5 ms·

I scraped 4M dev job offers for 5 months and here are the top paid languages

23 points by logan__dev 5y ago

gigel82 5y ago
I seriously doubt this data. Go, Perl and... HTML pay more than C++? In what world? Good / experienced C++ devs are very hard to come by nowadays, and scarcity creates value.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- alphabettsy 5y ago
  Scarcity without demand does not lead to higher compensation. I’m not saying there is or isn’t higher demand for C++, but that must be factored in.
smoyer 5y ago
If you can still edit the title, I think you mean "scraped".
- logan__dev 5y ago
  thanks! I meant "scraped" yes:)
ed25519FUUU 5y ago
The fact that Java and c++ are not on this list should tell you something about the methodology. What language do you think all of the $700K FANG engineers are using? Ruby?
- smoyer 5y ago
  Java/JVM and C#/.NET are still huge parts of the enterprise. Take a look at Fortune 500 companies and you'll get a very different picture of the popularity of various language versus the median salaries paid to those using them.
- brimble 5y ago
  This is heavily biased by the dataset, I suspect. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it's just a list of which languages have high-paying employers who put salary in their job listings. That a crypto thing is top of the list, I take as (soft) evidence in favor of that suspicion. Anyway, what everyone really wants to know is where some sweet spot of current-comp, comp-five-years-from-now, and availability-of-jobs, lies. I don't think this list helps much with that.
- tomhallett 5y ago
  While I appreciate the effort and the write-up, this methodology has a few flaws. 1) As you state, most high salary positions don't publish their salaries publicly, so a website with developer submitted salaries like levels.fyi provides better user metrics. 2) Most of the results on the "top ruby" link [1] are from dice.com... which then links to another job board [2], jobot.com. The post from jobot.com appears to be from a contingency recruiter with no company name stated. The lack of transparency there is a bit unsettling, but it might be accurate?? 3) The only post in the top 20 that is actually from the hiring company is for a "contract" position, where the "salary" is the contractor hourly rate annualized, ie: doesn't cover health insurance, self-employment taxes, etc... so that "salary" would be much less apples-to-apples with a full-time position. [1] https://www.devjobsscanner.com/top-paid-ruby-jobs/ https://www.devjobsscanner.com/top-paid-ruby-jobs/ [2] https://www.dice.com/jobs/detail/dc2e0bbd9bdcad4ac553c88fb064f690 https://www.dice.com/jobs/detail/dc2e0bbd9bdcad4ac553c88fb06...
  - logan__dev 5y ago
    I am the author, and I am 100% with you. This data is from scrapped job offers, as said in the article, not from devs posting their current salary. Also some offers have lack of transparency as you said, and some also have malformed salary ranges (which I try to clean). So yeah, this is the exact result of those scraped job offers, but take it with a grain of salt.
    - tomhallett 5y ago
      Totally makes sense. Is there any way for your scanner to filter on "job req from direct company", which would filter out reqs from contingency recruiters?
      - logan__dev 5y ago
        Hmm could try something, Glassdoor, Indeed and Dice have a lot of them, so I could filter out them or put less weigth on their job offers. What also needs to be solved, is, what is considered to be a 'Python' job for example. If python is a on a job 'tag', I count it, but many offers have many tags with many different languages and frameworks, and that is no good for the study. Maybe in future, I would just count what languages/stack is specified on the title. Just saying. Thanks for your comments, I would try to improve the next study I make.
scottiebarnes 5y ago
Solidity being highest is interesting, I suspect its because in boom times, crappy projects are willing to throw any amount of money to get development in so they can show progress and cash out. So I'd question the quality and longevity of those jobs.
- twox2 5y ago
  I don't think crappy projects dominate the high solidity comps, most of the crappy projects I think pay average dev comps and/or a cut of proceeds. The high paying jobs are the ones that require an intimate understanding of EVM, and usually DeFi protocol design, or really competitive fields like MEV. These will be around regardless of "boom times" and require a highly specialized skillset.
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  Most of the crappy projects are largely cut/paste copies of existing projects and there's always someone willing to cut/paste for lower rates. The big thing with actual development in Solidity is that you can't just google for a lot of your issues. Documentation sucks and for any novel project there aren't any answers on stackoverflow. You've got to work out best practices for yourself, sometimes the hard way. It's better than it was, but it's still on you and your personal network to figure most of it out.
2bitlobster 5y ago
It would be very useful to see volume of jobs in addition to how much they pay
- logan__dev 5y ago
  Yes, I know it would be nice. Some languages like haskell have so low volume of job offers with specified salary that is quite meaningless. The others have enough volume I would say. I would think though a way to merge that both streams of data.
tedivm 5y ago
I find the average salary, especially for things like PHP, to be absolutely meaningless. There are PHP shops where people are just tweaking wordpress templates, and there are PHP devs who work for companies like Facebook. These groups have a huge difference in salary. I'd love to see this data broken down into percentiles- what to the top 10% of positions in each language break down to? What about the bottom 10%?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- g105b 5y ago
  Came to comment about PHP specifically. Even in my local town, a PHP salary can be anything from a blog mangler @ £20K to a bespoke tool developer @ £100K, both just happening to share the same programming language.
  - brimble 5y ago
    It's got a big range, but I bailed on the language years ago because I got sick of sifting through all the laughably-low salaries. I'd still do PHP if someone hired me for it (at non-joke rates, plus more on top for working with tech that's got the kind of trajectory and reputation PHP does) but I absolutely avoid looking at PHP jobs when searching, specifically because the floor on wages is so much lower than most languages so there are a ton of garbage jobs out there. Certainly I'd skip right past a PHP job listing that didn't have an eye-catching salary listed prominently on it. Not having salary listed in general is annoying, but with most languages I can make a reasonable guess at where it'll be based on the company, location, and tech stack, and not be too far off. PHP, who knows. That "Senior Developer" position might turn out to only have a hiring budget of $60k (hahahaha good fucking luck with that). Or it might be $120k. Or $180k. PHP salaries are all over the place.
    - tedivm 5y ago
      Yeah I can relate- I run a couple of open source PHP projects that are fairly popular but other than that have mostly moved on to other languages. Salary is part of it, but I also found that there were a lot of characters in the PHP community who made dealing with the language less than pleasant.
footlose_3815 5y ago
[dead]
TrackerFF 5y ago
I think this could/should have been presented with more statistics than just the average.
- logan__dev 5y ago
  Yes, maybe median would have worked better
Life_exe 5y ago
Stackoverflow 2021 survey mentions Clojure to be the highest paying job. And it's nowhere in the list.
- logan__dev 5y ago
  Not enough data. There are so few Clojure job offers with salary data. But, it may be yes.
mreome 5y ago
Without adjusting for cost of living this kind of analysis is going to get heavily skewed in favor of the language du jour favored in select tech areas where the cost of living, and average income for almost everyone, is drastically higher. Additionally, many of those same cutting-edge technologies are not going to be represented in many lower cost-of-living areas, where there are still lots of opportunities using more mature technologies (think C# for business applications, or C for industrial applications). This will pull the averages down for those mature technologies, even though they represent incomes that may actually be higher relative to the cost of living.

