Which programming language should I learn?
This is the most common question asked by aspiring software engineers, and the answer is always: it depends on your preferences and what you want to build.
But maybe you want to take another route and learn the language for which the company pays you the most.
If so, this article is for you.
Let’s take a closer look.
StackOverflow Survey
StackOverflow is the OG site where developers can find answers to their questions and share their knowledge with others.
Every year, they conduct asurvey asking thousands of professional developers a variety of questions.
For example:
What is your salary?
Fortunately, they also ask:
What programming, scripting, and markup languages have you used to do a lot of your development work over the past year?
great! Let’s see which programming language pays the best.
Clean data
First, I had to make sure we weren't comparing apples and oranges relative to wages.
Developers in the US earn significantly more than similar developers in most other countries, and I'm only looking at full-time employees with a pure developer role.
so = answers_df = pd.concat([
pd.read_csv("../StackOverflow/data/2022/survey_results_public.csv"),
pd.read_csv("../StackOverflow/data/2021/survey_results_public.csv"),
])
so = so[so.MainBranch == "I am a developer by profession"]
so = so[so.Employment.str.replace(",", "") == "Employed full-time"]
so = so[so.Country == "United States of America"]
so = so[so.ConvertedCompYearly.notnull()]This leaves me with 15,501 developers out of 156,707 developers, which is almost exactly 10% of the dataset.
The highest and lowest paying programming languages
Here are the languages in the survey with more than 100 users, ordered from most paid to least paid.
Functional programming languages are in high demand!
To dig deeper, we can also look at the underlying distribution of each language. Here we see full-time developer salaries in the United States in 2022.
It's hard to draw any conclusions from the distributions, but it's interesting to look at the shapes and how they differ.
database
Language wasn't the only question they asked in the survey. Another question - which database environments have you done a lot of development work in over the past year?
web framework
We have the same issue with web frameworks, which are the only technology we see no salary growth between 2021 and 2022.
Other technologies
This is the last one - what other frameworks and libraries have you worked extensively on over the past year?
There are also some that don't show the same difference in salary, such as collaboration platforms and tools.