salary - freeCodeCamp.org

Computer Programmer Salary – How Much Do Coders Make?

Dionysia Lemonaki — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 19:34:20 +0000

Coding is one of the most popular and in-demand careers.

There are many reasons why people choose a career in coding and computer science.

The technology field offers promising and diverse job prospects in several industries, job security, a generally comfortable starting salary, and increased high-earning potential as developers gain more experience.

And although coding is a lucrative career, it is not a get-rich-quick scheme.

As with learning any new skill, it takes a lot of time, effort, and consistency to get good at it.

Learning to code requires hard work, and you will need to work hard to get a high-paying job.

With all that said, how much do coders actually make? The answer to that question is: well, it depends.

A computer programmer's salary will depend on education, specialization, and experience - an entry-level computer programmer's salary will generally be lower than someone with a few years of industry experience under their belt.

And a computer programmer's salary will vary from country to country.

In this article, I go over what coding is, where it is used, and how you can get started learning to code.

I also list some of the most high-paying tech jobs you can get with coding skills and their average annual salaries for people in the United States.

Here is what we will cover:

What is coding and what is it used for?
1. How to become a coder - University Degree vs Bootcamp vs self-taught
What are the most commonly used programming languages? In demand programming languages for top paying coding jobs
How much do coders make? US salaries for the highest paying coding jobs

What Is Coding and What Is It Used For?

We use applications, websites, electronic gadgets, and other technology tools daily.

Behind those modern software programs are thousands of lines of code.

Coding, also known as computer programming, is what powers those modern-day applications and websites.

Although computers are good at crunching numbers, processing large amounts of data, and are incredibly fast, they cannot fully think for themselves (at least not at the time of writing) - you have to tell them what to do.

Coding is how humans communicate with computers.

Specifically, coding is the process of giving a sequence of instructions to a machine using a programming language. The machine interprets the instructions and carries them out in order.

Essentially, coding tells a computer what to do and how to do it using a language both humans and machines can understand.

Computers do not understand human languages. They only speak binary, which is a language made up of 0s and 1s.

In binary, 0 represents off, and 1 represents on.

Binary is the primary language of all machines, which makes perfect sense since devices consist of a combination of thousands of transistors, which are tiny switches. The switches are either turned on or off depending on the flow of electricity.

Coding in binary is time-consuming and error-prone, so humans invented computer programming languages that are readable, easier to learn and understand, and more human-friendly.

To learn more about the definition of coding, check out this article.

And to learn more about what coding is used for, check out this article.

How to Become A Coder - University Degree vs Bootcamp vs Self-Taught

You have a few options to choose from when it comes to learning to code.

One of the options, and the more traditional one for learning to code, is to obtain a four-year Computer Science university degree.

Getting a Computer Science degree is an investment and a pricy route to take for learning to code - four-year Computer Science university degrees are not cheap.

With that said, a Computer Science degree from an accredited university is highly respected by employers, and it is an impressive credential on your résumé.

To learn more about what you can learn in a Computer Science degree, check out this article.

Another option is to attend a coding Bootcamp.

Coding Bootcamps are intensive training programs that teach you the necessary coding skills for landing a job. The average duration of a Bootcamp is around 15 weeks.

It is typically project-based learning, and by the end of the program, you will have a portfolio of work to showcase to prospective employers.

They also offer career support and guidance to help you prepare for coding interviews and advice on how you can transition into the tech industry and switch careers effectively.

With that said, it is still an expensive route to take. Some coding Bootcamps charge up to five-figure sums just for a couple of months of training.

To learn more about coding Bootcamps and figure out whether attending one is the right choice for you, read this article by Quincy Larson.

Attending a Computer Science university program or a Bootcamp is a great learning option if you enjoy a structured learning environment.

Another option is to learn to code on your own using either free or paid resources such as books, video tutorials, and interactive courses.

Learning to code on your own is a great option if you are busy, if you have life responsibilities such as taking care of family, or if you cannot quit your full-time job to pursue a career change.

