How much does knowing a specific computer language or the number of years of professional experience one has the matter in terms of salary? Stack Overflow’s users were required to fill out a survey with questions relating to their knowledge and jobs. Using the results of this survey and exploratory data analysis methods, I have attempted to answer this question. In order to do so, I have formulated three questions and will display below the results in three different graphs.
- Which computer language is the most used by users?
With the variety of programming languages nowadays it is almost impossible to know all of them. However, which ones are the most popular? Stack Overflow asked its users which computer language they use regularly and the results from this question can be seen in the following bar chart:
We can clearly see that C and Java are the most used programming languages, which is not surprising as C is a relatively small language and, therefore, a popular first language to learn, and Java runs on over 3 billion devices worldwide. They are followed by JavaScript, HTML/CSS and SQL.
- Which computer languages are associated with the highest salaries?
Now that we know which languages are the most popular, let’s find out which ones actually allows one to earn the most.
As it can be seen from this box plot, once the outliers are removed there is not much variance in salaries between the different computer languages. Go, Perl, Objective-C and Scala have the highest median, whilst PHP, Julia and Dart have the lowest.
- What is the average salary compared to years of experience?
Knowing a certain language is thankfully not the only factor contributing to how much a programmer makes. Professional experience in the field is of equal or sometimes even greater importance. So, how much does salary vary depending on years of experience?
As it can be seen on this scatter graph, the increase in salary compared to years of experience is fairly linear. Each dot represents the average in salary for all the users that have worked for that certain amount of years. The orange line represents the best fit and is drawn based on the data used for this graph.
So, how much does knowing a specific computer language or the amount of years of professional experience one has matter in terms of salary? As we have seen from the results of the second question, using a specific computer language does not actually mean you will earn significantly more or less. Nevertheless, years of professional experience do generally matter when looking at annual salary.