17 ms·

The Evolution of Developer Salaries: Looking Back 20 Years

102 points by fagnerbrack 6y ago

ArtTimeInvestor 6y ago
So from $62890 to $92610 in 18 years. That is only a 4% increase per year. I am surprised it is so little. I recently looked up some old receipts I paid in restaurants and cafes from 11 years ago. And then looked up the same items in the same cafes and restaurants now. The prices roughly doubled. So these increased by about 6% per year. If developer salaries increased slower than inflation, why is it still so hard to find good freelance developers? Could the explanation be that the market has been flooded with people who call themselfes developers but hardly grasp what is going on under the hood? And just glue external code together until it kinda works?
- ido 6y ago
  Restaurant prices are not the only mark for inflation. Has inflation in the past 18 years been more than 4% per year on average?
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    It doesn't look impressive against the CPI. According to the BLS calculator, $62,890 in 2003 is worth $90,538.76 in 2021. So after adjusting for inflation, salaries have risen by all of 2%?
    - PenguinCoder 6y ago
      That's pretty depressing.
  - ArtTimeInvestor 6y ago
    Depends on what you look at. Gold increased about 9% per year. The Nasdaq increased about 11% per year.
    - ploika 6y ago
      Neither of those represent inflation in consumer prices particularly well. The price of a new washing machine (amortised maybe, I don't know), a litre of milk, a pair of jeans, a monthly phone/broadband bill or a tank of petrol would be more useful in tracking inflation. Gold, copper, pork bellies, shipping, storage costs etc would be tracked in something like the Purchasing Managers Index. Share prices are pretty much irrelevant since buying shares isn't really consumption.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        > The price of a new washing machine (amortised maybe, I don't know), a litre of milk, a pair of jeans, a monthly phone/broadband bill or a tank of petrol would be more useful in tracking inflation. That’s pocket change compared to the change in price for real estate, healthcare, education, childcare, taxes, and savings (assets for retirement and emergencies). At least for where I want to live. If I made a budget 15 years ago of my purchases in the next 15 years, the total price for the total of those purchases increased at far more than US government CPI figures. I get more bang for buck for my TV, but that’s offset by the extra few hundred thousand dollars for land, healthcare, etc.
        ploika 6y ago
        Of course. Depending on where you live, most of what you mentioned is probably included in the CPI calculation. Rent, health insurance, education and childcare are all included in Ireland's CPI in some form, for example. I was trying to differentiate between increases in consumer prices (like the cost of a watch or running a car) and increases in cost/value of other stuff (like gold bullion or Tesla shares or whatever).
    - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
      When I start eating gold and living in a Nasdaq, then that might matter as a measure of inflation.
- enriquto 6y ago
  > hardly grasp what is going on under the hood? And just glue external code together until it kinda works? Wait, isn't this what all of us do? Do some folks really understand things?
  - ben_w 6y ago
    I try to, but I guess it depends what you mean by “really understand” — I’m happy so long as I know about the product logic, but @pjc50 has said of themselves something along the lines of “full stack at every level from the transistor to the UI” or similar (I can’t find a link to the actual comment, they post too much for that).
    - jlokier 6y ago
      Possibly this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191777
      - ben_w 6y ago
        That certainly looks like the one I was thinking of, thank you.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    I mean, I won't pretend I understand everything I do, but working in video games there's frequently no "external code" you can draw from, not even a Stack Overflow where you can ask questions. Over a year ago we got few prototype PS5 devkits dropped on our desks with some basic documentation available and were told to make it work - that's not something where you can ask for any help anywhere, because it's all NDA'ed and Sony engineers are extremely busy, so you just....have to figure stuff out by yourself.
  - sanxiyn 6y ago
    Yes, I do.
- ben_w 6y ago
  This inflation calculator says the USA has had cumulative inflation of only 20%, not 100%, in the last 11 years; of 42% in the last 18 years; and of 48% in the last 20 years: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ I suspect your restaurant and café receipts are not representative of general price changes.
  - ArtTimeInvestor 6y ago
    I suspect that website is not representative of general price changes. Maybe it looks at things that got easier to produce so they got cheaper via efficiency. They just don't sell cheaper because of inflation.
    - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
      That's the elephant in the room with inflation measures (CPI CPIH RPI) the selection of the basket of goods can have a massive effect on the actual recorded rate - which may not be what the average person on the ground experiences. Governments have incentives to use this to flatter the results or change inflation measures eg the UK and its switch to CPI from RPI for a lot of things.
      - zelos 6y ago
        Presumably there's a big difference in the level of inflation experienced based on income level as well: someone just scraping by is going to be much more exposed to food and rent inflation than a developer on $100k.
        foolmeonce 6y ago
        True, but the chosen measure is going to be the lowest inflation imaginable since it relates strongly the global price of goods instead of services cost. Poor people actually can't escape service costs and pay for a lot more (seemingly) mandatory service costs that go away when you have enough money to stay away from them. I.e. the costs of not having a fridge at all vs being able to bulk shop at a warehouse are all massively higher.
- Loic 6y ago
