Well, the mytho that a developer get a lot of money only fly in USA, maybe?.
Outside it? Well, at least in latin america US 5000/Year is normal.
A lot of good developers I know are clearly below the hour rate one in USA get. We do it because we love to programming, but here is well know that is very hard to be "rich" as a developer.
In fact, that is why I quit my job then do my own projects, consulting and freelance: I still not get a lot of money -however, I charge more than a lot of my peers (us 30-40/h), but certainly can work with things I like more.
I'm from Argentina, and used to work (a long time ago though) with developers from Venezuela an Brazil.
Not even an entry level developer makes U$d5000 a year, unless he is not working full time and even that would be stretching it. Entry level jobs in shitty places get you arround u$d7500/8000 a year. First job in a big company after you graduate gets you arround u$d11000/year, and with 2 or 3 years of experience you can get u$d15000/year easily if you are worth the investment. Upper tier jobs (manager, project leader or research for a big corporation, working remotely for someone in the US/Europe, consulting) start in u$d20000/year and can easily get to u$d30000/year.
That is using Argentina's and Venezuela's black market exchange rate, or Brazil's official one.
In Argentina even a PhD candidate gets more than u$d5000 a year from his publicly funded University. No idea about Brazil/Venezuela on this.
I have the stats from the Uruguayan Chamber of Software (CUTI), for the average salaries here in Uruguay (which is admittedly one of the better paying countries in South America) based on 330 companies (most are small, low-paying shops), and from my experience, they're what people are actually getting (in the IT industry, service companies pay more):
Monthly salary before taxes (take home pay is between 80% to 60% for the highest salaries)
Junior Dev (0 to 3 years): U$ 1000/month - U$ 12.000 year before taxes (but almost untaxed, maybe 10% in taxes)
Intermediate (3 to 7 years): U$ 1250/month - U$ 15.000 year before taxes
Senior (> 7 years or exceptional): U$ 1850/month - U$ 22.000 a year before taxes
Tech Lead/Super Senior: average U$ 2500/month (before taxes) so U$ 30.000 a year before taxes
Project Manager (Dev Lead or actual manager, not PM role): average U$ 2500/month (before taxes) so U$ 30.000 a year before taxes
Many of the better and smarter developers either open up their own consulting shops (making a lot more than those averages), or work remotely.
The best developers I know of make about U$ 40.000/year before taxes.
I'm currently stuck at the "senior" level, the thing is the cost of living isn't that much cheaper than in other countries so I really want to make more, so I must start working remotely if I want to break the salary barriers here.
The cost of living in SF is crazy, 40k in Argentina , in terms of nominal value, after taxes are probably around 32k/y, 2600 net dollars per month.
Rent of a 1 bedroom place in a decent neightborgood=> 400 U$S a month. Grocieries, living costs, going out,etc,say..250 U$S?
Lets make you a party animal and big spender at 400 U$S a month for that.
So after takes and expenses, 40k a year in argentina yields you 1800U$S a month.
In san francisco, a 1br for yourself is 2k a month at least. Work often provides food, but if it doesnt, at 10 dollars a meal avg you get 10 x 30 x 2 = 600U$S in food alone. Restaurants, shows, going out, drinks, add 200 U$S a month, if you go out weekly.
That ends up being about 2800 U$S per month only on rent+food.
To be able to nominally save 1800U$S a month, you have to make 4600U$S pre-tax, which at 28% taxes, ends up being about 70k annual income.
The point of this exercise is to measure the impact of cost of living on salary: it definitely makes a dent(you need 30k a year more in San Francisco for the cost of living difference). However, its very easy to make 100k+ in the bay area working for a startup (and more if you work for facebook or google), which means you will always make way more money working in a startup in the us,than any income bracket in uruguay.
(assumption: cost of living in Uruguay ~= Argentina)
Cost of living in Uruguay is higher than in Argentina at the moment, mostly due to rent being close to twice as much.
I pay U$ 700 in rent+expenses and it's not uncommon in a "good" neighbourhood (I was paying close to U$ 1000 before, including very high apartment expenses, in one of the better neighbourhoods called Punta Carretas, think Palermo, before I had to downsize).
