2016 European Software Development Salary Survey

Title, Role, and Tasks

WE TOOK TWO DISTINCT APPROACHES to defining the roles of respondents. The first was a text field for job title, which we parsed to assign respondents to a category. The most common (cleaned) title was Engineer/Developer/ Programmer, with 45% of the sample. Engineers or developers with “Senior” in their title made up a further 15% of sample. Two titles were given positive coefficients: Principal/Lead (8% of the sample, for +$6,254) and Architect (7%, for +$10,990). As mentioned at the start of this report, managers and students were excluded from the model, so there were no coefficients associated with them.

The second approach to capturing respondents’ roles was to ask whether they engaged in specific tasks. The three possible answers to each of the 16 task questions was “no involvement”, “minor involvement”, and “major involvement”, which was defined as a task that “is essential to most or all of your projects and responsibilities, and that you perform frequently (most days)”.

The two tasks with the greatest involvement were writing code for collaborative projects (72% major, 21% minor) and reading/editing code originally written by others (61% major, 32% minor). Even though neither of these tasks had associated coefficients, their high engagement rates highlight the importance of collaboration in software development: it is often a very social activity.

Back-end web development was also very common (56% major, 26% minor), more than front-end web development ...