23 points by logan__dev 5y ago

I seriously doubt this data. Go, Perl and... HTML pay more than C++? In what world? Good / experienced C++ devs are very hard to come by nowadays, and scarcity creates value.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
alphabettsy 5y ago
Scarcity without demand does not lead to higher compensation. I’m not saying there is or isn’t higher demand for C++, but that must be factored in.

smoyer 5y ago

If you can still edit the title, I think you mean "scraped".

logan__dev 5y ago
thanks! I meant "scraped" yes:)

ed25519FUUU 5y ago

The fact that Java and c++ are not on this list should tell you something about the methodology. What language do you think all of the $700K FANG engineers are using? Ruby?

smoyer 5y ago
Java/JVM and C#/.NET are still huge parts of the enterprise. Take a look at Fortune 500 companies and you'll get a very different picture of the popularity of various language versus the median salaries paid to those using them.
brimble 5y ago
This is heavily biased by the dataset, I suspect. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it's just a list of which languages have high-paying employers who put salary in their job listings. That a crypto thing is top of the list, I take as (soft) evidence in favor of that suspicion. Anyway, what everyone really wants to know is where some sweet spot of current-comp, comp-five-years-from-now, and availability-of-jobs, lies. I don't think this list helps much with that.
tomhallett 5y ago
While I appreciate the effort and the write-up, this methodology has a few flaws. 1) As you state, most high salary positions don't publish their salaries publicly, so a website with developer submitted salaries like levels.fyi provides better user metrics. 2) Most of the results on the "top ruby" link [1] are from dice.com... which then links to another job board [2], jobot.com. The post from jobot.com appears to be from a contingency recruiter with no company name stated. The lack of transparency there is a bit unsettling, but it might be accurate?? 3) The only post in the top 20 that is actually from the hiring company is for a "contract" position, where the "salary" is the contractor hourly rate annualized, ie: doesn't cover health insurance, self-employment taxes, etc... so that "salary" would be much less apples-to-apples with a full-time position. [1] https://www.devjobsscanner.com/top-paid-ruby-jobs/ https://www.devjobsscanner.com/top-paid-ruby-jobs/ [2] https://www.dice.com/jobs/detail/dc2e0bbd9bdcad4ac553c88fb064f690 https://www.dice.com/jobs/detail/dc2e0bbd9bdcad4ac553c88fb06...
- logan__dev 5y ago
  I am the author, and I am 100% with you. This data is from scrapped job offers, as said in the article, not from devs posting their current salary. Also some offers have lack of transparency as you said, and some also have malformed salary ranges (which I try to clean). So yeah, this is the exact result of those scraped job offers, but take it with a grain of salt.
  - tomhallett 5y ago
    Totally makes sense. Is there any way for your scanner to filter on "job req from direct company", which would filter out reqs from contingency recruiters?
    - logan__dev 5y ago
      Hmm could try something, Glassdoor, Indeed and Dice have a lot of them, so I could filter out them or put less weigth on their job offers. What also needs to be solved, is, what is considered to be a 'Python' job for example. If python is a on a job 'tag', I count it, but many offers have many tags with many different languages and frameworks, and that is no good for the study. Maybe in future, I would just count what languages/stack is specified on the title. Just saying. Thanks for your comments, I would try to improve the next study I make.

