Let’s dive into the most interesting results from the O’Reilly 2016 Salary Survey of 5,000 developers (which excluded managers and students).

The gender pay gap is real

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Not only are women grossly under-represented among developers, but they are grossly under-paid.

Women earned on average $13,000 less than their male counterparts.

Even when you control for location, title, and years of experience, women still get $5,000 less per year than men.

Employers actually do value age and experience

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One of the most common misconceptions about programming is that it’s a “young person’s game.”

But the astronomic salaries of recent college graduates at companies like Facebook are not representative of the field as a whole.

There’s a predictable correlation: the more experience you have — and generally, the older you are — the more you get paid. $1,194 more each year, to be exact.

Developers who shun meetings pay a price

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Like it or not, developers who spend more time in meetings — and less time coding — tend to make more money.

The bigger the company, the bigger your salary

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Part of this may be explained by smaller companies (startups?) granting equity in lieu of large salaries.

Interestingly, when you control for experience and location, freelancers make about $12,000 more per year than their full-time employee equivalents (though it’s not clear how much of this goes toward paying their own insurance.)

Most software jobs are actually outside of the tech industry

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Pretty much every large organization employs developers. Only about 1/3 of developers work in what we traditionally think of as the “tech” industry.

But some industries pay better than others

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The median annual developer salary was $90k.

But the same job in finance pays $11k more per year.

Education pays the worst — $11k less than median.

The more you work, the more you get paid

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Working smart is no substitute for working hard, at least as far as compensation is concerned.

About half of developers reported working 40 hours or more a week. And since the developers who spend the most time at their desk generally take home the most money, it’s hard to blame them.

What about people who are new to development?

We surveyed more than 15,000 people who are new to software development. And we’ve released the results as open data.

And here’s the full O’Reilly survey analysis (note: it’s email-walled).

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