If you own your own home, living becomes much cheaper, but I don't :( and they're incredibly expensive right now (the housing bubble never burst here, though it has slowed down).
Food is more expensive here as well, but not as much as housing.
I pay U$ 700 for food and going out for 2 people (We do eat takeaway and go out a lot, so it's definitely not normal. But I get paid U$ 300 in meal vouchers which suck).
So I have U$ 400 for the rest (including gas, insurance, medicine, any extra expenses...), so I basically can't save (I could if I cut down on the eating and going out part).
"Real" salaries are higher I think, so it makes up for a bit of the difference between Uruguay and Argentina.
But still, I'll never be able to afford a house unless the housing bubble bursts or I start working abroad.
I'm including social security and healthcare in the "taxes" part (that's why I said take home pay could be 60%), I get deducted 17.5% of my nominal salary for social security, 20% for taxes, and 5% for healthcare. To make it worse, I actually get paid a part of the remainder in "meal vouchers" called Tickets Alimentación.
Rent in Argentina is crazy low in proportion to property pricing. As rent grows 20% year over year on contract, and inflation is higher, rent is lagging behind. I remember my absolute dollar value rent going down from 400U$S to 350U$S, in a 1 br 82m2-next to subway-first occupant appt.
Inflation really does a number on the economy.
And Im glad meal vouchers dissapeared in argentina, we had all sorts of them 8 years ago.
Regarding property prices in Uruguay, don't you have a reliable mortgage industry? Ours is ridiculously small, and inflation makes it risky and unreliable for both lenders and borrowers.
That is using the 'official' rate, which the rate the central bank forces(if you transfer money to argentina, the central bank will keep the dollars and give you pesos) you to sell your dollars to(about 8.05). But you cant buy dollars from the central bank, so you have to get them 'illegaly', which is between 11 and 12 pesos per dollar today.
Thats what the OP refers to with black market exchange.
By "normal" I mean is not rare, not that everyone do this bad. The salary here in a decent company is between US 750 to US 2500/month, full time.
Take in account that the kind of developer that work for people in other countries is more likely to do better. But I know this from first hand, for the kind of market that IS NOT here on hackernews or places like that. Look weird, but a lot of developers are not big on be part of that internet thingy ie: A lot of developers not work for startup, neither consulting firms, neither big shops. Is very common to have <=3 developers even for companies/software you could call "big". But certainly, this is not visible, so is easy to overlook if you are not part of that...
Some of the devs that do well here are completely unaware that their US 80/h is just rare, and mainly, a fact of good luck, connections, be already from a semi-rich family, luck and more luck. Is hard to see the things outside our own circles if we haven't be part of them. I mean: Is very likely this is related to the previous socioeconomic level of the dev in question.
I know people from the high and the very low-end. I'm worked at both ie: I have earn less than US 5000/year and make for the company something like US >200.000 in 2 years as the solo developer!. Of curse, I learn this fact after that company crash, years after.
The thing is, the kind of well paying developer work is rare. Livable sometimes, and very bad more often that you expect, but the kind of developer-semi-millionaire? That is a myth here...
In Guatemala, $2000+/month for a good developer is "normal", if a bit low. Low end is around $1500 or so. $3-4K a month is not unheard of. It's one of the better paying jobs.
And the consulting firms don't magically charge less because they're in Central America. You can still get PWC to fill a room with $300+/hr people. That's not just technical people, but also project management, as you'd expect.
I have heard the same for Spain as well - I know a very good developer there who does not get anywhere near what even entry level developers get paid in the states.
Hell, even Britain - looking around at junior dev jobs at the moment, and the salaries are in the region of £25-30k (ie, $35-45k US).
Perfectly livable, of course, even in London (for comparison, the median wage is £20k, or $30k in 'real money') - but then I read stuff on here about people walking out of a bootcamp into a $80k job if they're in the States - and the tone of voice isn't the one I'd be adopting for that kind of money (UNIMAGINABLE RICHES!) but "you're getting ripped off because the boot camp boss has handed you off to one of his mates".
Of course, the 'social wage' is higher over here with universal healthcare and the like. But not that much higher.
