13 ms·

Average Income per Programming Language

169 points by bpodgursky 13y ago

newbie12 13y ago
You should control for geographical differences in pay and language distribution. California likely has more Ruby programmers-- the higher cost of living and higher salaries there may explain the entire difference between Ruby and PHP.
lucaspiller 13y ago
Without knowing where the users are based, this data alone is pretty meaningless. Where I'm from in South West England pretty much all the programming jobs are Java (hence why I left), and you are lucky to get £40k. Spain and Portugal have even lower salaries. I'm guessing this is US based, but even then, I'm sure there is a lot of variation. Working in London as a Java developer in finance you could easily get over £100k.
- CmonDev 13y ago
  Agreed. Working as a Haskell/Erlang dev in finance would get you well over £100k as well. Scarcity of such positions is a different matter though.
- rplnt 13y ago
  And you can be based in post-soviet ("happy" 45th anniversary to crushing Czechoslovakia's future) country, make $10k or $20k and be very happy.
  - lucaspiller 13y ago
    Personal experience? My SO is Lithuanian, so I would be interested to know what working in that area is like.
    - berntb 13y ago
      I can tell you that you live really well for quite few Euro after tax in Transylvania (as long as you don't go to West Europe for vacation). This is quite easy to check, Google: living costs Cluj London http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/london/cluj-napoca http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/london/c... (Don't trust information about cities with too few data points.)
      - rplnt 13y ago
        The only downside is that the prices of imported goods (most notably electronics) and software are usually higher than in the US for example. Services are much cheaper of course.
- canadiancreed 13y ago
  I'll second this. I've yet to ever see any PHP job short of architect paying that amount here (most are 70k or less), same with Java and Perl. I'd like to know where this was collected from....I need to move there.
  - fps 13y ago
    I feel the opposite. I can't get anyone that knows puppet for under $110k in the Boston area. All these salaries seem low for Boston, and probably the bay area as well.
    - canadiancreed 13y ago
      Geeze I need to move there....somehow.
    - druiid 13y ago
      That is... crazy high it seems like to me! Heck, I'd do it for less than $110k!
- cpncrunch 13y ago
  Check out contract jobs, which tend to pay higher in the UK.
- mamcx 13y ago
  I wish in Colombia to be like that. Here, the normal is something like US 800/month/Full time.
eterm 13y ago
Without significance testing, are those results significant? It looks like random data to my eye but I've not got the source data for any proper analysis.
quchen 13y ago
What are the distributions of the salaries among one language? Mean values alone are completely useless, give us some information about how you found the salaries out, what their standard deviations are etc. I don't want to imply maliciousness here, so I'm going to call this an example of unknowingly bad statistics (which, sadly, seems to be the default in most places). Bonus points for the bar (!) chart that starts at 90,000 and looks like ActionScript is twice as profitable as the rest of the languages.
- dlss 13y ago
  He found the salaries out using rapleaf... which didn't know the salaries but was making an educated guess. (You can try out their api if you register an account, FWIW it was way off for the people I've tried it on.) With data like that, I'd imagine the only sort of data you could trust would be the mean, since I'm guessing its much harder to be wrong about relative income levels between large groups than it is to be right about actual income numbers.
  - quchen 13y ago
    The only sort of data you can trust is the data itself. Providing the mean of data is providing a sum value a person thinks is useful to convey the shape of the data, and the mean in particular is unsuitable at conveying shape on its own. What the author tries to get at is a precise quantity, namely the average salary for each language. However, we cannot measure that quantity directly, so taking samples (from a good source) is as good as it gets. The easiest assumption about that data is that it follows a normal distribution, which does have a mean, but also a standard deviation; both of these are required to talk about any meaning of the result. (If the normal distribution is not a good fit things may get more complicated.) What I'm saying is that providing just means is not a ballpark way of doing statistics, it is wrong. The statistical ballpark is the normal distribution, and maybe a value ensuring that it is at least somewhat appropriate to use that one.
    - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
      So forgive the statistical ignorance, but how would one display mean and std dev in useful graphical form? (Asking seriously as it would be good to know which setting to press on gnu plot)
snitko 13y ago
I can kinda understand why XSLT is one of the most expensive (on an intuitive level - as quchen said, it's not clear how the data was obtained for this post). Certain parts of it is a complete brainfuck. I worked on a small opensource project of mine once, where I decided to use XSLT to translate XML to HTML. I din't know much XSLT, so I started reading docs and eventually managed to accomplish my goal. However after struggling with it for a while, I realized it sometimes makes completely no sense. Or, to be more fair, it takes a rather different logic to understand it than I usually apply to programming languages... because, well it's not a programming language. I only wonder, where is XSLT usually used? Can anyone outline the most typical types of projects and environments?
- xsace 13y ago
  You use it a lot in structured documentation business (think hardware manufacturer, military, pharmaceutical, ...). Where you publish some xml documentation into serveral output formats like HTML, epub, pdf, whathever..
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- wallflower 13y ago
  I had to struggle with XSLT to transform XML into HTML a while back. Since it not intended to be a real programming language, I had trouble making it do the equivalent of something basic like iterating through a collection (recursion, ugh!). I can easily see how it would be a highly-paid skill because the lack of debugging tools (again, it is not a real programming language) made me want to curse MSFT and everyone else who were supporting XSLT at the time (way back) as the Second Coming of content publishing. If you ever want a headache, try reading the XSLT spec. http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt
  - wolfgke 13y ago
    Visual Studio (tested version 2010; Express probably won't do it, though) has a pretty good XSLT debugger, which made writing XSLT stylesheets a lot easier when I wrote some a few years ago.
marklit 13y ago
Averaging is a very lossy method to use. You could be looking at a histogram shaped like a satellite dish and the average value you come to is one few are close to. There are a lot of extremes in tech salaries from what I've seen hiring and contracting over the years.
ronaldx 13y ago
> I’m unfamiliar with some of the other languages... Any ideas on why these languages ranked higher or lower than average? The unknown languages may appear on the outsides just because of the statistics: smaller sample size => higher variance in the sample mean.
tarekmoz 13y ago
It's not listing Cobol.
- taspeotis 13y ago
  It's off the chart.
- krob 13y ago
  That's because Cobol programmers probably make an order of magnitude greater income than on this chart. The only people who still write Cobol from my understanding are people who continuously update banking mainframe software. Government mainframes, etc. Usually these days you are apprenticed by someone with years of experience because of how difficult it is to obtain old documentation etc.
  - tarekmoz 13y ago
    yeah that's why I mentioned it. Back in college, right before the year 2k, we had a special Cobol course they added just to get people some 2k jobs. I recall one guy who's still doing Cobol most of his time, working on old software like traffic lights systems (!)
  - dagw 13y ago
    A vocational school here in Sweden recently started offering a 1 year Cobol degree, ostensibly after demand from the banking and insurance sector.
roel_v 13y ago
Where does he get income from? How does Rapleaf (whatever it may be) correlate emails with household income?
emilsedgh 13y ago
