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%" ;-)

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...