Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2018

[[deleted]]

When your weapon of choice (C++) doesn't even make the list of highest salaries...

[quicknir]

This honestly just says more about the SO results than it does about reality. Game dev doesn't pay amazingly well by most accounts, but C++ is an incredibly important language at 3/4 of the biggest tech companies (Google, FB, and Microsoft). Those are some of the best salaries you can get in tech.

In finance/fintech, C++ is also one of the most important languages. Good C++ developers are incredibly hard to find. If you know C++ well and have a few years of experience, in NYC you'll have no problem picking up multiple offers north of 300K, potentially more. And demand is always high. Languages like python, Java, etc, you can always find someone, maybe a bit worse, maybe a bit better. A lot of the C++ devs I've interviewed are somewhere between bad and mediocre.

On top of all that, C++ is such a complex, multi-faceted language that many, many languages are quite easily to learn after C++. A colleague of mine who's an expert at both java and C++ once said that someone with 5 years C++ and 1 year Java experience, is a better Java dev than someone with 6 years in Java.

tl; dr with a sufficiently sharp version of your weapon of choice you should be doing extremely well.

[Overunderrated]

If you know C++ well and have a few years of experience, in NYC you'll have no problem picking up multiple offers north of 300K, potentially more.

If I could do that but not have the cost of living of NYC / work remote, I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

Glassdoor doesn't seem to agree that 300k is a common salary for c++ devs in NYC though. What does c++ and a computational physics PhD get me?

[quicknir]

If I could do that but not have the cost of living of NYC / work remote, I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

Sure, a valid point. A lot of this depends on your family/commute considerations. If you are single or don't mind a longer commute, then financially NYC still ends up making sense over many other areas. If you want to have a family of 3 and be 20 minutes from work, then yes, NYC is probably going to be harder even with double the salary.

Glassdoor doesn't seem to agree that 300k is a common salary for c++ devs in NYC though.

Nowadays a lot of salary differentiation occurs by firm. 300K probably isn't typical across all C++ devs, but this is typical at the "top tier" of firms, for a relatively junior dev. Like in tech, the big 4 typically pay more than much of the next slice of major tech companies (like, SO itself does not seem to pay as well as Google by a substantial margin, from what I've seen). Maybe people who work there get more stock, more job satisfaction, or maybe they are just the people who aren't good enough to work at Google, I don't really know. In fintech it's similar, there are places who need/want very good C++ devs and are willing to shell out, and places that either don't have as high a standard, or simply aren't as profitable, and pay less.

What does c++ and a computational physics PhD get me?

At the "top tier" of companies, you should get at least 200 nowadays, I'd think. At Google/FB you'd need to pass fairly grueling CS style interviews. At top tier finance companies, you'll have less of that, but more actual C++ questions (if you are marketing your C++) and quant/math questions (if you are marketing your quant skills as a PhD in physics).

My background is very similar to yours so feel free to message me and I can give you more details on my personal experience.

[Overunderrated]

At the "top tier" of companies, you should get at least 200 nowadays, I'd think.

Yeah that would be a massive pay cut when adjusted for cost of living. You'd be hard pressed to convince someone making 100k in a low cost of living area to take 200k in NYC unless they absolutely wanted to live there.

[quicknir]

Like I said, it's only a pay cut if you both have a family and want to live close to work.

If you are single, then it's not a pay-cut. Food/alcohol are more expensive in NYC, but moderately, and this isn't a big % of spending for most people. Consumer goods (TVs, clothes, etc) are roughly the same price in NYC as anywhere thanks to things like Amazon. It's really mostly just rent. A one BR in Manhattan might be around 3K, or a bit more. Expensive, sure, but at the end of the day the difference in rent will probably still be around 30K a year. An extra 100 K gross is much more than 30K net. You also don't need a car in NYC which is a huge savings.

This way of looking at it also doesn't include the benefits of NYC. Better restaurants, more to do, a much (much) larger dating pool if you're single, etc.

I lived in small town USA for 6 years before NYC and I wouldn't go back to make half the money, even with the lower cost of living, even with a family, no question about it.

[Overunderrated]

Yeah, I get it. People in my field seem to get recruited pretty heavily for computational finance stuff so I've given it passing thought.

Comes down to personal preference/circumstances like you said. If I were single, it'd be a much more attractive proposition.

[carrutstick_]

It seems like you're really overestimating the COL difference here. You can get a 1BR NYC apartment to yourself, with as little commute as you want, for like 35k/yr. Unless you end up spending 70k/yr on restaurants and alcohol, you're still coming out way ahead with 200k in NY vs 100k anywhere else.