Is there a point im missing that causes CSS to perform better than Erlang?
- pkorzeniewski 13y ago
  I think CSS covers here a general "front-end web development" among with HTML and there is simply a big demand for such stuff, especially will all the new features of CSS3 and HTML5 - everyone wants a modern 3.0 website now :)
- Systemic33 13y ago
  Shiny things sell better than usefull things?
bishop_mandible 13y ago
LOL, even PHP programmers earn more than Haskell programmers.
- edem 13y ago
  And that would be a real shame if it would have been true.
- dagw 13y ago
  If you're getting paid to program Haskell chances are you are in either academia or finance. I think it's safe to assume that a) Haskell programmers in finance earn more than most PHP programmers and b) that they're not allowed to upload their latest projects to github.
ejbs 13y ago
I didn't know that ActionScript was used in the enterprise environment? Why and what for? Did I miss something?
- TheHippo 13y ago
  I've done some ActionScript freelancing back in the days. The demand for ActionScript programmers is actually rising, because everyone moved away from the Flash platform, but someone must maintain the legacy code and do the jobs Flash is best suited for.
- gunn 13y ago
  Probably for rich reporting tools in flex.
- myth_drannon 13y ago
  1. Web and mobile games.I see Adobe Air is getting popular as a cross platform game dev library + starling , feathers , etc ... 2. Flex dashboards and reports in banks( e.g.Morgan Stanley ).
- khalidmbajwa 13y ago
  It is because of Adobe AIR.Which is a cross platform runtime. Contrary to popular public opinion, Flash and Flex is actually a stunningly beautiful platform to code in. It's a very very mature platform, with an excellent community, and amazing libraries. (As a matter of fact, the creator of Angular JS wrote a blog post citing some of Flex's features as his inspiration). It's just that Adobe keeps screwing up their Runtimes. Flash and AIR both have performance issues which is why they are starting to get left behind now. For enterprise softwares,its cheaper and more optimal to have a single codebase that can work across platforms and in return take a slight hit on the performance.
  - pixie_ 13y ago
    I agree flash/flex is a great platform to develop on. From the language, to the IDE, to the API. It's like a strongly typed javascript with XAML done right. You can create a great looking app that shares the same code base between the web, iPhone and Android.
frobozz 13y ago
This states that it is average household income by language. I could assert the following from the data: * ActionScript developers are horribly underpaid, but more likely to marry lawyers, doctors and bankers. * Haskell developers are relatively well paid, but more likely to live alone or with a stay-at-home parent. * Pythonists get roughly the same salary as Haskell developers, but their partners are all low-paid key workers.
- siddboots 13y ago
  Pythonistas marry for love.
  - 6ren 13y ago
    Haskellers are single because you're not my type
    - cgh 13y ago
      Being lazy doesn't help either.
      - santadays 13y ago
        Or terse.
    - rybosome 13y ago
      Maybe.
- erikkri 13y ago
  It also shows that sysadmins that know Puppet probably doesn't have a partner.
- AlisdairSH 13y ago
  Those incomes look like fairly typical mid-level individual salaries (in the DC area, at least). I would expect the household numbers to be higher than listed to account for those that have working spouses.
wallflower 13y ago
Remember as patio11 says the most important and valuable skill is not making money for your employer but being able to enable them (and eventually other companies, as your own entrepreneurial soldier of fortune) to make more money. http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...
circuiter 13y ago
As a C and Java developer, the numbers made me feel good.
nazgulnarsil 13y ago
I'd really like to see a differing standard deviation between them.
CmonDev 13y ago
Looks like rubbish frankly speaking. That XSLT alone is a sign of something being wrong.
talloaktrees 13y ago
After just reading the headline the first thought I had was "the comments are going to seriously question the statistical basis used" I was not disappointed.
jyap 13y ago
Subtracting the top 2 and bottom 2 language data points and you have a range of $94,031.19 to $103,179.39. With a range that small, IMHO nothing significant can be derived. It's not like the range is $50k to $150k.
- jkscm 13y ago
  The range is probably not small, but the range between the highest and the lowest average is.
fbnt 13y ago
I believe ITJobsWatch ( http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/ http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/ ), despite being limited to the UK, gives a much more comprehensive overview on the topic.
- edem 13y ago
  I concur. I always use it if I want some statistics.
bayesianhorse 13y ago
It looks like the most data points are found in the middle of the field. The extremes at both ends are underrepresented (except Java). That is a common finding, because the probability of deviation from a “true norm” would be highest in the smallest sample. The big question is: How significantly do these datapoints deviate from the null hypothesis of “all programming languages average the same pay).
krob 13y ago
I guess I should drop php and switch to ruby & js exclusively eh?
stewbrew 13y ago
Do I understand the chart correctly that people get paid exclusively for writing vim plugins (VimL)?
- bpodgursky 13y ago
  No, but people who contribute to VimL projects (among other projects) do get paid for something.
patio11 13y ago
Please don't attempt to operationalize this data by saying "I know PHP. If I learn Ruby, then I can get a $5,000 raise!" I talk to more engineers than is healthy, and many of them think that languages are the primary differentiator in salary (or some other metric of interest in their career). They're very mistaken. Far more salient are negotiating skill, location, what company you work for, where you're assigned in that company (profit center or cost center, favored project/division/etc or not, etc), and ability to use computer code as leverage to accomplish things that capitalism cares about. Also, the dynamic range among e.g. Ruby programmers of my acquaintance goes from something like $2k a month to $2k a day, not primarily based on skill with Ruby. (If I were comfortable describing the individuals at the high end some people might say "That's cheating! They're getting compensated for non-Ruby things which happen to be expressed in Ruby programs." I call that winning rather than cheating but to each their own.)
- BlobbleBlab 13y ago
  There are two factors that determine how much money you can make in a job such as programming: - How much money are you making for your employer - What are the costs your employer needs to make to allow you to make that money for him If there's a large and growing gap between the two, you can expect a raise, event if the company as a whole isn't doing too well. If there's a small or shrinking gap, you'll be looking for another job soon. If the gap is negative, you're probably the owner.
  - alinajaf 13y ago
    The only thing I'd add to this is that there exist organisations in the world that can afford to hire a team of developers (or, as it were, execute long-term contracts with a consultancy at an aggregated $10k+ day rate) indefinitely with little or no function that couldn't be achieved with Wordpress 1.0, including the security vulnerabilities. In the worst case, I... I mean my made-up friend Bob... has worked on teams that seemed to have no other purpose than to execute the new idea that week, with little or no connection to any actual business value. Bob has seen this happen too many times for it to be a random occurrence. According to Bob, such engagements/teams are typically funded by the taxpayer or upper management at companies that have more cash than God. Then I told Bob to shut up, because he's in breach of all the NDAs and sometimes people read things on Hacker News.
6ren 13y ago
±10% is almost nothing... OTOH, maybe I could do XSLT, if I just took some nausea pills... PS: I actually think XSLT is a brilliant application of some cool ideas - putting them to work in (e.g.) grammar compatibility, it's just, like XSD, using XML itself as the syntax (e.g. i < 10 pls shoot me) and lack of helpful conventions (e.g. the empty stylesheet should be the identity transform, which you can then tweak).
- regularfry 13y ago
  XSLT smells to me like it should be a compilation target for a scheme rather than something you actually write directly.
