Considering a career in tech? Good choice. The sector is red hot, offering plenty of opportunities to work remotely, work with the latest technologies, and constantly learn and acquire new skills.
Speaking of skills, which ones should you focus on for the most lucrative career options in 2020? Fortunately, a new report has the answers.
The coding information team at StackOverflow have released their annual developer survey. For this report they polled 65,000 coders around the world about the programming languages they use, those they like the most, and which skills can earn the highest pay cheques.
Participants who use Perl, Scala, and Go tend to have the highest salaries, with a median salary of roughly $75,000. Perhaps not coincidentally, the results found that Perl was also amongst the languages that coders like the least. This could cause a lack of professionals using that tech on the market – resulting in the higher wages.
Here are the median salaries reported by 33,534 participants globally. Wages are reported in US dollars.
Wages earned by programming language in 2020
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Perl – $76k
Scala – $76k
Go – $74k
Rust – $74k
Ruby – $71k
Bash/Shell/PowerShell – $65k
Objective-C – $64k
Haskell – $60k
Julia – $59k
Python – $59k
Swift – $58k
C# – $57k
R – $57k
TypeScript – $57k
Kotlin – $54k
SQL – $54k
Assembly – $53k
C++ – $53k
JavaScript – $53k
HTML/CSS – $52k
VBA – $51k
C – $50k
Java – $50k
PHP – $39k
Dart – $37k
The survey also determined which specific roles pay the highest wages. Engineering managers, at $92,000 come out on top. Academic researchers make the lowest amount, with median salaries of less than half of that at $41,000.
Median salaries by developer type, 2020
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Engineering manager – $92k
Engineer, site reliability – $80k
DevOps specialist – $68k
Engineer, data – $65k
Data scientist or machine learning specialist – $58k
Developer, embedded applications or devices – $57k
Scientist – $57k
Developer, desktop or enterprise applications – $56k
Data or business analyst – $55k
Developer, full-stack – $54k
System administrator – $54k
Developer, back-end – $53k
Developer, QA or test – $53k
Database administrator – $50k
Developer, game or graphics – $50k
Developer, front-end – $49k
Educator – $49k
Designer – $47k
Developer, mobile – $43k
Academic researcher – $41k
You can read the whole report from StackOverflow here for much greater detail on regional and demographic differences and trends in programming technology professionals in 2020.
