programming

Dice.com shared recently an article about programming languages that pay ultra-high salaries, written by Nick Kolakowski. The article used “Burning Glass” data, which collects and analyzes millions of job postings from across the country”, US of course. The only report published we found on Burning Glass was published about two years ago about coding skills in the job market.

There are probably other reports or data that are unpublished, or available on demand for their customers, but anyway the top 12 programming languages with ultra high salaries found according to this reports are : C, C++, Ruby, Go, Objective C, Perl, CSS, Visual Basic, Javascript, Python and Swift.

Of course I will not comment why there is CSS inside programming languages. That could happen. Even Visual Basic, since they are talking about 10-years projected growth. That could happen too. What I find interesting that we share the same conclusion with Dice’s author since he noticed that some programming languages are missing “such as C# and Kotlin”. But, what about PHP ?

According to PayScale PHP salaries average is $70,352. PayScale is a compensation software and data company which helps employers manage employee compensation and employees understand their worth in the job market. Let see how previous programming languages salaries goes at PayScale, and very sorry CSS for being dropped from the list :

Programming languageAverage Salary in US dollars
Go116,156
Erlang114,866
Objective C102,276
Kotlin98,325
Swift97,100
Perl93,951
Ruby on Rails92,581
Python91,166
Java90,958
C89,990
NodeJs89,285
C++87,830
.NET84,396
Javascript82,655
C#82,192
VB.NET77,490
Visual Basic70,736
PHP70,352

And the winner is (drum roll…) Go lang ! Wish if it was a competition, it will be much easier. The issue is that we are comparing here the Average. To see the big image of the ecosystem, you need to see also the number of jobs available in each programming language, and the number of programmers available in the market.

Now someone will tell me, I’ll pick the top programming languages that pay ultra high salaries (Golang), and I’ll have highest chances to get higher salary than the lowest (PHP). This could be a good strategy if you can guarantee getting a job, it will be for sure with higher salary. So this conditional clause will make the difference, because in reality there are no ultra high salaries for programming languages, but for projects built with these programming languages !

So if you are a senior developer, with a strong experience, you should find yourself in the top of this table, maybe higher. The choice of the programming language always depends on many factors in the ecosystem including programmers availability, maturity level of the programming language, …etc. That’s why higher salaries have less chances to get ultra high paid positions, and vice versa.

So if you don’t find PHP on the top paid programming languages, that doesn’t mean PHP jobs are not well paid, but because there are too much PHP jobs available on the market and these jobs salaries range from very low salaries to ultra high ones. Or simply, PHP senior developers change career to management positions, the reason why you don’t find them anymore tagged with PHP programming language.

1 COMMENT

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here