You can learn at your own time and pace, and you can create your individualized schedule according to the spare time you have.

And while independent learning is not for everyone, it is a viable option for learning to code. It requires consistency and self-discipline, but you can do it if you put your mind to it.

Self-taught developers can earn six-figure salaries as they gain more experience, so it doesn't mean you will earn less if you are learning to code on your own.

And now is the best time to learn to code on your own. With a mobile phone or laptop at hand and an internet connection, you can access multiple learning resources on the world wide web.

freeCodeCamp is a non-profit organization whose mission is to help busy people from all over the world to learn to code for free.

freeCodeCamp makes tech education accessible by creating thousands of free educational materials.

You can check out their self-paced and comprehensive interactive coding curriculum, where you can build real-world projects and earn certifications you can add to your résumé or LinkedIn.

They also have one of the most popular tech education YouTube channels, where they post full-length courses on a variety of technology topics.

And they have a publication with 9000+ articles available for you to read and learn from when you want to dive deep into a specific topic.

freeCodeCamp also has a friendly and helpful developer community on their forum, where you can ask questions when you are stuck on a coding challenge and get answers.

freeCodeCamp also translates its learning resources into many major world languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and more.

The translation effort helps remove the language barrier when you want to learn to code and English is not your first language.

What Are The Most Commonly Used Programming Languages? In Demand Programming Languages for Top Paying Coding Jobs

Computer programming languages fall into one of two groups: low-level and high-level.

Low-level programming languages have little or no abstraction from the machine's instruction set. Essentially, their instructions resemble and are close to the machine's processor's instructions.

Binary code (or machine code) and assembly language are considered low-level programming languages.

High-level programming languages are more human-friendly.

They are similar to human languages and resemble and look a lot like English. They have syntactical elements like nouns, verbs, and phrases. And you group these elements to form something that resembles a sentence to create meaning.

They offer a shorter, more precise, and less verbose way to create instructions that the computer can understand.

The most popular high-level computer languages depend on the coding job you want to get and are often role specific.

Software Engineers

Software engineers are responsible for designing, building, testing, deploying, optimizing, and maintaining complex and large-scale applications, software systems, and tools for a variety of platforms.

As a software engineer, you may need to know one or more of the following languages:

Web Developers

Web developers are responsible for designing, creating, and maintaining websites. They are responsible for creating the layout of websites, fixing bugs, and ensuring they are fully functional, responsive, and have fast load times.

Their work will vary depending on whether they specialize in the frontend or backend of web applications or if they are fullstack web developers.

As a frontend web developer, you will need to know the following languages:

And as a backend web developer, you will need to know a server-side language such as:

And since you will be interacting with databases, you will also need to know SQL.

Information Security Analysts

Information Security analysts are responsible for ensuring the security of the organization's sensitive data, networks, and computer systems.

Essentially, they protect an organization from a cyber-attack.

Some of the languages used in the cybersecurity space are:

Database Administrators

Database administrators are responsible for designing, creating, updating, and testing databases and maintaining different types of information securely in database systems.

Here are some of the languages you would need to know as a database administrator:

Data Scientists

Data scientists are responsible for collecting, cleaning, modeling, visualizing, and interpreting data.

They gather raw data and can extract meaning, gain valuable insights, report key findings, and solve problems.

Some of the languages used in data science are the following:

How Much Do Coders Make? U.S. Salaries for the Highest Paying Coding Jobs

Multiple factors influence the salary potential for coders. No one factor will determine your earning potential.

In a nutshell, some of those factors are:

Education
Specialized skills
Experience
Industry
Location

As mentioned earlier, being self-taught doesn't mean you will earn less.

With that said, you may earn less at the beginning of your career compared to a someone who has a Computer Science degree from a 4-year university.

Besides just education, coding is a fast-paced field - you need to stay up to date with the latest trends and technologies to remain competitive in the market. Having in-demand skills will increase your earning potential significantly.

And with the more experience you gain and the more years you have worked in the industry, you will qualify for a higher salary.

