2016 European Software Development Salary Survey

Programming Languages

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES NATURALLY PLAYED A CENTRAL ROLE IN OUR SURVEY, and turned up important coefficients to explain salary differences. They also showed some correlations with other variables.

Correlations

A few differences in programming language by country and other variables are worth pointing out.

Country

• C#/ASP.NET/Visual Basic is more common in the UK (27%) than in Germany (12%); 19% of the rest of the sample (not in the UK or Germany) uses C#.
• PHP is more common in Germany and the Netherlands (25%) vs. 17% in the rest of the sample. It was very rare in Ireland with just 4% (only 2 of 48 Irish respondents reported using PHP).
• Germany had more Bash users (41% vs. 29%) and fewer ASP/ ASP.NET users (19% vs. 38%) than the rest of the sample.

Company size

• Smaller companies do more front-end web development: in companies with 2–25 employees, usage was high for CSS (47%), JavaScript (61%), HTML (61%), and PHP (26%). For the rest of the sample (mainly larger companies), the corresponding figures were 34%, 50%, 46% and 16%, respectively. Respondents from small (2–25) companies used Java less (29% vs. 40%).
• The largest companies (>10k employees) used C/C++ more, 26% vs. 15% for smaller companies.

Company age

• Young companies (2 to 5 years) had higher rates of Ruby (18% vs. 11%) and lower rates of ASP/ASP.NET and C# (4% and 9%, respectively, vs. 12% and 23%).
• Old companies (> 20 years) used C/C++ more (24% vs. 13%) with lower rates of JavaScript (45% ...