Salary-Comparing Survey Identifies Top-Paid Developers, Discovers North America Pays Better (linux.com)

21,000 developers were surveyed for this year's annual survey by VisionMobile -- and for the first time, they were asked about their salaries. An anonymous reader quotes Linux.com: [S]killed cloud and backend developers, as well as those who work in emerging technologies including Internet of Things, machine learning and augmented/virtual reality can make more money than frontend web and mobile developers whose skills have become more commoditized... The top 10 percent of salary earners in AR who live in North America earn a median salary of $219,000, compared with $169,000 for the top earning 10 percent of backend developers, according to the report... New, unskilled developers interested in emerging tech will have a harder time finding work, and earn less than their counterparts in more commoditized areas, due both to their lack of experience and fewer companies hiring in the early market.

Along with skill level and software sector, developer salaries also vary widely by where they live in the world. A web developer in North America earns a median income of $73,600 USD per year, compared with the same developer in Western Europe whose median income is $35,400 USD. Web developers in South Asia earn $11,700 in South Asia while those in Eastern Europe earn $20,800 per year.
For developers who want to move up in the world, VisionMobile suggests "Invest in your skills. Do difficult work. Improve your English. Look for opportunities internationally. Go for it. You deserve it!"

Comments

Full stack

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no difference between "front end" and "back end" anymore. The same person does both of them, and, alas, the salary doesn't change.

Re:Full stack

[ShanghaiBill]

There is no difference between "front end" and "back end" anymore. The same person does both of them, and, alas, the salary doesn't change.

Indeed. Every place I have worked, the same people do both. You need to have a fast edit-test-debug cycle without waiting for someone else to fix the server side.

Also, whenever I have filled out a salary survey, I bump my salary up by 30%. If everyone does that, I can show the high result to boss when I ask for a raise to a "competitive" salary.

Re:Full stack

[tommeke100]

In web development you would indeed be pretty useless if you knew one without the other, especially in smaller projects, unless you're a top notch designer.
In larger applications serving more users or more data, or where your client interface is not a webpage, it makes sense having people more specialized in certain areas. You may want to mitigate access by different types of users ( warehousing, analytics, real-time, transactions) to a huge relational database. You may need to design and maintain noSQL Cassandra clusters. Your customer uses your services through RPC procedures where you need to have a high-availability pipeline to consume their data and present the end-result back to them. All these use cases require zero lines of HTML, but a rather specialized skill-set. And that's where the money is.
Not a bad idea on the salary bump though :-) Let's all do that this year so next evaluation we can go "Well Mr Boss Man, seems industry standards for my job are +30%, but I'll take +20%" ;-)

Re:Full stack

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of products do you work with exactly?

What you say certainly rings true of "back end" web development - i.e. ASP.NET MVC developers for example that are also expected to know JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.

But web development isn't everything - there are still entire swathes of systems doing everything from data mining to batch processing, and systems monitoring to decision making whereby you'd never expect the developers to have any front end knowledge - they create black boxes with well defined interfaces that web developers may use somewhere down the chain, but would rarely be expected to do it all themselves. I would never for one second even consider putting any kind of front end knowledge as a requirement for a role for an expert in data mining for example, as it would be suicidal, you'd effectively be writing off the best people in the industry for the sake of a skill that they just don't need.

This survey matches my experience in the industry - that stuff like web development is pretty low paid, and low skilled, this is why you find plenty of developers that don't see a problem with things like JavaScript and PHP - they're certainly not experienced or skilled enough to understand why such languages are shit and they have salaries to match that relatively low skill level, doing very commoditised work. These are the people that typically complain about H1Bs, and suggest developer salaries are bad and all that kind of thing.

At the high end you have specialists in advanced topics - those in the summary such as cloud infrastructure developers, but also experts in fields such as data mining, compiler design, and so on and so forth. These people are well paid and deservedly so because they'll have put in consistent and repeated effort through their lives to skill up sufficiently in much more difficult topics. Such people will rarely complain about things like H1B because they've bothered to keep growing their skillset to be hireable regardless because there is such a shortage of those skills.

The reality is this also plays into the ageism debate here - no one wants to pay a web developer $150k just because they've been a programmer for 40 years - if you've been in the game that long you need to be in the second category above and have little excuse not to be. Those people will complain the industry is ageist, hate companies like Google for hiring younger people, oblivious to the fact that those younger people have done hard degrees, in hard topics, that allow them to engage in the second category of skills above, rather than the first category.

The division of skills talked about in this article is actually of profound relevance to the industry - it basically explains the division of views amongst developers here on Slashdot and across the internet, it highlights the difference between the haves and have nots. Any developer with any sense should make sure they're in the second category, because otherwise you'll end up dedicating your life to whining on Slashdot about poor pay, H1B, ageism and whatever else - complaints that are alien to any developer that's bothered to ensure they sit comfortably in the second category, that of highly skilled developers.

This is the real reason H1B scares Americans

[Anonymous Coward]

North America pays better, twice to three to seven times better.

H1B, outsourcing to Europe or Asia is always undercutting and threatening. There is just so much pressure on the American software developer to always keep improving and running ahead of the endless hordes of lower cost options snipping at the heels. So much so that a lot of them look at Trump to close the doors and make the race easier.

