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The programming and engineering skills with the highest salaries
- okibeogezi 12y agoReally helpful article.
- bengali3 12y agoInteresting article but much of it seems off to me. (CTO 120K? is that a fair average for medium to small-sized startups?) I prefer this guide: http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/RHT_2015_salary-guide.pdf http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/RHT_2015_salar...
- iolothebard 12y agoGlassdoor is typically the best in my experience (if people have put in enough data). The problem is, this is an average across a nation that has very different costs of living in different parts of the country.
- mawburn 12y agoWhat bengali3 linked is the salary guide used by one of the largest recruiting companies in the United States to negotiate salaries on behalf of their clients. It includes lots of little modifiers for different areas and situations. Glassdoor is people random people reporting their own salaries. http://www.roberthalf.com/salary-guides http://www.roberthalf.com/salary-guides
- iolothebard 12y agoI hadn't gone through the entire thing, thanks for pointing this out! Has modifiers at the bottom. I stopped at Canada. FU CANADA! ;-)
- iamcurious 12y agoGreat link! Does anyone know of a similar document for Europe?
- totalrobe 12y agoThese salaries seem really high. Is this cash or total compensation (w/ bennies)? According to these scales, I'm underpaid (below the low end of the scale) by 40k in my area.
- mrcactu5 12y agoi hear lots of critiques of Ruby on Rails on here, but from the business site that looks like #1 for now
- beat 12y agoI wonder if there's some geography bias there? Rails seems a lot more popular in the Bay area than the rest of the country, which could be artificially inflating its value. Then again, the armies of replaceable keyboard monkeys typing in Java might be artificially depressing Java wages, too.
- aguywithamum 12y agoI wonder what the average Android engineer makes compared to the average Java engineer.
- mhax 12y agoRails jobs seem to dominate all the remote programming jobs too as far as I can see. Learn Java they said....
- beat 12y agoI'm old. I was told to learn COBOL. But Java is just 21st century COBOL, really.
- vinceguidry 12y agoRails really is fantastic at solving the sorts of problems most businesses have. It's highly dynamic, meaning you can scaffold and iterate quickly, and there's enough Rails coders out there that companies don't have to worry that they'll be left in a lurch if their one guy leaves. I don't think Rails dev salary inflation will last more than a few years. Right now there's no such thing as an entry-level Rails gig, it's hard to break in and start getting critical professional experience that leads to being able to take advantage of those salaries. So there's a bit of a shortage at the moment. Eventually we'll build that ladder and the salaries will come back down some.
- dkyc 12y ago"Everyday you sit down, put on your headphones and open your integrated developer environment." Right there, the first sentence. Hilarious. I think it takes the cake for the quickest sentence that gives away that the author is no programmer himself. (Not that he needed to be to write this article)
- mawburn 12y agoBut, that's exactly what I do?
- dkyc 12y agoI'm referring to the choice of words. E.g., I never heard anybody call their IDE/Editor/emacs setup casually "integrated developer environment".
- aguywithamum 12y agoI think it could also be for people that aren't programmers that may read the article. But, yeah, I've never heard anyone use the full name.
- david 12y agoI don't think I've heard anyone at all call it an "Integrated Developer Environment", instead of "Integrated Development Environment".
- aguywithamum 12y agoOh, that's true! I hadn't even noticed the difference. I've never heard anyone use the phrase "integrated developer environment" either.
- lucozade 12y agoMaybe it's implying that real programmers have some sort of cyberpunk synapse plugin
- beat 12y agoI kinda giggled when they said that if you know Obj-C, then you know C++ as well.
- symfoniq 12y agoMaybe the writer is confusing C++ with C.
- beat 12y agoI see the C == C++ formulation even more often. It's like comparing a kayak to one of those flying battleship things from The Avengers. (I'd rather be kayaking than waiting for that crazy machine to just fall from the sky, but that's me)
- symfoniq 12y agoAgreed. The "C/C++" designation is all too common. What I was getting at is that any experienced Objective-C programmer would also know C. C++ is an entirely different matter.