  - qwerty_asdf 13y ago
    Yeah, the repetitive boilerplate of it all... This is probably something that many well-paid "XSLT developers" probably figured out early on. Develop your XSLT using ANYTHING except XSLT. ...and then they go on to create the "actual" programs to vomit the crapwads of excessive mark-up, and mystify those who made their own unfortunate beds and chose to consume this... this... XSLT.
Andy678 13y ago
Being a very versatile web developper, I never understood why (good) PHP programming gets so little credit in the profession, whereas to me it appears to be much more demanding to write a decent piece of software using PHP rather than with Ruby, Python, or even ASP/.NET. These other languages have so many easy tools, great debugging and all that, with the natural counterpart of offering less performance. PHP strikes me more as the C Language of web development : easy to learn, but harder to decently apply on a day-to-day basis. So I wonder if the companies out there just value other languages more because they tend to misinterpret the "simplicity" of a language for the quality of the developer using it. To me, making a good website using Rails is child's play compared to making one using PHP, framework or not...
- canadiancreed 13y ago
  Supply and demand and perception is pretty much what it boils down too. There's a lot of PHP apps, and a lot of terribly written PHP apps. Add that companies that hire for such positions have a plethora of options for cost-effective (read dirt cheap) and a lot of developers that will work for such wages and you have a language that while popular, is not well respected, and has those looking for more money and a more versatile skill set seeking greener pastures.
juskrey 13y ago
Your graphic representation is highly misleading.
ck2 13y ago
Isn't the real news here that programmers are making $100K on average? Language doesn't really seem to be too big a variable, it affects the income level by typically less than 10% Are people really making that much around here? Why are you on HN then?
- Mr_N 13y ago
  Perhaps my mistake was working for academia (support staff, not academic) but I make a bare fraction of that. (and for comparable work to what I've done elsewhere in industry.)
- GFischer 13y ago
  I make $24K after taxes anually. I live in Uruguay, and program in VB6, VB.NET, and occasionally in Forte4GL, C# or PHP, but I'd make the same programming in Java or C# (it's an average local salary for a developer). The way to make more money, as Patio11 said, is not to switch languages, but the "ability to use computer code as leverage to accomplish things that capitalism cares about" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6249373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6249373 If I made $100K, I wouldn't mind reading HN either :) (I know people that make orders of magnitude more and who occasionally browse it, or even post).
  - V-2 13y ago
    I make about 14K per annum in Poland (net pay) : )
    - GFischer 13y ago
      Ouch, is that a full-time job? Is that 14K euros or dollars? I barely manage on 24K for me and my girlfriend (made some bad decisions though). I've heard rent and cost of living is cheaper in Poland than in Uruguay - we're still in a housing bubble here, and it's close to the most expensive country on earth for some stuff (example: cars).
      - V-2 13y ago
programminggeek 13y ago
I would say location weighs heavily on average income as a programmer. For example, the average dev salary in the midwest might be more like $50,000 and anything approaching $100,000 being very high end.
- theandrewbailey 13y ago
  This. Salaries are based upon more than just skills and languages. It seems like this article is biased towards California or New York salaries. I once jokingly told a SF based recruiter that $55k might not seem too much, but those aren't California dollars, which are worth less than Pittsburgh dollars. If I wanted to make six figures right now, I'd probably move.
abraxasz 13y ago
Some languages heavily used in finance (and not much else) haven't been mentioned, and would likely fair pretty well. I'm thinking about K, and in Ocaml. Ocaml in particular is used at Jane Street which is known for paying extremely well.
kleiba 13y ago
You can make money writing Emacs Lisp?
PaulHoule 13y ago
Given the sample size here I don't think this means anything. I've seen real world programming jobs in the U.S.A. everywhere from $25,000 up to $250,000. Everything you get is closely clustered around $100,000k and when you consider the sample size I;m nit sure any of these mean anything.
dagw 13y ago
Surely who you're working for and what you're working on has a much much bigger effect on income than what programming language you happen to use. People using python at a top hedge fund will surely earn more than people using python at a low end web shop.
dons 13y ago
GIGO. Most commercial Haskell jobs are in finance -- where you don't get to contribute code to github. That leaves the PhD students and open source folks, shifting the data sideways.
- theorique 13y ago
  Most commercial Haskell jobs are in finance Cool - do you have any articles/references about that?
  - pjonesdotca 13y ago
    http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry Seems like more than a few quant shops advertise that they use Haskell.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jokoon 13y ago
actionscript, whaaat. I thought people are using flah less and less.
marknutter 13y ago
What about programmers who are proficient in multiple languages? (As any good programmer should be).
gtrubetskoy 13y ago
I think in reality the highest paid languages are C, Objective-C and C++, with Java a close second (though it very much depends on what is being done). And if you're looking to be at the top of your game, one single piece of advice: master C. Once you've mastered it, you can pick and choose whatever else you want.
- NAFV_P 13y ago
  I'm learning C at the moment, but it isn't mentioned much in these comments. It seems to be niche expertise to me these days.
  - gtrubetskoy 13y ago
    Probably because most people commenting here don't know it. ;)
- canadiancreed 13y ago
  I second this. Have a mate of mine that has five years in C and has been able to walk into any shop that he wants, regardless of language they use, and get a gig, and well paying to boot. On the other end of the scale, I have almost six years in PHP and it's worth as much as a broken kinder egg for anything outside the LAMP stack world (and in some cases, within that world as well)
  - ciclista 13y ago
    I've noticed less interesting gigs and lower pay as well for PHP over the last year or so. Spending a lot of time with Python and Go now.
dagw 13y ago
Actually the only really interesting thing about that data is how close the lowest and highest values are, certainly they must be within the margin of error (something I noticed he failed to talk about). So it seems the real conclusion to draw is that average income is largely uncorrelated with language used.
edem 13y ago
This chart looks like a GROUP BY clause which was used in a not too meaningful way. As others mentioned above there are a lot of parameters here like the company you are working for, location, project nature and such which would be important to point out.
edem 13y ago
This chart looks like if a GROUP BY clause was used in a not too meaningful way. As others mentioned above there are a lot of parameters here like the company you are working for, location, project nature and such which would be important to point out.
V-2 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox is quite likely ;) There's many other variables apart from the programming language itself that affect the salary. They can be only indirectly correlated with the language.
ori_b 13y ago
What's the standard deviation on these numbers? For all I know, they could all be the same (within error).
jcromartie 13y ago
It's based on household income, so is it reasonable to infer that Haskell programmers may be likely to be the sole income while ActionScript programmers have working spouses? That could make sense.
khalidmbajwa 13y ago
The actionscript programmers may be getting paid higher (Mostly because the Flex enterprise hangover is still lingering), but in my experience the actual number of actionscript jobs available is sharply falling. I have been doing Flash/Flex dev for about 8 years now, and while my evidence is certainly anecdotal,i have gone from having tons of contract offers swamping my inbox to once every few months.Make no mistake, Flash and Flex IS dying. Javascript meanwhile is maturing remarkably, and it will soon be in a position where enterprise will seriously start considering it as a viable platform.
