Which programming languages earn you the most money? Use this calculator to check

Stack Overflow, the developer community and jobs site, has launched a new salary calculator to help developers figure out what they could be paid according to the role, location, education level, experience, and areas of expertise.

The calculator is based on the company's 2017 developer survey, which collected responses to a variety of questions from 64,000 developers.

A portion of them, around 12,100, also supplied salary details, which Stack Overflow has used to determine average salaries in different locations and which technologies attract higher salaries.

For example, it found that US developers who use Go and Scala earned the most, with an average salary of $110,000, while top-earning UK developers used TypeScript and earned $53,000. A stranger finding was that developers who used spaces for indentation earned more than those who use tabs.

The calculator currently covers developer salaries in the US, Canada, the UK, France, and Germany. As it notes, the biggest factor determining salaries is geography, with developers in the US earning more than the other included geographies. Developers can also select key cities, including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, London, Paris, Berlin, and Toronto.

The calculator also offers an optional technologies field with tags for key technologies, frameworks and platforms.

The company plans to expand the calculator to India and other countries in the future.

After plugging in your details, the calculator spits out a predicted salary range in a format that might be appreciated by people familiar with regression analysis. That is, with a "50 percent prediction interval", which means it expects that half the people with the same characteristics as the data entered to have salaries in that range. It also includes 25th and 75th percentiles.

"The interval is just as important as the prediction itself (the 50th percentile), because it gives you an understanding of what the range of expected salaries could be," Stack Overflow data scientist Julia Silge explains.

Of course, the results are shown on a page that lists a range of jobs relevant to the skills and location that were inserted into the calculator. The predictions are also in the currency of the geography being explored.

According to its survey data, the highest median salaries go to developers working in DevOps, followed by data scientists, embedded applications and devices developers, quality-assurance engineers, web developers and mobile developers.

Stack Overflow also found an increase in salary for developers who use React.js or Amazon Web Services professionally.

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