The H1B lottery is a real lottery, especially for a developer in India. It is an immediate seven fold salary increase.

Re:This is the real reason H1B scares Americans

[Anonymous Coward]

They've got a long way to go before they are Japan. Because as far as I know every city in Japan has a flush toilet.

Re:This is the real reason H1B scares Americans

[Anonymous Coward]

Devil's advocate:

North America pays better than Europe, but you get more services in Europe, especially as a citizen:

1: Unemployment actually means something. Here in the US, expect $800 every two weeks tops.
2: You don't have to worry about crime in big cities in Europe, and at worst, it is a pickpocket.
3: If you get sick or injured, your life's earnings are not in jeopardy. The US healthcare system is the most expensive and shoddily run of any country on the planet, bar none. In fact, if you don't have health insurance, there is a good chance that medics will just let you code.
4: The US has no transportation system to speak of compared to Europe. So, you have to pay for a car and high rates.
5: There is no education system unless you pay for a private school. In Europe, there is a strong public school system. Yes, US public education is so crummy that there is no way someone from it can compete against foreign competition unless they are insanely smart. Which brings the next point.
6: If you stand out, you will wind up smacked down hard. Talk out loud in class, it can mean prison until age 21 (age 23 in California.) The US is so beholden to the private prison system that the schools to prisons path is so well greased, more students wind up incarcerated than graduating in most districts.
7: Roads are in disrepair, but there are no funds to fix them. Look at the dam in California, or the highways in Atlanta. There is no money to fix them, ever.

If you have EU citizenship, STAY THERE. If you are Indian, find a job in the US, then go to Europe. Europe is not collapsing from within. Brexit may be scary, but it isn't a war, and really won't affect long term trade.

Re:This is the real reason H1B scares Americans

[EvilAlphonso]

The US healthcare system is #11 out of 11 on outcomes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2014/06/16/u-s-healthcare-ranked-dead-last-compared-to-10-other-countries/) and #37 out of 191 on efficiency (http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf)... hardly the best, hardly the worst. It is however definitely #1 in costs.

People with money travel from all over the world if they have cash, because expensive untested treatments are available in the US but not in other places.

Re:H-1B Workers

[ShanghaiBill]

This survey proves that American workers aren't being harmed by workers with H-1B visas.

Nonsense. You cannot "prove" anything with statistics. We don't know what the salary range would have been if H1B visas didn't exist. In that alternative universe American tech salaries may have been higher. Or they may have even been lower if entire teams were shifted abroad. We just don't know, and this survey "proves" nothing.

The real reason there's so much objection to the H-1B program is rampant racism

Self-interest is a more plausible explanation.

What about hidden cost?

[muecksteiner]

Does this survey properly factor in things like healthcare and retirement costs?

Because sure, in Western Europe you earn half as much as in the US - but with that salary, you usually already have health insurance, retirement and free education for your kids covered (minus university, which is not free in a number of countries).

These little details could conceivably tilt the balance in favour of the lower salary.

Just silly.

[CptLoRes]

Comparing AR to web/mobile/backend is just silly. The people currently working on AR have to be highly skilled in some very specialized areas, basically inventing both the software and hardware technology as they go along. It's like comparing an actual rocket scientist to an car mechanic and wondering why the scientist has a higher salary.

What are the discretionary savings?

[thegarbz]

Income means nothing if I have to blow it on basic stuff like accommodation, food, school, and a many thousand dollar rainy day fund in case I stub my toe and need to go to a doctor.

Re:What are the discretionary savings?

[bluegutang]

Ouch! Call the burn ward. But only if his insurance covers it...

Re:11K in south asia

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear ShanghaiBill,

I am an Indian here who did his PhD in computer engineering from one of the UCs in USA. I later moved back to India and have been here in Bangalore for over a decade. I still remain a life long fan of Slashdot for its tech coverage and its reader discussions.

Now I have been reading your posts for many years. Many of them are indeed insightful and interesting.

Yet you exhibit a subtle but very distinct form of racism that is couched in a seemingly informed analysis and facts. But most of your analyses are fraudulent. You argue intelligently but I have observed that it is seldom based on real data. It is more based on selective picking of pieces of data that fits your bias or racism or xenophobia or ignorance or whatever we can call it. We know it when we see it.

In this particular case, for example, you are authoritatively proclaiming knowledge of life in 'South Asia' which basically refers to India as we know. You indirectly seem to hint that most well to do Indians with upper middle class salary keep a live-in housekeeper. There are subtle accusations of a slavery like culture here by choice of words like 'live-in' instead of simply saying 'domestic help'.
But as an Indian I have to inform you that this is simply not true. Do you indeed have that stats at hand?
Do you have the real numbers? What exact proportion of well to do Indians keep a live-in housekeeper? Well, the answer is in single digits, sir.
The fact that you dont bother to gather stats is to me a subtle but clear indication of racism.

I'm not amazed

[nospam007]

"Discovers North America Pays Better "

Small wonder, other countries offer decent/very good healthcare, up to 80% of last job's pay in case of unemployment for 1 or 2 years, >35 vacation days, paid sick leave up to 6 months or years, maternity leave, paid new parent vacation for 6 months or more, up to 5/6th state-guaranteed pension rights, free daycare, insurance for disability nursing/shopping at home, ...