EDIT: Sterling's strong at the moment, it turns out, so add $5k to all those dollar values. Looking at the history, it seems I took my stateside holiday at the pound's two year nadir. Just my luck!
I'm from the UK and I earned £13.5k as a junior (at a very large multinational company), I was 21 and just out of university. I only broke £25k when I hit 29 years old. I consider myself to be a good developer.
The salaries in the US seem 'pie in the sky' to me.
Construction workers are making more than developers here in Uruguay at the moment, because their union is among the strongest in the country (while developers are not unionized).
But they'll all be out of work in the next economic downturn (on the other side, they didn't spend 3 to 8 years studying)
I wouldn't let the default percentages mislead you. Just under 1% of US developers or 7 respondents (EDIT: using the filters you defined) are making under $20k. That is likely well within any margin of error. We also don't know any of the details surrounding the responses. The numbers could be caused just as easily by working on an early stage startup, working part time, or even user input error as it could be actually making under $20k.
Are those people all part-time developers? A $20,000 salary would equate to $9.62 per hour given a 40 hour work week. That doesn't seem to make since for a full-time developer.
No (I live, and lived at the time, in the US), but I'm assuming you asked because you were surprised I was working at 13. I was freelancing for some local businesses at the time, and I definitely didn't need the money.
You should factor in cost of living expenses before saying that. If the 13 year old in the US pays taxes and has to run a house on that money (even if it is a small rented apartment with expenses such as food and groceries for himself), the comparison with an adult doing the same in India /might/ be a bit more comparable.
Is there a way to make filters universal, instead of per chart?
Observation: There is exactly 1 front-end web developer in my state. He gets paid more than me. I think I could build up a pretty decent profile of him from this.
And maybe a bug: When I try to add another condition to your filters, the UI gives me two widgets to populate instead of 1. Weird.
Another bug: If I sort salary, it sorts by string, not by numerical values.
. Yup, you can make filters universal with the "Enable Filters" button in the upper left (only applies to future analyses, not retrospectively).
. The data is actually freely available for download via Stack Overflow, who ran the survey[1]. As per your comment, I'd hope that everyone who took the survey was informed that results would be available for download, but I can't tell for sure because the survey link is dead.
. (Just emailed you for a screenshot, I can't replicate)
. The last one isn't a bug per se. The UI around separately and intuitively exposing the ability to (1) sort by count, (2) sort by alpha, and (3) sort arbitrarily is a bit tricky. That said, point taken that the expected behavior on clicking was that it would sort in the user-determined arbitrary order (arbitrary since Statwing isn't yet smart enough to understand ranges, so those ranges were user-set into order).
Bear in mind that someone will always take jobs that are lower-paid, they might just not be as visible, as they're not going to be appearing on company blogs or writing about their work as much.
I knew two talented developers, one front-end one back-end web development, who were both on £13,000 a year. They are now on more, but it really wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are more like them.
The most interesting thing I saw on this was that based on HN I expected to see "Full Stack" developers way off the top of the charts, but it was comparable to most other jobs, and maybe paid a little less than enterprise or mobile developers.
to be honest StackExchange has very little to offer me or colleagues working on minis/mainframes. The few attempts to contribute to questions that looked platform independent to me didn't leave me with a good feeling
The data itself is really interesting! But the UI, gee, lots of frustration with tiny scrollbars, things not fitting on my large monitor, mal-aligned tables if scrolled right, gigantic help screen appearing everytime you close something, ">" and "$" of the values used in alphabetical sorting, ... I'd prefer oldschool HTML tables over this...
Hey, can you shoot me an email at contact @ statwing? I'd love to hop on a screenshare for 10 minutes.
Agreed that the gigantic help screen thing upon close is dumb. But a couple of the things you mention sound more like browser-related issues/bugs, we'd love to see them live for a second.
Thanks for seeing the feedback! I'm sorry, screenshare will not work out, but the platform I used is Firefox on Linux. The misaligned tables happen when the data is wide, so there is a thin horizontal scrollbar at the bottom that only appears on hover (which my personal taste doesn't like, sorry about that). When using that scrollbar to go all the way to the right, the top labels of the table are misaligned.