  For another reference point, the "cost of life index"[0] in Germany went from 79,9 (in 2000) to 105,8 (in 2020), a 32% increase. DESTATIS provide all the details of the calculations of this index and also how it changes over the years to adapt to the real cost of life (like everybody having a smartphone now but not in 1991). [0]: https://www-genesis.destatis.de/genesis/online?operation=previous&levelindex=1&step=1&titel=Ergebnis&levelid=1614268888541&acceptscookies=false https://www-genesis.destatis.de/genesis/online?operation=pre...
durnygbur 6y ago
As a dev based in EU, in any year I was at around 50% of the expected American level. The healthcare and social systems are so underfunded and overloaded in most of the EU countries that in case of any health or life problems I expect to receive "American-style" support (ie. ending up on the street, with bills and debt collection hounding me). Why even bother being employed?
- ido 6y ago
  I don't know where in the EU you are but I live in Germany and had to have cancer treatment a few years ago & got outstanding care for no cost. Also having two children the amount of support we (and everyone who has kids) get from the state here is excellent.
  - durnygbur 6y ago
    This will last at most only 5-10 years more [1]. Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain and Greece are brain-drained to the bone already. There is noone to come over. [1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2020/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2020/
    - ido 6y ago
      I've worked at tech companies since we moved here in 2013 and at least for developers most of the "imported talent" were from non-EU former Soviet countries (Russia, Ukraine, etc), India or Latin America.
    - iamlucaswolf 6y ago
      This might be a fair assumption from a birth statistics viewpoint, but completely misses immigration. I met a lot of brilliant people from all over the world during my undergrad at TU Munich; many of them stayed. Google, Apple, Microsoft have expanded rather aggressively over the past years, and the startup scene is growing. Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt seem to follow suit. Granted, it's much less likely (and also less politically incentivized) to become a "millionaire employee", but I guess ultimately, the correlation between wealth and wellbeing is simply weaker in (northern) European economies? As long as immigration policies don't change (and why would they? the current model aligns well with lobby incentives), I don't see much reason for this to change. Also, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Spain, and Greece have a different political and economic history than Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, etc.
z92 6y ago
His conclusion : > In the years to come, industry experts expect low-level coding and programming jobs to become obsolete with the development of new tools that remove the need to code completely. Me wondering how much of it shall we see.
- danjac 6y ago
  Without context, I could guess that quote could have been written at any time in the past couple decades. It's the "nuclear fusion" of our industry: one day someone will make it happen, but not as soon as you think.
  - durnygbur 6y ago
    It's like instant on demand video and voice calls. Science ficiton had been dreaming of it since the end of 19th century. Then suddenly... Skype. It will happen in the most obscure place.
- arcturus17 6y ago
  It's been discussed ad nauseam here, but companies love "no-code" tools until they find their limitations (which is often sooner rather than later) and then they desperately get out their wads of cash to have the problems they caused sorted. This creates an entire ecosystem of "low-code-real-developers" who have the skill, commercial foresight (and possibly patience) of working inside the guts of low-code tools, doing Java, JS or what-have-you, but inside an ugly, sparsely-documented propietary API instead of an open-source framework with literal gigabytes of documentation and knowledge accumulated in Stack Overflow over the course of fifteen years... So now instead of two in-house analyst-developers building business applications, you have Mark from Marketing & Sales building apps in low-code, and four "low-code-high-code" contractors on expensive contracts cleaning up behind Mark. And so it goes...
  - sanxiyn 6y ago
    Being able to do something by oneself is such a huge advantage over telling someone else to do something that it can compensate for lots and lots of disadvantages. HyperCard was a great success, and I have high hope we will have great low-code tools like HyperCard in the future.
vfc1 6y ago
At least the freelance rates of today are about the same value as in the early 2000's, for the typical enterprise job. I used to work as a freelance around 5 years ago, and I still receive some recruiter emails with occasional mention of the going rates. It's the same as 5 years ago or less, which is the same since I remember in the early 2000's. The rates took a hit with the 2008 crisis and stagnated since then. I think the golden age was somewhere in the mid-90s, where developers got paid really well.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I stopped contracting in 2001 (in the UK) and the rates I was charging then don't look much different to what is on offer today. It doesn't help that the UK tax authorities have been waging war against contractors, their latest wheeze is to force them into being employees.
  - burntoutfire 6y ago
    The rates are heavily dependent on the skillset. I.e. for people well-versed in the latest and "greatest" tech, it's typically 500-600 pounds per day, for everyone else it's 300-500.
    - fy20 6y ago
      That's what it's been for at least the last 8 years (when I started contracting). For sure you can earn more if niche down, but for a generic 'mid-senior level dev turned contractor' those are the going rates.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      That isn't much different from what I remember in 2001. SAP was in demand and people were billing £750 per day for that, even ordinary stuff was at least £300 per day.
unnouinceput 6y ago