That said, experience is not only the years you have worked but also the variety of projects you have worked on, the impact you have had on a company, and the leadership skills you have showcased, to name a few.

The industry you work in will also determine how much you earn. Some of the highest-paid industries are the tech industry, finance, healthcare, government and defense, and retail.

One of the most significant factors that will determine your earning potential is where you live, the cost of living, and the demand for computer programmers in that location.

Salaries will vary from state to state.

Some of the cities with the highest tech salaries are:

San Francisco, California
New York City
Seattle, Washington
Los Amgeles, California
Austin, Texas

Now, let's see the average salary for the highest-paid coding jobs for 2021.

How Much Do Software Engineers Make?

According to the U.S. Bureau of labor statistics, software engineers earned a median annual salary of $109,020 in 2021.

The anticipated change for 2021-2031 is a 25% growth, which is much faster than average.

How Much Do Web Developers Make?

According to the U.S. Bureau of labor statistics, web developers earned a median annual salary of $78,300 in 2021.

The anticipated change for 2021-2031 is a 23% growth, which is much faster than average.

How Much Do Information Security Analysts Make?

According to the U.S. Bureau of labor statistics, information security analysts earned a median annual salary of $102,600 in 2021.

The anticipated change for 2021-2031 is a 35% growth, which is much faster than average.

How Much Do Database Administrators Make?

According to the U.S. Bureau of labor statistics, database administrators earned a median annual salary of $101,000 in 2021.

The anticipated change for the period of 2021-2031 is a 9% growth, which is faster than average.

How Much Do Data Scientists Make?

According to the U. S. Bureau of labor statistics, data scientists earned a median annual salary of $100,910 in 2021.

The anticipated change for 2021-2031 is 36% growth, which is much faster than average.

Conclusion

This marks the end of the article – thank you so much for making it to the end!

Hopefully, this guide was helpful, and it gave you some insight into what coding is, how you can become a coder yourself, and how much coders make on average per year in the US.

Thank you for reading!

There is a real connection between technical interview performance and salary. Here’s the data.

freeCodeCamp — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 15:43:04 +0000

By Cat Hicks

At the end of the day, money is a huge driver for the decisions we make about what jobs to go after. In the past, we’ve written about how to negotiate your salary, and there are a lot of labor statistics and reports out there looking at salaries in the tech industry as a whole. But as with many things in eng hiring, there’s very little concrete data on whether technical interview performance plays a role in compensation offers.

So we set out to gather the data and asked our users who had gone on to successfully get jobs after using our platform to share their salary info. With our unique dataset of real coding interviews, we could ask questions like:

Does interview performance matter when it comes to compensation packages?
Do engineers who prioritize other parts of a role over compensation (e.g. values alignment) end up with lower salaries?
What else seems to matter in getting a higher salary?

To be clear, this is an exploration of past average interview performance and its connection with current salary, versus looking at how someone did in an interview and then what salary they got when they took that specific job. In other words, we haven’t paired job interviews with the salary for that same job. We believe that looking at these more general measures is more informative than trying to match single interviews and job offers, given how volatile individual interview performance can be. But our interviewing platform allowed us to look at performance across multiple interviews for respondents, which gave us more stability and more data.

The setup

On the interviewing.io platform, people can practice technical interviews online and anonymously, with real engineers on the other side.

When an interviewer and an interviewee match on our platform, they meet in a collaborative coding environment with voice, text chat, and a whiteboard and jump right into a technical question. Check out our recordings page to see this process in action.

Interview questions on the platform tend to fall into the category of what you’d encounter at a phone screen for a back-end software engineering role, and interviewers typically come from top companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, and more.

After every interview, interviewers rate interviewees on a few different dimensions: technical skills, communication skills, and problem solving skills. These each get rated on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 is “poor” and 4 is “amazing!”. On our platform, a score of 3 or above has generally meant that the person was good enough to move forward. You can see what our feedback form looks like below:

With this in mind, we surveyed interviewing.io users about their current roles, including salary, bonuses, and how satisfied they felt in their job. We then tied their comp back to how they did in interviews on our platform.