segmondy 13y ago
This is absolutely useless. Emacs Lisp? Really? XSLT? What? CSS? Woah. I love that the internet has made it easy for anyone to share their opinion, I hate when noise is presented is as useful information.
rip747 13y ago
as much as i'm loving that coldfusion (my primary language of choice) is included on this chart and ranked in the top 10, i would really like to see how the job market compares to the other languages on the chart. on a side note: really? xslt is second on the list? i remember using it to create a code generator years ago. probably one of the poorer decisions i've made in my life :P
kazagistar 13y ago
The article lists household income, which makes it just about useless. Household income will be higher if you are married. People who are married are more likely to chose a more stable job working for a large corporation. Such jobs require languages more like Java, and less like Haskell. Such people might also have less spare time to play around with new languages due to family engagements, or a dozen other differences, all masked by this chart.
snake_plissken 13y ago
Lolwut? Are these for two person households where each person is in the same language or only for people working at quant funds? About 40% of my social circle is made up of programmers and no one makes close to these amounts. 100% anecdotal, but, I think we are all being shafted ;0
rockyj 13y ago
Well this sucks, in India even after speaking Java, Ruby, CoffeeScript and Scala I get a measly $35,000 which after taxes goes down to $25,000. Yeah, I know low cost of living etc. etc.
Raphmedia 13y ago
All those "CSS programmers" must be freelancers, with the salary covering the whole contract. Otherwise, I'm really, really, really underpaid.
rwhitman 13y ago
Hmm, looks like my giving up ColdFusion was a mistake...
sequoia 13y ago
I am totally baffled about where the income data supposedly comes from, and how it's mapped to GH user accounts. http://www.rapleaf.com/about-us/faq/#where http://www.rapleaf.com/about-us/faq/#where "Rapleaf aggregates consumer data from data providers, cleanses it and maps it to emails, and ultimately makes it accesible through our easy to use Append portal and API. We partner with dozens of large and small data companies to aggregate data that we ultimately anonymize and tie to email addresses. We source it from only legitimate data bureaus who adhere to the highest consumer privacy standards -- sources that give consumers appropriate notice and choice about sharing their information and have opted in to make their data accesible." What? Are they claiming to know the salary of all the github users used in this study? Were the users filtered down to those who had income data available? Because if so, that's a really weird (bad) selection technique. If not, what is being done with users whose income data is not available? Also where the hell is rapleaf getting their data?? This whole thing confuses the heck out of me, someone please help.
- bpodgursky 13y ago
  Rapleaf's API provides income given an email address, when available. I ran the list of emails from the git commit log across that API, which only gives me data points for the users who have income data available. Is there really any way to correct for the fact that not all the data is going to be available? It certainly doesn't exclude a sampling bias, which I did mention in the post, possibly not aggressively enough.
awkward 13y ago
As a former actionscript programmer, this makes me cringe a little. My assumption is that actionscript is a new COBOL - tons of businesses rely on it, but now that it's looking like a dead end, the only way to fill those positions is to crank up the salary to compensate for the perceived dead space on a resume. IMHO experience in it translates well to Javascript, but I miss some of the features - especially the type system and the token API (which was much more consistently implemented than the various JS deferred systems).
gwu78 13y ago
I thought Puppet was a collection of Ruby scripts, not a programming language in the same sense as the others listed. To put it another way, can you "program" in Puppet without first having Ruby installed? On a side note, I am always wary of the statistics Github gives for each repository where they estimate the percentage of code from different languages used (e.g., 90% Python, 10% C, etc.). In your opinion, how accurate do you think these are?
- druiid 13y ago
  Puppet has it's own DSL. It's easy to learn, but it is difficult to use it well. Basically as a Puppet 'programmer' I can generally see the difference between an experienced user or not. This all said, to extract a lot of power from Puppet you also have to script in Ruby, as to add additional functions not included in the Puppet core DSL requires you to write your own scripts.
  - gwu78 13y ago
    Do you need Ruby installed to run Puppet programs? The answer if I'm not mistaken is yes. Personally I would be afraid to use Puppet as a substitute for my own configuration scripts. With the later, I'm required to know how things work at the shell level (and I use a small POSIX-like shell, not bash). But is this true with Puppet? I note it currently has some open security issues. But hey, if you are paid a competitive salary to write Puppet scripts, then there's little reason to learn more than how to do that. I imagine Puppet probably saves you heaps of time.
    - druiid 13y ago
      Indeed. Puppet was created in Ruby and thus requires it to function. Puppet is generally meant to be a replacement for configuration scripts. Essentially your Puppet scripts define a 'state' that you want the server to be in, thus if you want a user account called 'bob' you'd do something like this: user {'bob': ensure => present, gid => '0', uid => '0', password => '<my encrypted password>', } From this Puppet would do all the 'difficult' bits for you. You mention that if you get paid to write Puppet scripts you wouldn't need to know how things work at the shell level. That is extremely far from the truth. You need a strong background and experience with shell commands, configuration layouts, shell/CLI methodology, etc. Without those you would quickly be lost both in terms of managing and dealing with Puppet and scripting in it. Knowing Puppet is no replacement for Shell knowledge unless the extent of what you need to do with Puppet is understand you're using it to launch your Vagrant instances. Honestly there are things which to build out in Puppet would require extensive Ruby based functions and sometimes you really just need to fall back to using exec {} statements in Puppet (Meaning you're running shell commands from within Puppet). You can see some examples of this in the zookeeper module I built: https://github.com/justicel/puppet-zookeeper https://github.com/justicel/puppet-zookeeper Feel free to message me with Puppet questions and really, if you're just using Shell scripts I highly, highly recommend moving toward configuration-management (even if it's not Puppet), unless you only have one or two servers to manage.
JoeAltmaier 13y ago
Perhaps the differences is in the demographics, not the language. People using 'older' languages may be older, further along in their careers. That would explain everything.
tianyazi 13y ago
what's happened
cryofan 13y ago
A huge problem with this data is the absence of outliers. Look at how closely clustered the data is. Especially considering that this is household income, there should be a higher variation--the data should be more spread out. he posted an update: http://bpodgursky.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/updates-to-language-vs-income-breakdown-post/ http://bpodgursky.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/updates-to-langua... Language Mean Min Max Samples Python 97,578 95,481 99,676 2314 JavaScript 97,598 95,897 99,299 3443 Ruby 98,238 96,471 100,005 3242 in this update, he included the min and max. I have selected three languages for brevity from the updated data he provided. IN ruby, there is a min of 96K and a max of 100K, for example. There is no way that if you sample 3242 ruby programmers that none is going to make less than 96K and none will make more than 100K. Just not going to happen. There will be a much much wider variation in incomes, especially for household income because some will be married, and some spouses will work, some will have better paying jobs. But even if the data were for programmer incomes alone, the data should be more spread out. Same goes for all the other languages. So the data is bogus.