Quote: "In the years to come, industry experts expect low-level coding and programming jobs to become obsolete with the development of new tools that remove the need to code completely. Take for example the role of Web Developers when it comes to building websites. With popular CMS tools like WordPress and Squarespace, almost anyone can build a website for their business, reducing the need for people who know “just a little bit of front end web development”. " Yeah, not gonna happen. Low level code, if anything, is going to become even more popular with the current explosion of IoT. You have this 4th generation becoming in full swing (1st was mainframes in 50's/60's, 2nd was PC in 70's/80', 3rd was web/mobile in 90's to 10's, and now Arduino/Raspberry/MicroBIT for IoT) and I swear is the same stuff under new hood. Plenty of people want fully integrated stuff and blings around them, which means in next decade IoT is going to be what smartphones started from 2008 to 2015. Second - Sure mom and pop can do basic stuff in Wordpress, but once they want something unique guess what? PHP developer to the rescue to adjust their Wordpress site. So no, if anything, it's going the opposite direction, more code, more software. So the <need for people who know “just a little bit of front end web development”> is going to be shifted to mom and pop and that's all...at best.
- mritchie712 6y ago
  I think "low level" here means "low skill level", not the programming definition [0] 0 - low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture
  - osigurdson 6y ago
    I would like to see some concrete examples of what is meant by low skill level "programmer" work. In my opinion, programmer, developer and engineer mean the same thing. Is there a market for "Hello, world" that I am not aware of?
    - sceadu 6y ago
      Simple CRUD websites maybe, adding simple things to e.g. wordpress deployments.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mfontani 6y ago
Both charts purportedly show stats for 2001-2011. Is it the case the first shows 2001-2011, and the second 2011-2021?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  > Both charts... There are four charts. Are you referring to the just the top pair labeled median 2001-2011 and mean 2001-2011 which are in the “From 2001-2011” section? Those are 2001-2011. If you want later ones you’ll have to scroll down to the section titled “From 2013-2019.” There’s a pair labeled median 2013-2019 and mean 2013-2019. Those are the 2013-2019 ones.
  - mfontani 6y ago
    Ha! Missed the tiny "mean" vs "median" difference between the first two. Thanks!
swyx 6y ago
this is subject to the same issues all salary surveys have - they dont take into account stock based comp, which is responsible both for the huge amount of variance in comp by years of experience and for the increase in total comp over time. the conclusions you can draw from this are really not that meaningful in total.
- fatnoah 6y ago
  That is definitely a big miss. Looking only at cash, my rate of compensation increase was about 7.5% per year (in reality, it was typically a couple years at 1-2% with some big jumps). When stock is factored into the equation, the average jumps to about 12.5%!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
adamc 6y ago
The article needs to compare against salaries in general to distinguish changes in developer salaries from other trends.
tosswayaway 6y ago
Question: Should I be struggling to afford a 1000 sq ft house and maintain it? I want to get a bigger house but it feels like I’m getting priced out of the market right now. Fortunately I already have this small home which I used a loan from my retirement to put the 5% down payment on, paid off the loan and refinanced a couple of times, so I’m not struggling to pay for that, but it’s nowhere near big enough for my partner and I to both work remotely. It’s not in a super trendy area or new, actually near a bunch of seedy motels and pawn shops. I’m taking off work and crawling under my house to fix the furnace so I don’t blow through my savings. I don’t go out to eat often or much more than the occasional fast food or take extravagant vacations, usually just road trips to visit family or national parks. I have spent some money on replacing appliances and remodeling, but nowhere near a down payment on another house. I only bought this place because I was living in someone’s attic and it was getting old. I’ve been dev for 8 years, have always gotten stellar performance reviews, manage people, and get bonuses. Just feels off to me. Everyone else I know doing well has some kind of side hustle like managing properties. I myself was freelancing the past year in my free time trying to make some extra cash. True I’m doing better than many people and I am saving for my retirement, but it seems like a dev salary in this day and age should at least buy you a decent house. Everyone I know got a down payment from their parents. Is this normal? Where’s the money at?
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >I want to get a bigger house but it feels like I’m getting priced out of the market right now. LOL, come to Germany where you're by default priced out of buying any house period unless you get some sizable assistance from the bank of mom and dad. >Everyone I know got a down payment from their parents. Is this normal? It's normal if you've won the lottery of birth. If not, then, as someone else here said it, "get richer parents".
  - tosswayaway 6y ago
    If there’s any Daddy Warbucks out there that wants to adopt a 30 year old son, please let me know.
  - hiram112 6y ago
parentheses 6y ago
I feel that these numbers hide a lot: (1) There is a small percentage that are being paid what I consider to be a fair income. They are being paid in very competitive markets. They are getting valued in a HCOL market where demand for engineering talent is higher. (2) There is a large percentage that are being paid something like a "developer status quo". A salary that: - doesn't acknowledge that software developers are _capable_ of generating inordinately large amounts of value (and considered in aggregate, mostly do) - treats all work done by college-educated individual contributors as of roughly equivalent value - cannot be too high because "we can't pay you 2x what $other_person_of_value makes" - cannot be too high because "we can't pay you more than what $your_manager makes" (3) Developer skill levels vary greatly. This means that the average developer is just that: average. Average developers simply do not generate the kind of value that top-end developers do.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago
"low-level coding and programming jobs to become obsolete" What is low-level coding: Verilog or HTML?