The thing is, the data would be easier to view if it would simply be wider and the browser could arrange the scrolling of the whole screen(e.g. left/right arrow keys would do it).
Point taken about the scrollbar only showing on hover, definitely an issue.
For context, there's some tricky issues that come up in building a way to view tables that can scale to 10,000s by 10,000s (e.g., you can't just plop down the html, even though that would suit this particular dataset well). Definitely still got some kinks to work out.
And thanks for reporting the misaligned tables on Firefox/Linux thing.
- 55% of programmers surveyed are making less than $20k/yr, which is ridiculous.
- 4.9% of programmers surveyed are women
- 2.7% of programmers surveyed are 51+
- 17.5% of programmers earning less than $20k/yr live in California.
That last fact caught my eye, so I did some math:
This article (http://www.wired.com/2014/04/no-exit/) says that the author pays $1250/mo "for a mattress on the floor, behind a panel of imbricated torn shower curtains, in an unheated rabbit warren of 20 bunk beds under a low converted-warehouse ceiling." Assuming they all live in the same space that the author lived in, they spend $15000/yr on rent alone. Assuming that they have health insurance, a cell phone plan, and pay $3/day for transportation, they have (and I swear I'm not making this up) about $3.50 per day to spend on food.
In which city do you work? If you go to a big IT center in Brazil such as São Paulo or Campinas, $20k/year is just a little over the starting salary for a new grad from a top school. There's LOTS of worse positions, but this is not really that hard to find, considering that HN crowd is probably more qualified than the average developer...
That's true in Mexico too, if you work for small or local companies in a small/middle city, <$20,000 is almost the rule, but if you go to bigger cities, having enough English skills, with international companies, then salaries are incremented at least 100% (but still far from salaries in the US). That according to my experience, coming from an 800,000 citizens city to Guadalajara second biggest city in Mexico.
Which is interesting, because it implies that female programmers are less likely to use SO (or at least respond to SO surveys) than male programmers are. Why is that?
EDIT: or they're unwilling to specify their gender
Aaaargh.
This really frustrates me. I would rather have a bunch of text files and a link to the R manual.
Really, this is Stack Overflows annual "OK Cupid" moment and instead of a really linkable blog post with two gee-whiz insights I get "here you go, find an insight by spending two hours learning a UI you will never need again"
Did I miss the blog where they had already looked at the data themselves?
This was just us at Statwing grabbing their data (with permission) and sticking it into our software with the goals of making it easy to explore and exposing folks to Statwing.
I was also overwhelmed when I first saw the UI but found it to be pretty simple after having a go at it. Step one: choose the variables you're interested in. Step two: Describe each variable or Relate all variables. I am very impressed by this app.
This is really cool - I found it interesting relating the "job satisfaction" statistic with various other things like "hours per week: fixing bugs" or "hours per week: meetings." It goes pretty much as you would expect except that the two extremes seem to have the highest satisfaction. The only one that was exactly like I would have expected was "hours per week: technical support"
Did they do some filtering of their users or just raw data? In that case they asked 20000 stackoverflow users, and their results will not be representative of developers as a whole.
Ha. We apologize. Oversight on our part, we're normally more loyal to our good friend cynicism.
For what it's worth, this demo is a bit less fun than typical because all the data is categorical (i.e., almost all of it stems from multiple choice questions).
Our more typical demo dataset--every project run on the DonorsChoose, like KickStarter for teachers--includes numbers and times, such that you get a lot more variety in output: https://www.statwing.com/demo
At first I was disappointed that the dataset wasn't analyzed for me; I wanted to see what an expert (or at least someone who had put in effort) had to say about it. The statwing tool is awesome though... I would absolutely love to use this for something useful. Hopefully I'll remember it if/when that time comes.
Full time remote workers have the highest average salary. That's an interesting data point. Correlation is not causation obviously, but it's interesting that the more time you spend out of the office, the more money you make. (Compensation plus bonus)
The reason could simply be that the pool of jobs available when you work remotely is larger/of better quality than the pool of jobs available within a reasonable distance of where you live.
Buying a house is also negatively correlated with salary [1] for a similar reason: you are less likely to relocate for a better job (whatever your definition of better is) when you own a house...
