course you should be aware of what languages the industry is using in your niche, and outside of your niche. You should hone your skills and learn a lot of different languages. All languages have unique capablities specific to their design and learning them will help you know what tool is best for a given job. A high-paying salary should come with expectations to do the job using the tools provided and expectations to have expertise to drive decisions on tools.
Almost all the Forth programmers I know own their own companies. Heck that's got to count for something.