169 points by bpodgursky 13y ago

You should control for geographical differences in pay and language distribution. California likely has more Ruby programmers-- the higher cost of living and higher salaries there may explain the entire difference between Ruby and PHP.

lucaspiller 13y ago

Without knowing where the users are based, this data alone is pretty meaningless. Where I'm from in South West England pretty much all the programming jobs are Java (hence why I left), and you are lucky to get £40k. Spain and Portugal have even lower salaries. I'm guessing this is US based, but even then, I'm sure there is a lot of variation. Working in London as a Java developer in finance you could easily get over £100k.

CmonDev 13y ago
Agreed. Working as a Haskell/Erlang dev in finance would get you well over £100k as well. Scarcity of such positions is a different matter though.
rplnt 13y ago
And you can be based in post-soviet ("happy" 45th anniversary to crushing Czechoslovakia's future) country, make $10k or $20k and be very happy.
- lucaspiller 13y ago
  Personal experience? My SO is Lithuanian, so I would be interested to know what working in that area is like.
  - berntb 13y ago
    I can tell you that you live really well for quite few Euro after tax in Transylvania (as long as you don't go to West Europe for vacation). This is quite easy to check, Google: living costs Cluj London http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/london/cluj-napoca http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/london/c... (Don't trust information about cities with too few data points.)
    - rplnt 13y ago
      The only downside is that the prices of imported goods (most notably electronics) and software are usually higher than in the US for example. Services are much cheaper of course.
canadiancreed 13y ago
I'll second this. I've yet to ever see any PHP job short of architect paying that amount here (most are 70k or less), same with Java and Perl. I'd like to know where this was collected from....I need to move there.
- fps 13y ago
  I feel the opposite. I can't get anyone that knows puppet for under $110k in the Boston area. All these salaries seem low for Boston, and probably the bay area as well.
  - canadiancreed 13y ago
    Geeze I need to move there....somehow.
  - druiid 13y ago
    That is... crazy high it seems like to me! Heck, I'd do it for less than $110k!
cpncrunch 13y ago
Check out contract jobs, which tend to pay higher in the UK.
mamcx 13y ago
I wish in Colombia to be like that. Here, the normal is something like US 800/month/Full time.

eterm 13y ago

Without significance testing, are those results significant? It looks like random data to my eye but I've not got the source data for any proper analysis.

quchen 13y ago

What are the distributions of the salaries among one language? Mean values alone are completely useless, give us some information about how you found the salaries out, what their standard deviations are etc. I don't want to imply maliciousness here, so I'm going to call this an example of unknowingly bad statistics (which, sadly, seems to be the default in most places). Bonus points for the bar (!) chart that starts at 90,000 and looks like ActionScript is twice as profitable as the rest of the languages.

dlss 13y ago
He found the salaries out using rapleaf... which didn't know the salaries but was making an educated guess. (You can try out their api if you register an account, FWIW it was way off for the people I've tried it on.) With data like that, I'd imagine the only sort of data you could trust would be the mean, since I'm guessing its much harder to be wrong about relative income levels between large groups than it is to be right about actual income numbers.
- quchen 13y ago
  The only sort of data you can trust is the data itself. Providing the mean of data is providing a sum value a person thinks is useful to convey the shape of the data, and the mean in particular is unsuitable at conveying shape on its own. What the author tries to get at is a precise quantity, namely the average salary for each language. However, we cannot measure that quantity directly, so taking samples (from a good source) is as good as it gets. The easiest assumption about that data is that it follows a normal distribution, which does have a mean, but also a standard deviation; both of these are required to talk about any meaning of the result. (If the normal distribution is not a good fit things may get more complicated.) What I'm saying is that providing just means is not a ballpark way of doing statistics, it is wrong. The statistical ballpark is the normal distribution, and maybe a value ensuring that it is at least somewhat appropriate to use that one.
  - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
    So forgive the statistical ignorance, but how would one display mean and std dev in useful graphical form? (Asking seriously as it would be good to know which setting to press on gnu plot)

snitko 13y ago

I can kinda understand why XSLT is one of the most expensive (on an intuitive level - as quchen said, it's not clear how the data was obtained for this post). Certain parts of it is a complete brainfuck. I worked on a small opensource project of mine once, where I decided to use XSLT to translate XML to HTML. I din't know much XSLT, so I started reading docs and eventually managed to accomplish my goal. However after struggling with it for a while, I realized it sometimes makes completely no sense. Or, to be more fair, it takes a rather different logic to understand it than I usually apply to programming languages... because, well it's not a programming language. I only wonder, where is XSLT usually used? Can anyone outline the most typical types of projects and environments?

xsace 13y ago
You use it a lot in structured documentation business (think hardware manufacturer, military, pharmaceutical, ...). Where you publish some xml documentation into serveral output formats like HTML, epub, pdf, whathever..
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
wallflower 13y ago
I had to struggle with XSLT to transform XML into HTML a while back. Since it not intended to be a real programming language, I had trouble making it do the equivalent of something basic like iterating through a collection (recursion, ugh!). I can easily see how it would be a highly-paid skill because the lack of debugging tools (again, it is not a real programming language) made me want to curse MSFT and everyone else who were supporting XSLT at the time (way back) as the Second Coming of content publishing. If you ever want a headache, try reading the XSLT spec. http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt
- wolfgke 13y ago
  Visual Studio (tested version 2010; Express probably won't do it, though) has a pretty good XSLT debugger, which made writing XSLT stylesheets a lot easier when I wrote some a few years ago.

marklit 13y ago

Averaging is a very lossy method to use. You could be looking at a histogram shaped like a satellite dish and the average value you come to is one few are close to. There are a lot of extremes in tech salaries from what I've seen hiring and contracting over the years.

ronaldx 13y ago

> I’m unfamiliar with some of the other languages... Any ideas on why these languages ranked higher or lower than average? The unknown languages may appear on the outsides just because of the statistics: smaller sample size => higher variance in the sample mean.

tarekmoz 13y ago

It's not listing Cobol.

taspeotis 13y ago
It's off the chart.
krob 13y ago
That's because Cobol programmers probably make an order of magnitude greater income than on this chart. The only people who still write Cobol from my understanding are people who continuously update banking mainframe software. Government mainframes, etc. Usually these days you are apprenticed by someone with years of experience because of how difficult it is to obtain old documentation etc.
- tarekmoz 13y ago
  yeah that's why I mentioned it. Back in college, right before the year 2k, we had a special Cobol course they added just to get people some 2k jobs. I recall one guy who's still doing Cobol most of his time, working on old software like traffic lights systems (!)
- dagw 13y ago
  A vocational school here in Sweden recently started offering a 1 year Cobol degree, ostensibly after demand from the banking and insurance sector.

roel_v 13y ago

Where does he get income from? How does Rapleaf (whatever it may be) correlate emails with household income?

emilsedgh 13y ago

Is there a point im missing that causes CSS to perform better than Erlang?

pkorzeniewski 13y ago
I think CSS covers here a general "front-end web development" among with HTML and there is simply a big demand for such stuff, especially will all the new features of CSS3 and HTML5 - everyone wants a modern 3.0 website now :)
Systemic33 13y ago
Shiny things sell better than usefull things?

bishop_mandible 13y ago

LOL, even PHP programmers earn more than Haskell programmers.

edem 13y ago
And that would be a real shame if it would have been true.
dagw 13y ago
If you're getting paid to program Haskell chances are you are in either academia or finance. I think it's safe to assume that a) Haskell programmers in finance earn more than most PHP programmers and b) that they're not allowed to upload their latest projects to github.

ejbs 13y ago

I didn't know that ActionScript was used in the enterprise environment? Why and what for? Did I miss something?

