Indeed Salary Search is an index of salary information extracted from over 50 million job postings from thousands of unique sources over the last 12 months. Many job descriptions don’t contain salary information, but there are enough that do to produce statistically significant median salaries.
Inspired by The Unix Guy, following are the annual salaries (as of June 10, 2008) for software developer jobs for the most popular programming languages and a few related technologies such as LAMP, Ajax and ASP.NET. The second column lists the salary for developer jobs in that language, such that the job title for C# would be “C# developer.” The third column lists senior developer salary, and the fourth columns lists junior developer salary. Note that some jobs had no listings for the specified language.
| Language | Developer Salary | Senior Developer | Junior Developer |
| C++ | $85K | $90K | $52K |
| Python | $84K | — | — |
| C# | $81K | $91K | $57K |
| C | $80K | $88K | — |
| UI | $79K | $91K | — |
| Java | $79K | $84K | $54K |
| LAMP | $75K | $78K | $44K |
| Ajax | $78K | — | — |
| Cobol | $77K | $77K | — |
| SQL | $76K | $79K | $66K |
| Perl | $76K | $75K | — |
| Ruby | $75K | — | — |
| JavaScript | $74K | — | — |
| Delphi | $73K | $80K | — |
| VB.NET | $71K | $83K | $52K |
| ColdFusion | $70K | $81K | $44K |
| ASP.NET | $68K | $82K | $55K |
| PHP | $64K | $73K | $44K |
Article published on June 10, 2008
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June 10th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Wait. So you’re telling me that a PHP programmer makes $73K as a senior developer, but a senior LAMP programmer makes $78K, and if he can do SQL it’s $79K, and UI work he can make $91K? WTF?
June 10th, 2008 at 11:24 am
[…] Bix wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptInspired by The Unix Guy, following are the annual salaries (as of June 10, 2008) for software developer jobs for the most popular programming languages and a few related technologies such as LAMP, Ajax and ASP.NET. … […]
June 10th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Yes, that’s what the data says. Odd, isn’t it? For some reason, dedicated UI developers are very expensive. My experience in business has shown this to be true. Maybe it’s similar to why the lead singer in a rock band is usually the most important member. They are the interface to the audience, just as the UI developer is the interface to the customer. Or maybe it’s just a supply & demand equation: there are more PHP and LAMP experts than UI experts.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:26 am
[…] Darren Murph wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptInspired by The Unix Guy, following are the annual salaries (as of June 10, 2008) for software developer jobs for the most popular programming languages and a few related technologies such as LAMP, Ajax and ASP.NET. … […]
June 10th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
This is just more garbage from indeed.com. It’s already been busted.
June 10th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Savagecat, can you provide me with some links to this negative information on indeed.com? A search on Google turns up only positive information, yet I have been receiving many flames from developers about indeed.com. I’d like to see the evidence/discussion. Thank you.
June 10th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
great, I write Py/Ajax/JavaScript and I get $13K at my country lol
June 10th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
This report is very inconsistent.
LAMP Programmers may include PHP and Perl Programmers.
ASP.NET can include VB.NET and C# (since the former two are languages and the first is a technology utilizing these two).
AJAX is a set of technologies that are based on JavaScript but cannot be usually used without a server side technology (ASP.NET, JSP, PHP etc.)
June 10th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Don’t think of these as cumulative qualities that you can add and subtract to equal net worth. i.e. LAMP = PHP + Perl + MySQL, etc. These numbers are simply salary statistics derived from job titles. So if there were two “C++ Developer” jobs currently available, one for $80K and the other for $90K, the average would be $85K as shown in this report. The value of the numbers is that there are thousands of jobs available at any one time, so this gives a good pulse. Note these numbers will vary with time based on jobs available. So you should also investigate salary trends from sites like salary.com, monster.com, etc.
June 10th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Alrightee… But when I write a web site in ASP.NET I automatically write in C# or VB.NET or even combined. In this case how can an ASP.NET job be considered? Simply an ASP.NET job or a C# one? Or both?
June 10th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
@timm
The majority of salaries listed on sites like Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, and even the salaries listed on Salary.com and Indeed.com are very over-inflated and a far stretch from the actual salaries paid. The trend is recruiters listing the “bill to customer rate” rather than the actual employee salary rate. It’s a slick bait-and-switch routine.
