2016 Software Development Salary Survey

Executive Summary

The O’Reilly Software Development Salary Survey contained 72 questions about the respondents’ roles, tools, compensation, and demographic background. Over 5,000 software engineers, developers, and other professionals involved in programming participated in the survey, providing us with the opportunity to explore the software-development world—and the careers that propel it—in great detail. Key findings include:

• Top languages currently used professionally in the sample: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Java, Bash, Python
• Respondents reported using an average of 3.75 languages
• The highest salaries are in the US (especially CA, OR, WA), Switzerland, Japan, Australia, and the UK
• Software development is a social endeavor: those on tiny teams and who don’t attend meetings tend to earn much less
• The most common languages that respondents used in the past but no longer use were C/C++, Java, PHP
• The most common languages that respondents stated they intend to learn in the next 1–2 years were Go, Swift, Python, and Scala

Salary estimates can be obtained from a model based on the survey data whose coefficients are mentioned throughout the report and repeated in full at the end. We hope you will learn something new (and useful!) from this report, and we encourage you to try plugging your own data points into the model.

You can take next year’s survey here.

Introduction

The first O’Reilly Software Development Salary Survey was conducted ...