102 points by fagnerbrack 6y ago

So from $62890 to $92610 in 18 years. That is only a 4% increase per year. I am surprised it is so little. I recently looked up some old receipts I paid in restaurants and cafes from 11 years ago. And then looked up the same items in the same cafes and restaurants now. The prices roughly doubled. So these increased by about 6% per year. If developer salaries increased slower than inflation, why is it still so hard to find good freelance developers? Could the explanation be that the market has been flooded with people who call themselfes developers but hardly grasp what is going on under the hood? And just glue external code together until it kinda works?

ido 6y ago
Restaurant prices are not the only mark for inflation. Has inflation in the past 18 years been more than 4% per year on average?
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  It doesn't look impressive against the CPI. According to the BLS calculator, $62,890 in 2003 is worth $90,538.76 in 2021. So after adjusting for inflation, salaries have risen by all of 2%?
  - PenguinCoder 6y ago
    That's pretty depressing.
- ArtTimeInvestor 6y ago
  Depends on what you look at. Gold increased about 9% per year. The Nasdaq increased about 11% per year.
  - ploika 6y ago
    Neither of those represent inflation in consumer prices particularly well. The price of a new washing machine (amortised maybe, I don't know), a litre of milk, a pair of jeans, a monthly phone/broadband bill or a tank of petrol would be more useful in tracking inflation. Gold, copper, pork bellies, shipping, storage costs etc would be tracked in something like the Purchasing Managers Index. Share prices are pretty much irrelevant since buying shares isn't really consumption.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      > The price of a new washing machine (amortised maybe, I don't know), a litre of milk, a pair of jeans, a monthly phone/broadband bill or a tank of petrol would be more useful in tracking inflation. That’s pocket change compared to the change in price for real estate, healthcare, education, childcare, taxes, and savings (assets for retirement and emergencies). At least for where I want to live. If I made a budget 15 years ago of my purchases in the next 15 years, the total price for the total of those purchases increased at far more than US government CPI figures. I get more bang for buck for my TV, but that’s offset by the extra few hundred thousand dollars for land, healthcare, etc.
      - ploika 6y ago
        Of course. Depending on where you live, most of what you mentioned is probably included in the CPI calculation. Rent, health insurance, education and childcare are all included in Ireland's CPI in some form, for example. I was trying to differentiate between increases in consumer prices (like the cost of a watch or running a car) and increases in cost/value of other stuff (like gold bullion or Tesla shares or whatever).
  - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    When I start eating gold and living in a Nasdaq, then that might matter as a measure of inflation.
enriquto 6y ago
> hardly grasp what is going on under the hood? And just glue external code together until it kinda works? Wait, isn't this what all of us do? Do some folks really understand things?
- ben_w 6y ago
  I try to, but I guess it depends what you mean by “really understand” — I’m happy so long as I know about the product logic, but @pjc50 has said of themselves something along the lines of “full stack at every level from the transistor to the UI” or similar (I can’t find a link to the actual comment, they post too much for that).
  - jlokier 6y ago
    Possibly this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191777
    - ben_w 6y ago
      That certainly looks like the one I was thinking of, thank you.
- gambiting 6y ago
  I mean, I won't pretend I understand everything I do, but working in video games there's frequently no "external code" you can draw from, not even a Stack Overflow where you can ask questions. Over a year ago we got few prototype PS5 devkits dropped on our desks with some basic documentation available and were told to make it work - that's not something where you can ask for any help anywhere, because it's all NDA'ed and Sony engineers are extremely busy, so you just....have to figure stuff out by yourself.
- sanxiyn 6y ago
  Yes, I do.
ben_w 6y ago
