Professional developers with the highest income — who are they?
A data-driven attempt to build a profile of a high-earning professional developer.
In this article, I will present the results of my analysis of the 2017 StackOverflow survey, that has been conducted among approximately 64 000 StackOverflow contributors.
I will try and create a general profile of the top-earning developer. Where are they based? What formal education have they received? What gender do they identify as? These are the questions that can be treated as a starting point to a much more detailed analysis, that’s why I decided to tackle them first.
I decided to focus on respondents who are employed as professional developers, not the ones who are part-time developers or are in between two different occupations.
In which countries professional developers earn the most?
On average, the developers earn the most in the United States, followed closely by Switzerland, as seen on the graph below:
This graph shows the yearly salary in USD. It is important to note at this point, that these are direct values — they don’t consider the costs of living, which vary from country to country. Nevertheless, the results do show that the developers in countries considered to be “rich” earn the most, which is not surprising.
What was surprising to me, was the magnitude of the difference between the salaries for the developers from the US and from the countries that ended up at the bottom of the list — Nigeria, Nepal, and Egypt. Professional developers in these countries earn on average 8181.25, 7608.33, and 6116.17 USD a year, respectively — at least according to this survey.
Does formal education have an impact on the salary?
According to the survey results, people with a doctoral degree earn the most, which might suggest that an academic career in this field is indeed worth pursuing. On the other hand, if we look at the rest of the results, we’ll see that people who completed only primary school are close behind, which is quite surprising, frankly. People who ended their formal education before the doctoral degree appear to earn less than people who can put the “dr.” before their name, but when it comes to other stages of education, the mean salaries don’t vary too much.
Is programming still a male-dominated field?
In popular culture, professional developers are usually portrayed as men, which reinforces a popular stereotype saying that IT is a male-dominated branch. According to the survey results, there is some truth to that statement. When asked about their gender, most of the respondents answered with “male”. In fact, the advantage over any other answer was huge — almost 91% of respondents identify as males.
When it comes to salary, the differences between male developers, female developers, and other gender identities are not that significant — in fact, according to the survey, on average non-male developers earn slightly more:
Conclusions
The analysis brought up some interesting results. Contrary to popular belief, formal education is not the most important factor when it comes to the salary of professional developers. Many of them have not completed any formal education other than elementary school, yet they still earn more than people with bachelor’s or master’s degrees. It’s also worth noting that even though 91% of respondents were male, it doesn’t mean that other genders do not stand a chance in this field — on the contrary: the non-male minority of developers earn more than their male counterparts.
