Top 13 Highest Paying Developer Jobs in 2017

A recent survey by Stack Overflow has managed to find the 13 highest paying developer jobs across the world. These chaps have provided this data every year since 2011. The current survey represents the largest group of respondents for Stack Overflow in their history. A staggering 64,000 developers took their annual survey.

Stack Overflow is the world's biggest and most trusted community for software developers. As a reward to their users, they run these surveys to share these results to improve their lives.

Stack Overflow says, "we want to empower developers by providing them with rich information about themselves, their industry, and their peers. And we want to use this information to educate employers about who developers are and what they need."

Fair enough. Their forums have saved my bacon more than a few times. Cheers guys!

Methodology for calculating the highest paying software jobs 2017

The following results are the median results of 12,475 respondents converted to USD. They took responses from 64,277 software developers from over 213 countries and territories across the globe. These respondents were approached through channels primarily "owned" by Stack Overflow.

These include blog posts and ads on their site. The following list is for the top 13 categories only of the total supplied for the highest paying software jobs.

Of the total around 36,601 (about 57%) completed the entire survey, 24% partially completed it with a total of 51,392 useful responses. The survey was run between the 12th of January 2017 and 6th February 2017.

Salary information was provided by 32% of the respondents. Extreme outliers were trimmed from the data if in excess of $200,000. Those who provided salary information were asked to convert their salaries into dollars at the exchange rate prevailing midway through the survey. Respondents were asked to provide either their current or expected post-graduation salaries. This accounted for about 0.5% of responses.

Their full methodology can be found here. With that out of the way here are the results for the highest paying developer jobs.

https://youtu.be/TALH8SsQJp4

1. DevOps specialist

Average Developer Jobs Salary: $60,215

DevOps or Development and Operations, if you didn't know (but were are confident you could work it out), are "officially" the highest paying developer jobs of 2017. With a stonking global median of $60,215, it's certainly something to consider if you're thinking of a career in software development. As the above-noted salary is the median across the world it might be putting it in perspective. In the US the average declared salary for this position is $100,000. Nice.

Average Developer Jobs Salary: $57,000

Next of the highest paying developer jobs is the Machine learning specialist on $57,000 median salary, nice. These guys focus on a branch of computer science that develops algorithms that can "learn", not too shabby. In fact, their work provides algorithms that take data and adapt to make predictions. Such algorithms are used by large organizations like Amazon to persuade you to part with your hard earned cash. The swines!

3. Developer with a statistics or mathematics background

Average Developer Jobs Salary: $55,000

Ok, a bit of a broad brush stroke category here. Given the primary focus of computer science on handling and manipulating data, this is probably not a surprise, of course. The results of the survey indicate that applying mathematical of statistical experience in computer science might be worth your while.

https://youtu.be/nLLlunR5cGo

4. Data Scientist

Average Developer Jobs Salary: $53,763

These chaps spend their time analyzing and interpreting complex data sets. They are ranked 4th on the list of highest paying developer jobs. And they seem to be handsomely rewarded for their labors. Remember the figures provided are a global median, but of course, you knew that. If you fancy spending your days analyzing website usage stats, for example, you might want to consider this career. They are also found assisting businesses in their decision-making processes.

5. Quality assurance engineer

Average Developer Jobs Salary: $53,757

Ah, quality assurance. A title to put the quiver up any developer's spine. Although they might be deemed an "annoyance" to most, they play a vital role in the usability and integrity of any software development. These peeps spend their days testing software to destruction. They tend to test software at all stages of development or oversee the entire development process. To be honest it might be cheaper to just ask the company's average administrator to test it, sorry break it, at a fraction of the cost. Only joking of course, but the average "Joe" seems to have an inane ability, far in excess of any experienced QA, to quickly find problems with any "well tested" software.