This inflation calculator says the USA has had cumulative inflation of only 20%, not 100%, in the last 11 years; of 42% in the last 18 years; and of 48% in the last 20 years: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ I suspect your restaurant and café receipts are not representative of general price changes.
- ArtTimeInvestor 6y ago
  I suspect that website is not representative of general price changes. Maybe it looks at things that got easier to produce so they got cheaper via efficiency. They just don't sell cheaper because of inflation.
  - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
    That's the elephant in the room with inflation measures (CPI CPIH RPI) the selection of the basket of goods can have a massive effect on the actual recorded rate - which may not be what the average person on the ground experiences. Governments have incentives to use this to flatter the results or change inflation measures eg the UK and its switch to CPI from RPI for a lot of things.
    - zelos 6y ago
      Presumably there's a big difference in the level of inflation experienced based on income level as well: someone just scraping by is going to be much more exposed to food and rent inflation than a developer on $100k.
      - foolmeonce 6y ago
        True, but the chosen measure is going to be the lowest inflation imaginable since it relates strongly the global price of goods instead of services cost. Poor people actually can't escape service costs and pay for a lot more (seemingly) mandatory service costs that go away when you have enough money to stay away from them. I.e. the costs of not having a fridge at all vs being able to bulk shop at a warehouse are all massively higher.
Loic 6y ago
For another reference point, the "cost of life index"[0] in Germany went from 79,9 (in 2000) to 105,8 (in 2020), a 32% increase. DESTATIS provide all the details of the calculations of this index and also how it changes over the years to adapt to the real cost of life (like everybody having a smartphone now but not in 1991). [0]: https://www-genesis.destatis.de/genesis/online?operation=previous&levelindex=1&step=1&titel=Ergebnis&levelid=1614268888541&acceptscookies=false https://www-genesis.destatis.de/genesis/online?operation=pre...

durnygbur 6y ago

As a dev based in EU, in any year I was at around 50% of the expected American level. The healthcare and social systems are so underfunded and overloaded in most of the EU countries that in case of any health or life problems I expect to receive "American-style" support (ie. ending up on the street, with bills and debt collection hounding me). Why even bother being employed?

ido 6y ago
I don't know where in the EU you are but I live in Germany and had to have cancer treatment a few years ago & got outstanding care for no cost. Also having two children the amount of support we (and everyone who has kids) get from the state here is excellent.
- durnygbur 6y ago
  This will last at most only 5-10 years more [1]. Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain and Greece are brain-drained to the bone already. There is noone to come over. [1] https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2020/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2020/
  - ido 6y ago
    I've worked at tech companies since we moved here in 2013 and at least for developers most of the "imported talent" were from non-EU former Soviet countries (Russia, Ukraine, etc), India or Latin America.
  - iamlucaswolf 6y ago
    This might be a fair assumption from a birth statistics viewpoint, but completely misses immigration. I met a lot of brilliant people from all over the world during my undergrad at TU Munich; many of them stayed. Google, Apple, Microsoft have expanded rather aggressively over the past years, and the startup scene is growing. Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt seem to follow suit. Granted, it's much less likely (and also less politically incentivized) to become a "millionaire employee", but I guess ultimately, the correlation between wealth and wellbeing is simply weaker in (northern) European economies? As long as immigration policies don't change (and why would they? the current model aligns well with lobby incentives), I don't see much reason for this to change. Also, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Spain, and Greece have a different political and economic history than Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, etc.

