Stack Overflow Reveals Insights Into UKI Developer Salaries and Top Programming Languages

The report’s results are drawn from the Stack Overflow Global Developer Survey, the largest survey of software developers ever, with over 100,000 respondents. The UK was the fourth highest represented country – over 6,700 of respondents live and work in the UK and Ireland.

Key findings

For higher salaries relative to experience, become a DevOps specialist, learn Groovy and move to England

• Developers in England have a median salary of £45,000, compared to £42,000 in Scotland, £41,500 in Wales and just £37,750 in Northern Ireland
• DevOps specialists and data scientists in UKI report a higher salary than what’s proportionate to their level of experience
• Overall, DevOps specialists command the second highest salary in the UK (£55,000), pipped to the post by engineering managers (£67,000)
• Groovy is the highest paid language in UKI despite developers’ levels of experience, with Scala and Go following behind
• The lowest paying languages are Matlab, VBA and the most dreaded Visual Basic 6

Do developers have their priorities straight?

When it comes to compensation and benefits, a whopping 78% of UKI developers said their highest priority was salary and/or bonuses.
The lowest priority for the most developers was child care benefit – 27% of developers said it was their lowest priority – followed by parental leave (16%)

Programming languages and technologies: what’s hot and what’s not

• Javascript, HTML and CSS are the three most commonly used languages by developers in the UK and Ireland, whereas Visual Basic 6,
• Groovy and Perl are the languages that are used the least.
• Kotlin and Rust both dominate as the most loved languages or developers in the UK, with Python, TypeScript and Go following right behind
• Almost 90% of the respondents said that they dread working with Visual Basic 6 and Cobol.
• Conversely, Python and Go are the two most sought-after programming languages.

Find the UK and Ireland Developer Hiring Landscape 2018 here.