News

Interactive Stack Overflow Tool Reveals Developer Salaries

• By David Ramel
• September 22, 2017

Stack Overflow has published a salary calculator tool to answer the question: "How much do developers earn?"

Based on the site's massive developer survey (more than 64,000 respondents), the Stack Overflow Salary Calculator lets users investigate salary ranges according to a developer's role, experience level, location, specific technology expertise and education.

"The reason we built the calculator with these inputs is that we found these specific characteristics to be most predictive of a developer's salary, tabs or spaces notwithstanding," Stack Overflow said in a post Tuesday. "There are also more subjective ways that coders are evaluated and compensated. We at Stack Overflow have written publicly about how that happens here but we don't take that kind of skills assessment into account in this current model."

Among the input factors, geography has a significant impact, Stack Overflow said, offering this graphic as proof that U.S. coders enjoy a special status among worldwide developers:

The type of developer is also important, as data shows DevOps specialists earn top dollar, followed by data scientists, embedded applications/devices developers, quality assurance engineers and Web developers.

Mobile coders, despite a well-documented skills gap that's hindering enterprise mobility efforts, comes in at No. 6 on that list.

The tool lets developers input their own data to get salary range estimates, while also providing them the opportunity to add their own salary information in order to improve the tool.

"As an employer, you can learn more about industry salary ranges and the competitive marketplace for developers' skills," Stack Overflow said.

The tool's data should probably be ingested with a grain of salt, however, as Stack Overflow earlier made the dubious (and perhaps tongue-in-cheek) claim that developers who indent with spaces make more than those who use tabs.