z92 6y ago

His conclusion : > In the years to come, industry experts expect low-level coding and programming jobs to become obsolete with the development of new tools that remove the need to code completely. Me wondering how much of it shall we see.

danjac 6y ago
Without context, I could guess that quote could have been written at any time in the past couple decades. It's the "nuclear fusion" of our industry: one day someone will make it happen, but not as soon as you think.
- durnygbur 6y ago
  It's like instant on demand video and voice calls. Science ficiton had been dreaming of it since the end of 19th century. Then suddenly... Skype. It will happen in the most obscure place.
arcturus17 6y ago
It's been discussed ad nauseam here, but companies love "no-code" tools until they find their limitations (which is often sooner rather than later) and then they desperately get out their wads of cash to have the problems they caused sorted. This creates an entire ecosystem of "low-code-real-developers" who have the skill, commercial foresight (and possibly patience) of working inside the guts of low-code tools, doing Java, JS or what-have-you, but inside an ugly, sparsely-documented propietary API instead of an open-source framework with literal gigabytes of documentation and knowledge accumulated in Stack Overflow over the course of fifteen years... So now instead of two in-house analyst-developers building business applications, you have Mark from Marketing & Sales building apps in low-code, and four "low-code-high-code" contractors on expensive contracts cleaning up behind Mark. And so it goes...
- sanxiyn 6y ago
  Being able to do something by oneself is such a huge advantage over telling someone else to do something that it can compensate for lots and lots of disadvantages. HyperCard was a great success, and I have high hope we will have great low-code tools like HyperCard in the future.

vfc1 6y ago

At least the freelance rates of today are about the same value as in the early 2000's, for the typical enterprise job. I used to work as a freelance around 5 years ago, and I still receive some recruiter emails with occasional mention of the going rates. It's the same as 5 years ago or less, which is the same since I remember in the early 2000's. The rates took a hit with the 2008 crisis and stagnated since then. I think the golden age was somewhere in the mid-90s, where developers got paid really well.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
I stopped contracting in 2001 (in the UK) and the rates I was charging then don't look much different to what is on offer today. It doesn't help that the UK tax authorities have been waging war against contractors, their latest wheeze is to force them into being employees.
- burntoutfire 6y ago
  The rates are heavily dependent on the skillset. I.e. for people well-versed in the latest and "greatest" tech, it's typically 500-600 pounds per day, for everyone else it's 300-500.
  - fy20 6y ago
    That's what it's been for at least the last 8 years (when I started contracting). For sure you can earn more if niche down, but for a generic 'mid-senior level dev turned contractor' those are the going rates.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    That isn't much different from what I remember in 2001. SAP was in demand and people were billing £750 per day for that, even ordinary stuff was at least £300 per day.

unnouinceput 6y ago

Quote: "In the years to come, industry experts expect low-level coding and programming jobs to become obsolete with the development of new tools that remove the need to code completely. Take for example the role of Web Developers when it comes to building websites. With popular CMS tools like WordPress and Squarespace, almost anyone can build a website for their business, reducing the need for people who know “just a little bit of front end web development”. " Yeah, not gonna happen. Low level code, if anything, is going to become even more popular with the current explosion of IoT. You have this 4th generation becoming in full swing (1st was mainframes in 50's/60's, 2nd was PC in 70's/80', 3rd was web/mobile in 90's to 10's, and now Arduino/Raspberry/MicroBIT for IoT) and I swear is the same stuff under new hood. Plenty of people want fully integrated stuff and blings around them, which means in next decade IoT is going to be what smartphones started from 2008 to 2015. Second - Sure mom and pop can do basic stuff in Wordpress, but once they want something unique guess what? PHP developer to the rescue to adjust their Wordpress site. So no, if anything, it's going the opposite direction, more code, more software. So the <need for people who know “just a little bit of front end web development”> is going to be shifted to mom and pop and that's all...at best.