June 10th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Re: In this case how can an ASP.NET job be considered? Simply an ASP.NET job or a C# one? Or both?
Based on today’s available jobs, an “ASP.NET Developer” job title is considered to be less valuable than a “C# developer” job title. ASP.NET requires C# (or VB.NET or some other .NET language), but C# is also much more than just ASP.NET. Which is why this list is not a skills=salary calculator, but rather just a statistical reporting on the salaries associated with various job titles.
I believe most people will find that location is the single biggest factor on salaries. Cost of living in that area, supply of available jobs of that type, and demand of qualified candidates ultimately determine what the market is willing to pay for a given job position.
June 10th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
[…] Software Developer Salaries (tags: jobsearch salary jobs ** developer company business) […]
June 12th, 2008 at 8:19 am
[…] Software Developer Salaries per Programming Languages – It still pays to know c++ […]
June 13th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
@#9 I think Timm is right. It only makes sense that the lowest paid jobs are going to be the ones that sit on the boards longest. And the higher paid jobs for the same skill set will usually never hit a board, since they will be filled before that ever get listed.
I guess this statistic is like any other, you need to follow the money, to find the true motivation for the article. Someone wants us to believe that C# developers get paid the most, and I can imagine how funded this study. And it wasn’t the companies behind PHP, LAMP, Ruby or Java.
It’s just paid advertised garbage.
June 14th, 2008 at 5:15 am
These prices do not reflect the Tampa metro area. Java Enterprise is still a hot job opportunity and pays close to 90k.
Is this statistic just data culled from job websites…..it certainly is not reality.
Regards,
Tom Pridham
June 15th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
[…] se você quer passar raiva clique aqui: Software Developer Salaries e veja quanto o mercado norte-americano paga para seus […]
June 17th, 2008 at 6:00 am
ohh… WTF! I earn about $7000 per year as a .Net developer…
June 17th, 2008 at 6:02 am
Wait man, compare your income to your country’s average income and the average cost of life in your area too.
June 20th, 2008 at 7:49 am
Interesting survey 🙂 … Good to learn that C# programmers are in the top-3 spot. You can never go wrong with .Net!
Cheers man!
Cyril
June 21st, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Perhaps I am fortunate; my title is “architect” and I code 80% of the time in C#. I earn $136k a year and them around me are not too far behind; moreover, I have external clients whom I charge $95/hr. It is all about motivation and the ability to take chances.
I read the LAMP folks take exception yet in the market, advanced .Net is in extreme demand and PHP or Ruby folks are opined as “cheap labor”. The prevailing attitude is “…if I do not have to pay for the software, why should I spend a lot for open-source scripters…”
I have overheard that too many times to be an isolated opinion.
June 26th, 2008 at 3:10 am
[…] most popular programming languages and a few related technologies such as LAMP, Ajax and ASP.NET.https://www.devtopics.com/software-developer-salaries/New to Development?If you are completely new to development, this page provides the learning […]
October 3rd, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Thank you so much for the statistics! 🙂 This will really help me when I am evaluating potential offers.
August 31st, 2009 at 12:30 pm
i plan to go to itt 4 software development technology// could some 1 give me some advice// iit cost 45000 4 the complete Associate program
January 19th, 2010 at 8:31 am
Excuse me,is that per year or month?
January 24th, 2010 at 12:53 pm
Of course, you shouldn’t take this into account too seriously. Actual salary gets determined by your skills and abilities… Once you’ve gone through several successful projects it won’t be hard to find high-paying jobs.
February 26th, 2010 at 10:47 pm
In Puerto Rico the developer scale is:
$20K (less than 5 years of experience) to $35K (over 5 years of experience) for .NET and Java which are the only jobs available.
April 2nd, 2010 at 2:09 am
What the **** ? it all wrong info 🙁
April 9th, 2010 at 8:42 am
in my country(IRAN) developer are so poor :people -(
April 29th, 2010 at 4:32 pm
guys the information is greately useful to me….!
I had already been planning to learn AJAX this summer vacation….!
thanx to author of this blog…!
