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Best-paying programming languages, skills: Here are the top earners

Wages growth for tech workers was flat last year, but pay for some roles and skills has been growing much faster.
Written by Liam Tung, Contributing Writer

Wages growth for tech jobs in the US was stagnant in 2018, rising just 0.6 percent from 2017 to an average of $93,244 for the year, accord to Dice's 2019 tech salary report

Average tech wages haven't increased since 2015, when the average was actually higher than today at $93,328, according to Dice's data, and that's despite historically low levels of unemployment in the sector. 

However, there are a few specialized skills and roles that have seen higher than average growth, which could motivate some into making a career pivot. 

Dice's survey of 10,780 technology professionals finds that 68 percent would jump ship to get a higher wage, compared with 47 percent who would do it for better working conditions, like remote work and more flexible hours.

As expected, the top-paying tech jobs are held by C-level execs and directors, whose average annual salary grew 3.9 percent over the year to $142,063. 

Salaries for software engineers grew 5.1 percent to $110,898, while technology strategist and architect wages grew eight percent to $127,121. 

Database administrators on average received $103,473 per year but wages grew only 0.2 percent. Meanwhile, web developer and programmer salaries grew 11.6 percent to $82,765. Even technical-support wages saw decent growth of 6.8 percent to $60,600. 

Average wages for software engineers grew 5.1 percent to $111,000, while app-developer wages grew 7.6 percent to $105,200. Other roles that paid between $100,000 to $115,000 include DevOps engineer, hardware engineer, project manager, and security analyst.   

SEE: How to build a successful developer career (free PDF)

Looking at the most lucrative skills, Dice finds that programmers using Google-developed Go, or Golang, earned the highest on average at $132,827, while programmers using Apache Kafka earned an average of $127,554. 

Besides Go, the top-paying languages, according to a list compiled by ZDNet sister site TechRepublic, are Perl, Shell, Node.js JavaScript, Java/J2EE, TypeScript, Python, Ruby, Swift, and C#. All commanded average wages of between $110,000 and $101,000. 

Skillsets where average annual wages exceeded $120,000 include Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, Apache Cassandra, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, MapReduce, and SAP HANA.    

Some skills saw significant declines in average wages. The average wage for those skilled in the iOS graph design app declined 12.1 percent to $107,061, while wages for those skilled in Rackspace technology slipped 7.1 percent to $104,782. 

Others broadly defined skills where average wages declined by more than five percent but still exceeded $100,000 include infrastructure as a service, Pure Storage, NetApp, Fortran, 3Par, software-defined networks, Informix, Siebel, unified communications, Compellent, Glassfish, Sun, Objective-C, and IBM's Infosphere Data Stage.         

The top-paying location is Silicon Valley, where average wages for tech jobs rose 3.2 percent to $118,306. Other cities where average wages are between $105,000 and $100,000 include Seattle, San Diego, Minneapolis, Boston, Baltimore, Portland, and New York. 

However the best cities, adjusted for the local cost of living, are Minneapolis, Portland, Tampa, Charlotte, and Seattle. 

dicetechskills2019.jpg

Dice finds that programmers using Google-developed Go, or Golang, earned the most on average at $132,827.

Image: Dice

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