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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!"
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!"
Here are some direct links to avoid the form:
http://go.linuxfoundation.org/l/6342/e-of-developer-nation-2017-pdf/3qp35l
(also, the form is cool with mailinator addresses if that stops working)
https://ufile.io/26f4a
Also, here's the extracted text of the Key Insights:
• Developers who work in areas with a higher technical complexity or in very young sectors - and therefore with higher barriers to entry and ultimately fewer developers doing it - generally earn more. In Western Europe, for example, the median backend developer earns 12% more than the median web developer; a machine learning developer makes 28% more. Web and mobile development are the most commoditised.
• We’re still a long way off a global market for developers. The median earnings of web developers in Western Europe are half of those of their North American counterparts; web developers in other regions earn half again. This opens up arbitrage opportunities for developers willing to work remotely.
• C# is the most popular primary programming language amongst Augmented and Virtual Reality developers, preferred by 30% of them. This is followed by C/C++ (16%) and Java (15%). Interestingly, professionals are more likely to use C# or C++ in comparison to hobbyists.
• Almost 90% of AR/VR developers would be considered juniors by other industries’ standards, having less than 2 years experience. The industry consists of many newcomers who are inexperienced in the field - they will not be deeply invested in any tools, technologies or platforms, so any vendor has the potential to establish market leadership with the right product.
• 48% of web developers are currently using a third-party library or framework other than jQuery as their primary way of doing front-end web development. Angular and React account for 30%, leaving all the others fighting for the remaining 18%. Indeed front-end web development is such a fragmented space that no other single library or framework accounts for more than 2% of primary usage.
• Facebook’s React appears to dominate Google’s Angular in online discussion and open source activity. However, not only is Angular 2.x the primary framework for about as many developers as React (10% vs 9% globally), but Angular 1.x is still the most popular overall by a slim margin (11% use it as their primary framework). In total those using one or the other version of Angular number more than double those using React.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most popular primary cloud hosting at every company size. For the smallest companies (1-5 employees) where Amazon has just a 15% share, they face very credible competition from Microsoft (12%), Google (11%), and Digital Ocean (10%). However, when we look at larger companies, Amazon’s share grows to 26-27% at every size, Microsoft stays in the 11-13% range, while Google fades along with Digital Ocean. Google has just a 5% share of companies with more than 5,000 employees, and Digital Ocean just 4% at the same size.
• AWS is also the most popular primary cloud host with developers regardless of targeted audience, although strongest with backend developers who target large enterprises, of whom 29% are primarily using AWS. Microsoft shows greater strength equally with developers who target large enterprises, and those who target small to medium businesses (14% each). They are weaker with those targeting consumers (11%) or professionals (9%). Google shows the opposite patternbeing strongest with developers who target consumers(10%) but only half as popular with those who target large enterprises or internal employees.
• Despite the proliferation of IoT platforms and other tools, the IoT tool market is still underdeveloped and heavily fragmented. IoT developers use comparatively fewer tools than their colleagues in other software sectors. 11% of IoT developers don’t use any of the tools in our list.
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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.
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.
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.
With 11K in South Asia you can live with the same quality of life as someone making $120K in the US.
Yes and no. You can't afford a car, but you can easily afford a live-in housekeeper and nanny for your kids.
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.
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.
Also, salary is just one factor. Cost of living, especially healthcare, amount of paid holiday, having a "sick day" quota, workers' rights, maternity/paternity rights, employer spying, progressive society...
I get the impression that salaries in the US are high to make up for the lack of other stuff.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
The top 10 percent of salary earners in AR who live in North America earn a median salary of $219,000,
Is it just me or is that a very convoluted way of saying "95th percentile"?
Ezekiel 23:20
You are a liar. USA has twice the amount of suicides.
http://apps.who.int/gho/data/n...
Sweden: 13.2
France: 15.8
United Kingdom: 7.0
Spain: 7.0
South Korea: 36.8
Canada: 11.4
United States: 13.7
Mexico: 4.1
Oh, and suicide rates strongly correlate to the latitude (because of the amount of sunlight in winter). United States shares most of its the latitude with Southern Europe, but its suicide rate is higher:
Spain: 7.0
Italy: 6.4
Portugal: 12.5
Greece: 4.9
Malta: 6.8
Malta is basically as far south as Southern Europe goes and it is on about the same latitude as Los Alamos, New Mexico, so USA goes even further south. Seriously, suicide rates in USA suck in comparison to what they ought to be.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
This, a billion times this.
At my level, I could probably make five or more times what I make over here in Europe in the US. Easily. Trouble is, I don't even need the money I make here, so why bother?
But here I get 25 days paid vacation plus sick days on top of that (no, they don't count as vacation days here), perfect healthcare, unemployment benefit should I for some reason get unemployed (not bloody likely unless I want to, but in that case it pays, too), retirement plan, worker's protection (law commands I MUST NOT work more than 50 hours a week and even that only for a very short time, with no more than 45 hours a week on average during the year. Oh, and no more than 10 hours a day).
Try to beat that, US.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Plus worker protection laws that can't be beat. Limitation of hours per week, limitations of what your boss can impose on you, certain practices that are common in the US being outlawed, easy and free/cheap access to work related lawyers in case it gets to court (including insurance to cover your cost in case that lawyer says you should sue and you lose)...
The list is pretty long. And it's universal, so companies don't even get the idea to sneak it in on the low level, where people can't afford to defend against it and fight it, and let it creep upwards.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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. :-) 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%" ;-)
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
If you've got something like the NHS, that doesn't stop you from seeking private care if you can pay. What it does stop you is from going bankrupt if you wind up with a condition that would cost far more than you've got.
Are you going to wait longer than you would if you can pay for it? Yes. Is that any worse than what happens if it's pay-only, and you can't pay?
access to toys like fire arms and off road vehicles makes my quality of life decidedly better than my European counterpart.
Always good to hear the views of our teenage readers!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Yeah, but not everyone is lucky enough to be the president of the US.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.