TheHippo 13y ago
I've done some ActionScript freelancing back in the days. The demand for ActionScript programmers is actually rising, because everyone moved away from the Flash platform, but someone must maintain the legacy code and do the jobs Flash is best suited for.
gunn 13y ago
Probably for rich reporting tools in flex.
myth_drannon 13y ago
1. Web and mobile games.I see Adobe Air is getting popular as a cross platform game dev library + starling , feathers , etc ... 2. Flex dashboards and reports in banks( e.g.Morgan Stanley ).
khalidmbajwa 13y ago
It is because of Adobe AIR.Which is a cross platform runtime. Contrary to popular public opinion, Flash and Flex is actually a stunningly beautiful platform to code in. It's a very very mature platform, with an excellent community, and amazing libraries. (As a matter of fact, the creator of Angular JS wrote a blog post citing some of Flex's features as his inspiration). It's just that Adobe keeps screwing up their Runtimes. Flash and AIR both have performance issues which is why they are starting to get left behind now. For enterprise softwares,its cheaper and more optimal to have a single codebase that can work across platforms and in return take a slight hit on the performance.
- pixie_ 13y ago
  I agree flash/flex is a great platform to develop on. From the language, to the IDE, to the API. It's like a strongly typed javascript with XAML done right. You can create a great looking app that shares the same code base between the web, iPhone and Android.

frobozz 13y ago

This states that it is average household income by language. I could assert the following from the data: * ActionScript developers are horribly underpaid, but more likely to marry lawyers, doctors and bankers. * Haskell developers are relatively well paid, but more likely to live alone or with a stay-at-home parent. * Pythonists get roughly the same salary as Haskell developers, but their partners are all low-paid key workers.

siddboots 13y ago
Pythonistas marry for love.
- 6ren 13y ago
  Haskellers are single because you're not my type
  - cgh 13y ago
    Being lazy doesn't help either.
    - santadays 13y ago
      Or terse.
  - rybosome 13y ago
    Maybe.
erikkri 13y ago
It also shows that sysadmins that know Puppet probably doesn't have a partner.
AlisdairSH 13y ago
Those incomes look like fairly typical mid-level individual salaries (in the DC area, at least). I would expect the household numbers to be higher than listed to account for those that have working spouses.

wallflower 13y ago

Remember as patio11 says the most important and valuable skill is not making money for your employer but being able to enable them (and eventually other companies, as your own entrepreneurial soldier of fortune) to make more money. http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

circuiter 13y ago

As a C and Java developer, the numbers made me feel good.

nazgulnarsil 13y ago

I'd really like to see a differing standard deviation between them.

CmonDev 13y ago

Looks like rubbish frankly speaking. That XSLT alone is a sign of something being wrong.

talloaktrees 13y ago

After just reading the headline the first thought I had was "the comments are going to seriously question the statistical basis used" I was not disappointed.

jyap 13y ago

Subtracting the top 2 and bottom 2 language data points and you have a range of $94,031.19 to $103,179.39. With a range that small, IMHO nothing significant can be derived. It's not like the range is $50k to $150k.

jkscm 13y ago
The range is probably not small, but the range between the highest and the lowest average is.

fbnt 13y ago

I believe ITJobsWatch ( http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/ http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/ ), despite being limited to the UK, gives a much more comprehensive overview on the topic.

edem 13y ago
I concur. I always use it if I want some statistics.

bayesianhorse 13y ago

It looks like the most data points are found in the middle of the field. The extremes at both ends are underrepresented (except Java). That is a common finding, because the probability of deviation from a “true norm” would be highest in the smallest sample. The big question is: How significantly do these datapoints deviate from the null hypothesis of “all programming languages average the same pay).

krob 13y ago

I guess I should drop php and switch to ruby & js exclusively eh?

stewbrew 13y ago

Do I understand the chart correctly that people get paid exclusively for writing vim plugins (VimL)?

bpodgursky 13y ago
No, but people who contribute to VimL projects (among other projects) do get paid for something.

patio11 13y ago

Please don't attempt to operationalize this data by saying "I know PHP. If I learn Ruby, then I can get a $5,000 raise!" I talk to more engineers than is healthy, and many of them think that languages are the primary differentiator in salary (or some other metric of interest in their career). They're very mistaken. Far more salient are negotiating skill, location, what company you work for, where you're assigned in that company (profit center or cost center, favored project/division/etc or not, etc), and ability to use computer code as leverage to accomplish things that capitalism cares about. Also, the dynamic range among e.g. Ruby programmers of my acquaintance goes from something like $2k a month to $2k a day, not primarily based on skill with Ruby. (If I were comfortable describing the individuals at the high end some people might say "That's cheating! They're getting compensated for non-Ruby things which happen to be expressed in Ruby programs." I call that winning rather than cheating but to each their own.)

BlobbleBlab 13y ago
There are two factors that determine how much money you can make in a job such as programming: - How much money are you making for your employer - What are the costs your employer needs to make to allow you to make that money for him If there's a large and growing gap between the two, you can expect a raise, event if the company as a whole isn't doing too well. If there's a small or shrinking gap, you'll be looking for another job soon. If the gap is negative, you're probably the owner.
- alinajaf 13y ago
  The only thing I'd add to this is that there exist organisations in the world that can afford to hire a team of developers (or, as it were, execute long-term contracts with a consultancy at an aggregated $10k+ day rate) indefinitely with little or no function that couldn't be achieved with Wordpress 1.0, including the security vulnerabilities. In the worst case, I... I mean my made-up friend Bob... has worked on teams that seemed to have no other purpose than to execute the new idea that week, with little or no connection to any actual business value. Bob has seen this happen too many times for it to be a random occurrence. According to Bob, such engagements/teams are typically funded by the taxpayer or upper management at companies that have more cash than God. Then I told Bob to shut up, because he's in breach of all the NDAs and sometimes people read things on Hacker News.