May 1st, 2010 at 9:44 am
haha…this is crapshit…its too over inflated…rare ppl get paid arnd that much…especially in a country like India…n maybe thats why a lot projects are outsourced to the third world..
dont use or trust this info..its crap
July 9th, 2010 at 3:18 am
Is this data from planet Richie Rich? It is so over inflated… Go to the Philippines and you’ll find that most programmer are only paid around $4,500 per year whatever your skills chest contains!!! Very cheap labor for corrupt and savage employers.
July 10th, 2010 at 10:41 pm
I’m in China,I get 10K salary per year,you are in a right country!
July 16th, 2010 at 3:55 am
Great I write CC++C# code and only get $4.7K per year in my country.
September 23rd, 2010 at 7:55 am
Pure crap
September 26th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
.NET is an overpriced snap together module system… very few ‘.net developers’ can handle lower end coding… BTW, see the ASP exploit that effects ALL ASP sessions? This is why opensource is the future. Why pay a 20k license for SQL server setup, pay $ for each module implementation you want to use, pay $ for a guy to botch up code using bloated visual studio GUI. I’m currently porting sites as fast as i can to LAMP, saving my clients money & making my pockets fat. newbz
September 26th, 2010 at 6:09 pm
This is great news, I’m coding .NET and SQL Server and my salary in my country (Jamaica) is 11+K. While I agree that a lot of ‘.Net developers’ these days may not be able to handle lower end coding, the question is; What lower end coding is there to be handled in today’s market of Distributed Computing? While I do not decry the technologies inherent in LAMP based systems, a lot of business intensive applications depend on .NET because of (1.) It’s proven track-record and (2.) These languages are to a large extent, accepted because they are mostly improvements on pre-existing technologies. It all comes back full circle on the market and what is required.
December 5th, 2010 at 2:10 am
These sorts of stats can be sort of interesting, but like most stats that are quite misleading if you don’t carefully look at how they were gathered. For one thing the vast majority of jobs postings do not include salary info. Unless we have some other information to support the claim that jobs that post the salary generally pay the same as those that don’t then these stats don’t really tell us much.
The other factor that has not been mentioned (at least not directly) in the comments is that the programming language has very little to do with the salary is a person is paid. As the salary increases, this becomes more important. Good programmers have a variety of skills that don’t involve the act of programming in a specific language. Things like communication, abstract thinking, problem solving.
Personally, I see these stats as little more than a very rough approximation. I don’t think they are useful in any specific situation.
December 16th, 2010 at 7:11 pm
I think there’s a systematic bias in these figures. I hypothesize that postings for jobs with higher salaries will be more likely to list a salary figure.
December 27th, 2010 at 12:59 am
If you’re worried about making a ton of money you shouldn’t be writing code. I started making much better money when I realized I could tell a group of developers what to do, take credit for their work and get a nice bonus. Sounds harsh but it is exactly what your Project Manager/Team Lead is doing to you…just being honest here. With salary and bonus and overtime (yes I actually get overtime) I will earn double what the best UI developer makes in this little survey.
So if you are writing code for big bucks, quit it, if you’re writing code because it’s fun and interesting then by all means keep at it (because it really is fun to create something from nothing).
So how to make big bucks writing code? It can be done! Find something that
#1: can’t be outsourced (security, defense, etc…)
#2: get a security clearance (if you can stomach govt. contracting)
#3: niche (usually) legacy that isn’t going away but nobody wants to do it anymore…or the people who are doing it are going to retire soon
#4: be a contractor…this is especially good if your spouse/partner has good benefits
I pay contractors on my team between 65 and 75 an hour as W2 employees (no benefits). The team does C/C++ (and a little Java). I can usually get them Overtime approved as well…so a senior guy on my team makes 200k a year with Overtime (not bad). And yes, each of the 4 items above do apply to my team. So there you have it, you can make big bucks writing code regardless of what your little table says!
January 26th, 2011 at 8:12 pm
Hi,
I live in Canada and I’ve been coding for 5 years now :
Java, JSF, PL/SQL, C#, MC++, Perl, AJAX, Javascript, ADF and other frameworks.
I make 65K/year + benefits.
fyi…
January 29th, 2011 at 11:02 am
you are being ripped off. 65k is what an entry level guy usually makes out of college. All of this web stuff just doesn’t pay well.