We ended up with responses from 494 engineers, and because compensation packages are so complex and vary from company to company, we analyzed the data in several different ways, looking at annual salary numbers, bonuses, and equity. Then we tied compensation data to performance in technical interviews to see whether it matters, and if so, how much.

The results

We looked at the relationships between interview performance (technical skills, communication ability, and problem solving ability) and the following: base salary, bonuses, and equity. In all cases, we corrected for location (being in the Bay Area means a higher salary) and experience (senior engineers make senior salaries), and where we could, we corrected for company size (bigger companies can generally pay bigger salaries).

The mean yearly salary for all survey participants was around $130k, and 57% of them reported a yearly bonus. For that group, the average yearly bonus was $20k. For people who reported a dollar amount for equity, the average was $54k. Below is the distribution of experience level/seniority of survey respondents.

Here’s what we found.

Better technical skills correlate with higher compensation

As probably comes as no surprise, people who score higher on technical skills during interviews do make more money. First, let’s look at base salary. [2]

Bonuses, too, correlate with technical skills, with an additional point in performance potentially worth about 10k. [3]

The relationship between compensation and other interviewing skills

We also looked at the two other ratings that interviewers give after interviews: communication and problem solving. Better communication scores had a small but statistically significant correlation with salaries (r = .15, p < .01), but we found no significant relationships for problem solving scores.

We also didn’t see a relationship between either communication ability or problem solving ability when it came to bonuses.

The non-relationships didn’t surprise us too much, to be honest, because with a relatively small sample size it’s notoriously difficult to get subcomponents of ratings to show a relationship to something distal and complicated like salaries. It’s very possible these relationships do exist, and with many determiners besides actual interview performance, like seniority and market salary norms, we’d like to repeat this survey at a bigger scale to inform this question.

What else?

We asked engineers whether they felt satisfied with their role, and found that engineers who felt satisfied earned an average $14k more than engineers who felt dissatisfied. [4]

We also looked at people’s perceptions of their own performance. In a previous post, we explored how people rated their own technical performance after an interview compared to how the interviewer rated them, and found that even experienced engineers aren’t great at guessing how they did.

For this project, we were curious about whether overconfident engineers might net higher salaries (perhaps they negotiate harder!). So we also looked at people who rated their performance higher than their actual interview score — but found no difference in their compensation packages.

Another thing we were curious about was whether people who valued money over other factors while making a job decision would have higher salaries. So we asked people to rank the most important variables in their job decisions. 32% of respondents said that a compensation package was the most important part of their decision; the next highest response was “matches my interests and values.”

But these questions didn’t have any predictive value for the actual salary amount: people who said money matters the most didn’t have significantly different salaries from people who said money matters the least.

It’s possible that with salaries being impacted by so many outside factors, like location and role type, candidates don’t truly have a lot of negotiating power over that salary number.

We looked at equity as well, and the average reported equity package size was 54k. We did not find any significant association between interview performance and reported equity packages. That said, enormous amounts of research have documented various salary gaps based on gender, race, and other important sociocultural and demographic factors, and we hope to repeat this analysis when we have more data.

What do these findings mean for you?

Interview performance doesn’t just get you in the door or not: it can have a demonstrable connection to your eventual compensation. For instance, doing just a point better in your technical interview could be worth 10k or more, and with bonus, it could add 20k to your annual comp.

Given how much technical interview performance matters, we’d be remiss if we didn’t suggest signing up for free, anonymous mock interviews on our platform. So, please go do that.

And, if you’re curious about what our salary survey looked like or want to participate and contribute to v2 of this post, please do so too!

Want to become awesome at technical interviews and land your next job in the process? Join interviewing.io!

Cat Hicks, the author of this guest post, is a researcher and data scientist with a focus on learning. She consults in research, has published empirical research on learning environments, and has led research on the cognitive work of engineering teams at Google and Travr.se. She holds a PhD in Psychology from UC San Diego.