scottiebarnes 5y ago

Solidity being highest is interesting, I suspect its because in boom times, crappy projects are willing to throw any amount of money to get development in so they can show progress and cash out. So I'd question the quality and longevity of those jobs.

twox2 5y ago
I don't think crappy projects dominate the high solidity comps, most of the crappy projects I think pay average dev comps and/or a cut of proceeds. The high paying jobs are the ones that require an intimate understanding of EVM, and usually DeFi protocol design, or really competitive fields like MEV. These will be around regardless of "boom times" and require a highly specialized skillset.
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
Most of the crappy projects are largely cut/paste copies of existing projects and there's always someone willing to cut/paste for lower rates. The big thing with actual development in Solidity is that you can't just google for a lot of your issues. Documentation sucks and for any novel project there aren't any answers on stackoverflow. You've got to work out best practices for yourself, sometimes the hard way. It's better than it was, but it's still on you and your personal network to figure most of it out.

2bitlobster 5y ago

It would be very useful to see volume of jobs in addition to how much they pay

logan__dev 5y ago
Yes, I know it would be nice. Some languages like haskell have so low volume of job offers with specified salary that is quite meaningless. The others have enough volume I would say. I would think though a way to merge that both streams of data.

tedivm 5y ago

I find the average salary, especially for things like PHP, to be absolutely meaningless. There are PHP shops where people are just tweaking wordpress templates, and there are PHP devs who work for companies like Facebook. These groups have a huge difference in salary. I'd love to see this data broken down into percentiles- what to the top 10% of positions in each language break down to? What about the bottom 10%?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
g105b 5y ago
Came to comment about PHP specifically. Even in my local town, a PHP salary can be anything from a blog mangler @ £20K to a bespoke tool developer @ £100K, both just happening to share the same programming language.
- brimble 5y ago
  It's got a big range, but I bailed on the language years ago because I got sick of sifting through all the laughably-low salaries. I'd still do PHP if someone hired me for it (at non-joke rates, plus more on top for working with tech that's got the kind of trajectory and reputation PHP does) but I absolutely avoid looking at PHP jobs when searching, specifically because the floor on wages is so much lower than most languages so there are a ton of garbage jobs out there. Certainly I'd skip right past a PHP job listing that didn't have an eye-catching salary listed prominently on it. Not having salary listed in general is annoying, but with most languages I can make a reasonable guess at where it'll be based on the company, location, and tech stack, and not be too far off. PHP, who knows. That "Senior Developer" position might turn out to only have a hiring budget of $60k (hahahaha good fucking luck with that). Or it might be $120k. Or $180k. PHP salaries are all over the place.
  - tedivm 5y ago
    Yeah I can relate- I run a couple of open source PHP projects that are fairly popular but other than that have mostly moved on to other languages. Salary is part of it, but I also found that there were a lot of characters in the PHP community who made dealing with the language less than pleasant.

footlose_3815 5y ago

[dead]

TrackerFF 5y ago

I think this could/should have been presented with more statistics than just the average.

logan__dev 5y ago
Yes, maybe median would have worked better

Life_exe 5y ago

Stackoverflow 2021 survey mentions Clojure to be the highest paying job. And it's nowhere in the list.

logan__dev 5y ago
Not enough data. There are so few Clojure job offers with salary data. But, it may be yes.

mreome 5y ago

Without adjusting for cost of living this kind of analysis is going to get heavily skewed in favor of the language du jour favored in select tech areas where the cost of living, and average income for almost everyone, is drastically higher. Additionally, many of those same cutting-edge technologies are not going to be represented in many lower cost-of-living areas, where there are still lots of opportunities using more mature technologies (think C# for business applications, or C for industrial applications). This will pull the averages down for those mature technologies, even though they represent incomes that may actually be higher relative to the cost of living.