mritchie712 6y ago
I think "low level" here means "low skill level", not the programming definition [0] 0 - low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture
- osigurdson 6y ago
  I would like to see some concrete examples of what is meant by low skill level "programmer" work. In my opinion, programmer, developer and engineer mean the same thing. Is there a market for "Hello, world" that I am not aware of?
  - sceadu 6y ago
    Simple CRUD websites maybe, adding simple things to e.g. wordpress deployments.

deleted 6y ago

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mfontani 6y ago

Both charts purportedly show stats for 2001-2011. Is it the case the first shows 2001-2011, and the second 2011-2021?

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
> Both charts... There are four charts. Are you referring to the just the top pair labeled median 2001-2011 and mean 2001-2011 which are in the “From 2001-2011” section? Those are 2001-2011. If you want later ones you’ll have to scroll down to the section titled “From 2013-2019.” There’s a pair labeled median 2013-2019 and mean 2013-2019. Those are the 2013-2019 ones.
- mfontani 6y ago
  Ha! Missed the tiny "mean" vs "median" difference between the first two. Thanks!

swyx 6y ago

this is subject to the same issues all salary surveys have - they dont take into account stock based comp, which is responsible both for the huge amount of variance in comp by years of experience and for the increase in total comp over time. the conclusions you can draw from this are really not that meaningful in total.

fatnoah 6y ago
That is definitely a big miss. Looking only at cash, my rate of compensation increase was about 7.5% per year (in reality, it was typically a couple years at 1-2% with some big jumps). When stock is factored into the equation, the average jumps to about 12.5%!
deleted 6y ago
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adamc 6y ago

The article needs to compare against salaries in general to distinguish changes in developer salaries from other trends.

tosswayaway 6y ago

Question: Should I be struggling to afford a 1000 sq ft house and maintain it? I want to get a bigger house but it feels like I’m getting priced out of the market right now. Fortunately I already have this small home which I used a loan from my retirement to put the 5% down payment on, paid off the loan and refinanced a couple of times, so I’m not struggling to pay for that, but it’s nowhere near big enough for my partner and I to both work remotely. It’s not in a super trendy area or new, actually near a bunch of seedy motels and pawn shops. I’m taking off work and crawling under my house to fix the furnace so I don’t blow through my savings. I don’t go out to eat often or much more than the occasional fast food or take extravagant vacations, usually just road trips to visit family or national parks. I have spent some money on replacing appliances and remodeling, but nowhere near a down payment on another house. I only bought this place because I was living in someone’s attic and it was getting old. I’ve been dev for 8 years, have always gotten stellar performance reviews, manage people, and get bonuses. Just feels off to me. Everyone else I know doing well has some kind of side hustle like managing properties. I myself was freelancing the past year in my free time trying to make some extra cash. True I’m doing better than many people and I am saving for my retirement, but it seems like a dev salary in this day and age should at least buy you a decent house. Everyone I know got a down payment from their parents. Is this normal? Where’s the money at?

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>I want to get a bigger house but it feels like I’m getting priced out of the market right now. LOL, come to Germany where you're by default priced out of buying any house period unless you get some sizable assistance from the bank of mom and dad. >Everyone I know got a down payment from their parents. Is this normal? It's normal if you've won the lottery of birth. If not, then, as someone else here said it, "get richer parents".
- tosswayaway 6y ago
  If there’s any Daddy Warbucks out there that wants to adopt a 30 year old son, please let me know.
- hiram112 6y ago

parentheses 6y ago

I feel that these numbers hide a lot: (1) There is a small percentage that are being paid what I consider to be a fair income. They are being paid in very competitive markets. They are getting valued in a HCOL market where demand for engineering talent is higher. (2) There is a large percentage that are being paid something like a "developer status quo". A salary that: - doesn't acknowledge that software developers are _capable_ of generating inordinately large amounts of value (and considered in aggregate, mostly do) - treats all work done by college-educated individual contributors as of roughly equivalent value - cannot be too high because "we can't pay you 2x what $other_person_of_value makes" - cannot be too high because "we can't pay you more than what $your_manager makes" (3) Developer skill levels vary greatly. This means that the average developer is just that: average. Average developers simply do not generate the kind of value that top-end developers do.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago

"low-level coding and programming jobs to become obsolete" What is low-level coding: Verilog or HTML?