- raverbashing 12y agoTo be fair, C++ distanced itself from "C with classes" with time, and as better libraries came on board that you don't have to bother with system libraries (mostly) C++ today is far from what it was 10 years ago (also, its much less relevant today)
- beat 12y agoThe interesting part of knowing Obj-C is knowing all the Apple system stuff, because no one uses it outside the Apple ecosystem. Incidentally, I've been using Go lately, and it's much closer to the "modern C" feel that I want than either Obj-C or C++. It's a remarkably reality-driven language.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- 72deluxe 12y agoThe developer in that photo does not have sufficient light, and has poor posture. Additionally, the screen images are horribly doctored. Good to see C++ still commanding high wages; not sure it is the case here in the UK where it appears to be hovering in value with C#. As someone else has said, knowing Obj-C really does not mean that you'll know C++!
- MadManE 12y agoThis is slightly off-topic, but does anyone know of a similar list for non-software engineering skills/fields? I'm a MechE, and would love to see a comparison of what I should pursue if I want to maximize my worth.
- robotkilla 12y agoGood article, but what happens when you cover frontend, backend and architecture all in the same job?
- mellavora 12y agoburnout? Or the thrill of being a founder...
- robotkilla 12y agoeh - i like being able to design a site in photoshop, architect data models, build a site in django, build the templates, the css and javascript and launch it. I don't think that leads to burn out.
- mellavora 12y agoYeah, I was trying to be snarky, thinking about the guy who is responsible for everything but doesn't have any creative freedom. Epic fail on my part. I'd also enjoy what you describe.
- bshimmin 12y agoIt appears in the infographic that the front-end developer is just about to fall off his chair. I'm not sure quite what to read into this.
- pknerd 12y agoSeems it will take another year to see languages like Go, Rust and other functional languages to go in mainstream.
- sporkenfang 12y agoRust is still changing every couple of months; I'd bet on it being another two or three years before it reaches widespread use. That said, its current form is pretty darn great.
- pknerd 12y agoI do find a few job posts now asking for Go. Guess one should prefer it over Rust or Elixir?
- edwinnathaniel 12y agoThey won't be mainstream... they will be known, but won't achieve the same success like node or rails.
- Avalaxy 12y agoI still wonder why there's such a big gap in wages between the US and Europe (at least here in the Netherlands). $100K for a senior developer seems to be very normal on average in the US. Here in the Netherlands you would probably get more like $60K max.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y agoI'd love to see some weighting that allows for local cost of living. $60k in most of Europe is reasonable money. $100k in SV (or London, but not quite so much) will barely keep a roof over your head.
- JMill 12y agoWeighting for US and Canada is available in the document posted by bengali3.[1] See pp. 23-25, "Local Variances". [1] http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/RHT_2015_salary-guide.pdf http://s3.amazonaws.com/DBM/M3/2011/Downloads/RHT_2015_salar...
- kls 12y agoAlso there are a lot of social programs in Europe that are unavailable in the US though our tax rates are not that far off when you factor in state, federal and sales taxes. Medical alone, for a family is a pretty sizable chunk of expenditure. Factor in that many states only have rudimentary mass transit and you can see that 60K in Europe actually starts to look a lot better than 100K in the Vally where cost of living is astronomical.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jrs235 12y agoWhat is the average cost to the individual for an education that is likely to land a development position in the US vs Europe? Are salaries paid to individuals higher in the US because individuals on average incur more costs and expenses in achieving the "opportunity" to land the positions?
- steven2012 12y agoThese numbers don't apply, at least in Silicon Valley in 2015. 120k for a CTO? Someone I know was offered a senior devops position for 200k plus 800k nominal value of options (strike price x # options) at a well known, well-funded "startup".
- fuse117 12y ago"As these are average salaries, it is important to note that 50% of actual wages will fall above or below the numbers listed." Um, no!
- logfromblammo 12y agoMean, median, and mode are different types of averages. By the context, the author intended this use of the word average to refer to the median average, rather than the mean average. This makes sense when discussing populations and demographics, as a mean average often diverges from the median due to the high-end outliers, and the median is the most useful kind of average in this context.