6ren 13y ago

±10% is almost nothing... OTOH, maybe I could do XSLT, if I just took some nausea pills... PS: I actually think XSLT is a brilliant application of some cool ideas - putting them to work in (e.g.) grammar compatibility, it's just, like XSD, using XML itself as the syntax (e.g. i < 10 pls shoot me) and lack of helpful conventions (e.g. the empty stylesheet should be the identity transform, which you can then tweak).

regularfry 13y ago
XSLT smells to me like it should be a compilation target for a scheme rather than something you actually write directly.
- qwerty_asdf 13y ago
  Yeah, the repetitive boilerplate of it all... This is probably something that many well-paid "XSLT developers" probably figured out early on. Develop your XSLT using ANYTHING except XSLT. ...and then they go on to create the "actual" programs to vomit the crapwads of excessive mark-up, and mystify those who made their own unfortunate beds and chose to consume this... this... XSLT.

Andy678 13y ago

Being a very versatile web developper, I never understood why (good) PHP programming gets so little credit in the profession, whereas to me it appears to be much more demanding to write a decent piece of software using PHP rather than with Ruby, Python, or even ASP/.NET. These other languages have so many easy tools, great debugging and all that, with the natural counterpart of offering less performance. PHP strikes me more as the C Language of web development : easy to learn, but harder to decently apply on a day-to-day basis. So I wonder if the companies out there just value other languages more because they tend to misinterpret the "simplicity" of a language for the quality of the developer using it. To me, making a good website using Rails is child's play compared to making one using PHP, framework or not...

canadiancreed 13y ago
Supply and demand and perception is pretty much what it boils down too. There's a lot of PHP apps, and a lot of terribly written PHP apps. Add that companies that hire for such positions have a plethora of options for cost-effective (read dirt cheap) and a lot of developers that will work for such wages and you have a language that while popular, is not well respected, and has those looking for more money and a more versatile skill set seeking greener pastures.

juskrey 13y ago

Your graphic representation is highly misleading.

ck2 13y ago

Isn't the real news here that programmers are making $100K on average? Language doesn't really seem to be too big a variable, it affects the income level by typically less than 10% Are people really making that much around here? Why are you on HN then?

Mr_N 13y ago
Perhaps my mistake was working for academia (support staff, not academic) but I make a bare fraction of that. (and for comparable work to what I've done elsewhere in industry.)
GFischer 13y ago
I make $24K after taxes anually. I live in Uruguay, and program in VB6, VB.NET, and occasionally in Forte4GL, C# or PHP, but I'd make the same programming in Java or C# (it's an average local salary for a developer). The way to make more money, as Patio11 said, is not to switch languages, but the "ability to use computer code as leverage to accomplish things that capitalism cares about" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6249373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6249373 If I made $100K, I wouldn't mind reading HN either :) (I know people that make orders of magnitude more and who occasionally browse it, or even post).
- V-2 13y ago
  I make about 14K per annum in Poland (net pay) : )
  - GFischer 13y ago
    Ouch, is that a full-time job? Is that 14K euros or dollars? I barely manage on 24K for me and my girlfriend (made some bad decisions though). I've heard rent and cost of living is cheaper in Poland than in Uruguay - we're still in a housing bubble here, and it's close to the most expensive country on earth for some stuff (example: cars).
    - V-2 13y ago

programminggeek 13y ago

I would say location weighs heavily on average income as a programmer. For example, the average dev salary in the midwest might be more like $50,000 and anything approaching $100,000 being very high end.

theandrewbailey 13y ago
This. Salaries are based upon more than just skills and languages. It seems like this article is biased towards California or New York salaries. I once jokingly told a SF based recruiter that $55k might not seem too much, but those aren't California dollars, which are worth less than Pittsburgh dollars. If I wanted to make six figures right now, I'd probably move.

abraxasz 13y ago

Some languages heavily used in finance (and not much else) haven't been mentioned, and would likely fair pretty well. I'm thinking about K, and in Ocaml. Ocaml in particular is used at Jane Street which is known for paying extremely well.

kleiba 13y ago

You can make money writing Emacs Lisp?

PaulHoule 13y ago

Given the sample size here I don't think this means anything. I've seen real world programming jobs in the U.S.A. everywhere from $25,000 up to $250,000. Everything you get is closely clustered around $100,000k and when you consider the sample size I;m nit sure any of these mean anything.

dagw 13y ago

Surely who you're working for and what you're working on has a much much bigger effect on income than what programming language you happen to use. People using python at a top hedge fund will surely earn more than people using python at a low end web shop.

dons 13y ago

GIGO. Most commercial Haskell jobs are in finance -- where you don't get to contribute code to github. That leaves the PhD students and open source folks, shifting the data sideways.

theorique 13y ago
Most commercial Haskell jobs are in finance Cool - do you have any articles/references about that?
- pjonesdotca 13y ago
  http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry Seems like more than a few quant shops advertise that they use Haskell.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jokoon 13y ago

actionscript, whaaat. I thought people are using flah less and less.

marknutter 13y ago

What about programmers who are proficient in multiple languages? (As any good programmer should be).

gtrubetskoy 13y ago

I think in reality the highest paid languages are C, Objective-C and C++, with Java a close second (though it very much depends on what is being done). And if you're looking to be at the top of your game, one single piece of advice: master C. Once you've mastered it, you can pick and choose whatever else you want.

NAFV_P 13y ago
I'm learning C at the moment, but it isn't mentioned much in these comments. It seems to be niche expertise to me these days.
- gtrubetskoy 13y ago
  Probably because most people commenting here don't know it. ;)
canadiancreed 13y ago
I second this. Have a mate of mine that has five years in C and has been able to walk into any shop that he wants, regardless of language they use, and get a gig, and well paying to boot. On the other end of the scale, I have almost six years in PHP and it's worth as much as a broken kinder egg for anything outside the LAMP stack world (and in some cases, within that world as well)
- ciclista 13y ago
  I've noticed less interesting gigs and lower pay as well for PHP over the last year or so. Spending a lot of time with Python and Go now.

dagw 13y ago

Actually the only really interesting thing about that data is how close the lowest and highest values are, certainly they must be within the margin of error (something I noticed he failed to talk about). So it seems the real conclusion to draw is that average income is largely uncorrelated with language used.

edem 13y ago

This chart looks like a GROUP BY clause which was used in a not too meaningful way. As others mentioned above there are a lot of parameters here like the company you are working for, location, project nature and such which would be important to point out.

edem 13y ago

This chart looks like if a GROUP BY clause was used in a not too meaningful way. As others mentioned above there are a lot of parameters here like the company you are working for, location, project nature and such which would be important to point out.

