Over a third of respondents to the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey shared details of their salaries, revealing that average developer salaries have fallen by about $10K USD. Another concerning finding is that only 20% are happy in their current role.
This year's survey took place in May 2024 with responses from more than 65,000 developers across 185 countries, with the United States (18.9%), Germany (8.4%), India (7.2%), the United Kingdom (5.5%) and Ukraine (4.6%), being the top five.
Looking at employment status, worldwide 84% of respondents were working either part-time, freelancing, or full-time.
There were regional variations, in the USA full-time employment 65%, down from 69% in the 2023 edition of the survey. In Germany and India only 56% of respondents were full-time employees but a larger percentage, nearly 20% were students. In the UK and Ukraine a larger percentage were independent consultants or freelancers, 12% and 15% respectively.
Asked about work environment, 42% of respondents selected "Hybrid", 38% "Remote" and 20% "In-person", a percentage that had increased from 15% in 2022 and 16% in 2023.
As would be expected when it comes to remuneration there is a clear correlation between years of experience and salary.
This chart, Salary by Developer type, is based on all 22,677 respondents worldwide who supplied data about pay. It calculates the top salary, that of Senior Executive as on average $127,388, followed in second place by Developer Advocate, $124,203 and in third place Manager, $115,999. The highest reported salaries are from the USA with Senior Executives earning on average $225,000 and Managers, $192,500.
From the chart, developer salaries are concentrated between $60,000-$80,000 worldwide and $135,000-$145,000 in the USA. Higher pay is awarded to site reliability engineers ($99,099/$166,500) and cloud infrastructure engineers ($96,666/$165,000), which as the report notes are pivotal roles in keeping digital services up and running.
One anomaly is that in the USA mobile devs earn $185,000 on average whereas globally their salary is below the median at $54,340. Academic Researcher is the lowest paid role in the USA at $62,000 (compared to $48,820 worldwide) and System Administrator next lowest at $83,080 ($50,133 worldwide). On a worldwide basis Front-end Web Developer is even lower at $48,787 whereas at $135,000 in the US it at the low end of the median range. The explanation for this discrepancy is that in India this role has an average salary of $14,356.
Looking at the Salary and experience by Language chart, which is on a worldwide basis, notice that average years on the x-axis now starts at 8 and salary on the y-axis starts at $40,000 - students who had average salary around $15,00 and just over 2 years of average experience have been excluded.
Developers that are using Erlang and Clojure are top earners in the past year, averaging more than $95K annually with about 12 years experience. At the other end of the scale those working with Dart and Prolog are earning the least annually, averaging less than $45K with less than 10 years experience.
As last year, PHP devs earn less than expected given their experience - a factor which might be explained by the India-effect and Delphi programmers are the most disadvantaged outliers, and like Cobol and Perl devs who have on average over 16 years of experience suffer the consequences of working with legacy languages. Conversely Scala and Ruby developers earn more than expected given their experience.
The most common language JavaScript is, as could be expected, in on-trend - average experience (just under 10 years) and average salary(around $63,000). Python devs are on average around half a year less experienced and have salaries around $5,000 higher. Rust and Go at just over $75,000 are both above the trend as are "unusual" languages Zig and Ocaml which attract a similar salary.
This year, professional developers were asked about whether they were happy in their current role with this result:
The predominant response, given by almost half of respondents was neither happy nor unhappy, but more were unhappy than happy, which is a turnaround from when Stack Overflow asked a similar question in 2015 when 36% chose the option "I love my job" and a further 40% chose "I'm somewhat satisfied with my job".
The two most important factors contributing to job satisfaction was the same for all respondents and were " Improving quality of code and developer environments" and "Learning/Using new tech." So why if devs share the same values, are so few of them feeling happy?
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