A lot of consultants that are either working out of their home office or at a client site only for so long count themselves as full time remote workers because they have no defined daily place. I know I and several other traveling consultants considered ourselves in this category. I believe a lot of people that are expected to travel frequently (conference speakers, so-called "community evangelists" might also count). I've gotten the impression that most programmers that are traveling consultants are probably able to negotiate with companies that really badly want their specific skills and as correlation to that need results in some wage boosts. I would have liked to see a better breakdown of the compensation side and if bonuses were a higher percentage for remote workers with lower equity to other groups, that'd closely fit the profile of most consulting groups (pre-sales might mix the results up too). The data points they have aren't exactly comprehensive though unfortunately.
What is "enterprise" in this context? Do they work for an enterprise SaaS/vendor or for an actual enterprise, aka big businesses that use software? I don't think either of those are particularly better paid than the other groups.
I think it's more likely that the best paid programmers are working in a field with specialized software that only runs on Windows. For example, EEs use Windows almost universally for Altium/Cadence/Mentor Graphics software which means that the majority of commercial firmware compilers and IDEs are Windows only too (even though many are forks of cross platform tools). The same is pretty much true of biotech too: a majority of the software that interfaces with hardware, especially lab automation, is on Windows so anyone dealing with those specialized fields would be start with Windows and run VMs for everything else.
Another explanation would be hardware support. My workstation has a high end but not a server mobo (with funky features like Marvell's weird simulated RAID) and dual SLI K-series GPUs (professional/super computing). Getting Ubuntu 14.04 to even boot up, let alone properly deal with monitors and peripherals like a 3D mouse coming and going, takes at best an entire work day. Windows 7 with NVIDIA's drivers and VMWare leave much to be desired if you're a fan of Linux but they just work, especially if you have to do anything with CUDA at the same time as your main line of work.
I enjoyed 'hours surfing the internet' for those 'currently looking for a job.' If you have enough time to stay employed and surf the internet: you probably just feel like you're employed to receive a paycheck. Not challenged at all and seeking adventure in a new shiny grass field. Let's read about those greener fields (or burn time) instead of acting on it.
There is a significant relationship between willingness to invest effort and potential payoff. Spending ten minutes playing with what is essentially an online pivottable to possibly find learn an interesting but ultimately useless factoid counts for me as a large investment for a low payoff.
No, that makes perfect sense. The ones with the high SO rep are the ones that have the most time on their hands, the others are clocking up paid hours.
Joking aside, I'm genuinely confused as to how you survey that many of the site's users and get no one with rep above 10k. Especially considering that high rep users are much more engaged and invested in the site, and so I would expect a much higher response rate from them.
Yeah, sorry, just looking at this now. These are all represented in the raw data as "10,000" and "5,000", etc., as though they were actual numbers; they should actually be ranges, though, as indicated by that post.
It's a fun data set to explore, but without the ability to compare interaction effects the UI doesn't allow you to get very deep into the data. Also, it'd be nice to be able to filter out the highly correlated tables.
Otherwise a cool presentation, I particularly like the little arrows for significance p-vals and CI tooltips.
For now, the best way to deal with confounds and interactions is to run an analysis a couple times, filtering for a third variable in various ways to see how that affects the analysis.
Obviously it'd also be nice to also have multivariate regression, or at least views that integrate 3 different variables.
A bit off-topic but the page looks really heavy and responds slowly on a rather powerful machine that I have. Any idea if we can get a csv or raw data of this?
E.g. Ryan Dahl uses Linux and has objections towards OSX. I trust him (and others) and I use Ubuntu on a MBPR (Linus likes 13inch screens with high res & low weight... he actually has a Mac Book Air). Now Ubuntu is maybe okay but for a professional SW-developer/hacker there are a couple of more roads to go down with (BSD, myriad of Linux distros / devices). There is a Mac standing in our living room and if you are an iOS dev ofc. Better than Windows in my opinion.
I did some analysis that I think is a little more useful.
Compensation & Job => filtered by 'US only', 'not looking for a job', and 'provided a job'. https://www.statwing.com/demos/dev-survey-2#workspaces/18770