5 Things that can affect your salary as a developer
Introduction
A software developer (a.k.a. “developer”) is someone who creates software programs. This is a very competitive area and knowing how to improve your career as a developer is a good advantage.
With that in mind, I analyzed the public dataset “2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey”. Since 2011, every year, StackOverflow releases the “Stack Overflow Developer Survey”, and, with the 2020 data, new insights emerged.
The dataset consists in nearly 65000 lines of questions and answer, with each line being the response of a volunteer to the proposed questions, with the content of the answers of those questions, we can begin our study and understand what affect a developer’s salary.
1. Country
Responses to the survey allow us to see that the country has a great impact in the salary. This analysis considered the median salary to avoid outliers.
The Figure 1 shows that users living in United States have the largest salaries, followed by countries in Europe and Asia. With that in mind, if you do not live in one of the countries in the plot, consider moving to one of the countries in the plot!
2. Education Level
The education level also has a positive impact on the developer’s salary, with Bachelor’s degree being the most common education level among the respondents.
Also, as shown in Figure 2, higher education levels leads to higher salaries, making keep studying being a great choice to improve your career.
3. Experience
The years of programming experience also had a great impact on the salary, with 20 or more years of experience having substantial impact.
Figure 3 displays a clear trend to the salary grow with years of coding experience, however after 27 years of experience, the curve started to lower, probably because of advanced age. This is a good motivation to stay working as a developer, the tendency is to your salary keep growing over the years!
4. Operation System
The data also shows that respondents who worked with MacOS or BSD based systems had the greatest salaries (as displayed in Figure 4).
That is a good motivation to learn how to work with different operation systems!
5. Programming Language
Finally, the programming languages you worked with may affect your salary.
As shown in the Figure 5, working with either Julia, Perl, Scala, Ruby and Rust can lead to larger salaries. Besides that, those languages are not among the most popular ones, as shown in Figure 6. Hence, those languages may have larger salaries due to the fact that there fewer developers working with those.
So, there is a trade-off to keep in mind, learning a popular language can lead to a bigger number of job offers, but learning one of the languages in Figure 5 may lead to a bigger salary.
Conclusion
In this post, we evaluated 5 things that can affect a developer’s salary, based on the 2020 StackOverflow Developers Survey, analyzing the influence of each feature to create this list.
This list can be used as a guide to what to do from now on, in order to keep growing in your career as a developer. Therefore, learning new programming languages, OS and getting a Bachelor’s degree can improve your salary, as well as getting more job experience.
So, stay motivated and keep studying to improve your chances of getting a raise or a better job!
To see more about this analysis, check out my Github.
