idealpeople blog

Blimey, we’ve been inundated.

We’ve almost lost count of the number of people who have responded to our popular thread on which programming are hot and which are not asking for information on which programming languages were attracting the best salaries.

Now this was a tricky one, but you’ll be pleased to know that we have some data for you. This - as with all salary surveys - comes with a health warning. In particular, we’d like to stress that we can’t guarantee that just because you have skills in one of the below areas, then you’re guaranteed to get the salary specified. Salaries vary massivley according to experience, responsibility and location - and generally, salary surveys are to be ignored. You are worth what a company is willing to pay you

This data is based on actual salaries of people we placed in 2007. They’re not based on predicted salaries or advertised salaries, they’re actual salaries. There is, of course, some skew - we’ve placed people at all levels within businesses, but we’re having to assume that this skew is the same across all programming languages. We’ve also had to simplify some of the languages and group them together a bit.

Anyway, that’s the boring stuff over, and here’s the results…..

1) J2EE/Java/J2SE/J2ME - average salary of £41,605
2) Embedded C - average salary of £39,500
3) SAS* - £38,000
4) C++ - £33,187
5) C - £31,416
6) PHP/HTML/Perl/HTML/Web Programming - £30,416
7) C# - £29,780
8) VB/VB.NET - £28,000
9) COBOL - £27,500

*Yes, we know SAS wasn’t in the original study. And when we say SAS, we mean SAS programmers, not analysts.

Now, what’s interesting about this is that even though C/C++/C# were both in higher demand and harder to find than the Java technologies in our last survey, the programmers out there with the finely tuned Java/JEE skills are being paid the most. By far. And as for the rarest skill of all - C# - well, quite what’s going on there is hard to figure out. Maybe those C# engineers are so hard to find because salaries are so poor. Or maybe more and more people are looking at Java/JEE because the salaries are higher? Who knows……?

Part 2 of the Hot Skills series, which will feature databases, is coming soon. Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss it!