V-2 13y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox is quite likely ;) There's many other variables apart from the programming language itself that affect the salary. They can be only indirectly correlated with the language.

ori_b 13y ago

What's the standard deviation on these numbers? For all I know, they could all be the same (within error).

jcromartie 13y ago

It's based on household income, so is it reasonable to infer that Haskell programmers may be likely to be the sole income while ActionScript programmers have working spouses? That could make sense.

khalidmbajwa 13y ago

The actionscript programmers may be getting paid higher (Mostly because the Flex enterprise hangover is still lingering), but in my experience the actual number of actionscript jobs available is sharply falling. I have been doing Flash/Flex dev for about 8 years now, and while my evidence is certainly anecdotal,i have gone from having tons of contract offers swamping my inbox to once every few months.Make no mistake, Flash and Flex IS dying. Javascript meanwhile is maturing remarkably, and it will soon be in a position where enterprise will seriously start considering it as a viable platform.

segmondy 13y ago

This is absolutely useless. Emacs Lisp? Really? XSLT? What? CSS? Woah. I love that the internet has made it easy for anyone to share their opinion, I hate when noise is presented is as useful information.

rip747 13y ago

as much as i'm loving that coldfusion (my primary language of choice) is included on this chart and ranked in the top 10, i would really like to see how the job market compares to the other languages on the chart. on a side note: really? xslt is second on the list? i remember using it to create a code generator years ago. probably one of the poorer decisions i've made in my life :P

kazagistar 13y ago

The article lists household income, which makes it just about useless. Household income will be higher if you are married. People who are married are more likely to chose a more stable job working for a large corporation. Such jobs require languages more like Java, and less like Haskell. Such people might also have less spare time to play around with new languages due to family engagements, or a dozen other differences, all masked by this chart.

snake_plissken 13y ago

Lolwut? Are these for two person households where each person is in the same language or only for people working at quant funds? About 40% of my social circle is made up of programmers and no one makes close to these amounts. 100% anecdotal, but, I think we are all being shafted ;0

rockyj 13y ago

Well this sucks, in India even after speaking Java, Ruby, CoffeeScript and Scala I get a measly $35,000 which after taxes goes down to $25,000. Yeah, I know low cost of living etc. etc.

Raphmedia 13y ago

All those "CSS programmers" must be freelancers, with the salary covering the whole contract. Otherwise, I'm really, really, really underpaid.

rwhitman 13y ago

Hmm, looks like my giving up ColdFusion was a mistake...

sequoia 13y ago

I am totally baffled about where the income data supposedly comes from, and how it's mapped to GH user accounts. http://www.rapleaf.com/about-us/faq/#where http://www.rapleaf.com/about-us/faq/#where "Rapleaf aggregates consumer data from data providers, cleanses it and maps it to emails, and ultimately makes it accesible through our easy to use Append portal and API. We partner with dozens of large and small data companies to aggregate data that we ultimately anonymize and tie to email addresses. We source it from only legitimate data bureaus who adhere to the highest consumer privacy standards -- sources that give consumers appropriate notice and choice about sharing their information and have opted in to make their data accesible." What? Are they claiming to know the salary of all the github users used in this study? Were the users filtered down to those who had income data available? Because if so, that's a really weird (bad) selection technique. If not, what is being done with users whose income data is not available? Also where the hell is rapleaf getting their data?? This whole thing confuses the heck out of me, someone please help.

bpodgursky 13y ago
Rapleaf's API provides income given an email address, when available. I ran the list of emails from the git commit log across that API, which only gives me data points for the users who have income data available. Is there really any way to correct for the fact that not all the data is going to be available? It certainly doesn't exclude a sampling bias, which I did mention in the post, possibly not aggressively enough.

awkward 13y ago

As a former actionscript programmer, this makes me cringe a little. My assumption is that actionscript is a new COBOL - tons of businesses rely on it, but now that it's looking like a dead end, the only way to fill those positions is to crank up the salary to compensate for the perceived dead space on a resume. IMHO experience in it translates well to Javascript, but I miss some of the features - especially the type system and the token API (which was much more consistently implemented than the various JS deferred systems).

gwu78 13y ago

I thought Puppet was a collection of Ruby scripts, not a programming language in the same sense as the others listed. To put it another way, can you "program" in Puppet without first having Ruby installed? On a side note, I am always wary of the statistics Github gives for each repository where they estimate the percentage of code from different languages used (e.g., 90% Python, 10% C, etc.). In your opinion, how accurate do you think these are?

druiid 13y ago
Puppet has it's own DSL. It's easy to learn, but it is difficult to use it well. Basically as a Puppet 'programmer' I can generally see the difference between an experienced user or not. This all said, to extract a lot of power from Puppet you also have to script in Ruby, as to add additional functions not included in the Puppet core DSL requires you to write your own scripts.
- gwu78 13y ago
  Do you need Ruby installed to run Puppet programs? The answer if I'm not mistaken is yes. Personally I would be afraid to use Puppet as a substitute for my own configuration scripts. With the later, I'm required to know how things work at the shell level (and I use a small POSIX-like shell, not bash). But is this true with Puppet? I note it currently has some open security issues. But hey, if you are paid a competitive salary to write Puppet scripts, then there's little reason to learn more than how to do that. I imagine Puppet probably saves you heaps of time.
  - druiid 13y ago
    Indeed. Puppet was created in Ruby and thus requires it to function. Puppet is generally meant to be a replacement for configuration scripts. Essentially your Puppet scripts define a 'state' that you want the server to be in, thus if you want a user account called 'bob' you'd do something like this: user {'bob': ensure => present, gid => '0', uid => '0', password => '<my encrypted password>', } From this Puppet would do all the 'difficult' bits for you. You mention that if you get paid to write Puppet scripts you wouldn't need to know how things work at the shell level. That is extremely far from the truth. You need a strong background and experience with shell commands, configuration layouts, shell/CLI methodology, etc. Without those you would quickly be lost both in terms of managing and dealing with Puppet and scripting in it. Knowing Puppet is no replacement for Shell knowledge unless the extent of what you need to do with Puppet is understand you're using it to launch your Vagrant instances. Honestly there are things which to build out in Puppet would require extensive Ruby based functions and sometimes you really just need to fall back to using exec {} statements in Puppet (Meaning you're running shell commands from within Puppet). You can see some examples of this in the zookeeper module I built: https://github.com/justicel/puppet-zookeeper https://github.com/justicel/puppet-zookeeper Feel free to message me with Puppet questions and really, if you're just using Shell scripts I highly, highly recommend moving toward configuration-management (even if it's not Puppet), unless you only have one or two servers to manage.

JoeAltmaier 13y ago

Perhaps the differences is in the demographics, not the language. People using 'older' languages may be older, further along in their careers. That would explain everything.

tianyazi 13y ago

what's happened

cryofan 13y ago

A huge problem with this data is the absence of outliers. Look at how closely clustered the data is. Especially considering that this is household income, there should be a higher variation--the data should be more spread out. he posted an update: http://bpodgursky.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/updates-to-language-vs-income-breakdown-post/ http://bpodgursky.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/updates-to-langua... Language Mean Min Max Samples Python 97,578 95,481 99,676 2314 JavaScript 97,598 95,897 99,299 3443 Ruby 98,238 96,471 100,005 3242 in this update, he included the min and max. I have selected three languages for brevity from the updated data he provided. IN ruby, there is a min of 96K and a max of 100K, for example. There is no way that if you sample 3242 ruby programmers that none is going to make less than 96K and none will make more than 100K. Just not going to happen. There will be a much much wider variation in incomes, especially for household income because some will be married, and some spouses will work, some will have better paying jobs. But even if the data were for programmer incomes alone, the data should be more spread out. Same goes for all the other languages. So the data is bogus.