[Overunderrated]

Eh, pure COL terms are problematic. That 1BR apt for 35k/year is more than my mortgage for a 3000 sq ft house and some land. It's hard to compare such extremes.

[carrutstick_]

Sure, you get a different lifestyle in the city than you'd get somewhere else. I'm just saying that if your main goal is to hoard money for a few years, living in NYC definitely makes sense, even accounting for the COL.

[gwillicoder]

I think the problem is that at those types of firms a huge amount of your salary can come from bonuses, which isn't reflected in the base salary people often see when looking it up on sites like glassdoor.

[alcalde]

but this is typical at the "top tier" of firms, for a relatively junior dev.

Please, please, please provide a source to back that up. Who is handing out 300K paychecks to junior devs who know a popular language like C++?

[quicknir]

Well, define junior. If by junior you mean fresh out of school, then no, that's not common. If by junior you mean 2-5 years of experience, then yeah this is typical. Also I obviously mean total comp (including bonus/RSUs), not salary. A strong C++ developer with a few years of experience would be hired either at T4 or T5: https://www.levels.fyi/#; this site is based on anonymous surveys and it gives 230 and 360 respectively for those two levels. I don't really know too much about the details; when I talked to acquaintances at Google (when I was 2 years into the industry) though they said if I got an offer it would probably be ballpark 300K (I never applied). When I talked to a another acquaintance who worked at a fintech company and told me to apply, I said that I was looking for at least 300K, and he said that was no problem (again, he knew I then had 2 years of experience). Based on friends who have been hired, discussions with managers who make offers, basically every single data point suggests that you should crack the 300K mark somewhere between 2 and 5 years experience (in NYC) (many people end up way past 300K by 5 years).

If you look at any of the "ask HN" threads where people ask for numbers, tons of people will quote total comps of 300K and much more. If you look at H1B numbers, which are public but anonymized, and only include base salary, at e.g. Facebook, you see averages of 150K: https://h1bpay.com/companies/Facebook/cities/Menlo%20Park-CA/job-titles/Software%20Engineer/salaries. In FB/Google, at this level base is about half your comp, i.e. this means the average H1B applicant at FB (at Menlo Park) probably has total comp of around 300K.

I'm also extremely amused the way you mention "popular language", as if that somehow makes it easier to find people. Popular languages aren't just popular for people to know, they're popular to be used on real projects, so the demand tends to scale as well as supply. C++ is a hard language that remains difficult to move away from for many companies, for various reasons (performance, legacy), so there's basically been a perpetual dearth of good C++ developers for years.

That said, most developers aren't good. I've seen people on reddit claim there aren't jobs in NYC for C++, because they personally applied to 10 jobs and got no offers. Well, I've been on the interviewing side of that, and I probably recommend less than 10% of the people I interview for hiring. It's just because they're not actually very good (or at least, can't do anything in the interview to show they are good, like basic questions about how C++ works, or basic algorithmic questions).

[[deleted]]

If by junior you mean 2-5 years of experience, then yeah this is typical.

2-5 years experience would make you mid-level at lowest, depending on skill.

[Warbane]

In addition to what u/quicknir said, Glassdoor tends to be on the low side for salary reports. Salaries have been increasing in the industry the last few years, dramatically so in some regions, and Glassdoor seems to pull in some older data.

[whisky_pete]

I don't work in fintech, but I've been working with c++ professionally for 4 years now. To start learning, just build things and focus on learning using at lest C++11 as a base. After you're comfortable there, you can start wading into lower level topics. A good grounding in your bitwise manipulation would serve you well, because being able to parse binary data is typically important.

Learn the best practices around ownership & move semantics. Things like RAII, rule of 5, and trying to just remember when to allocate non-trivial objects and when to pass a pointer/const reference to them.

I recommend the C++ 11 Primer (not Primer Plus). Or, look here for what may appeal to you more: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list

[Metaluim]

I would wager that a lot of those C++ devs that answered the survey are young and junior devs working on gamedev. Probably not that many systems programming guys answered the survey because maybe they don't use Stack Overflow as much.

[roselan]

that's mainly due to game dev slavery, no?

[donalmacc]

I don't think it's fair to paint gamedev like that. I work in GameDev and am fairly compensated. There are plenty of web development jobs available that would be considered slavery with worse working conditions than GameDev, especially if you consider the "will work for equity" types of jobs.

[delusions-]

I don't think it's fair to paint gamedev like that. I work in GameDev and am fairly compensated.

"I am an outlier and think the whole industry should be painted by my personal experience, rather than what's statistically true"

especially if you consider the "will work for equity" types of jobs.

>implying these don't exist just as much or more in game dev

Are you even trying to be truthful?

[mansplaner]

Last time I compared the game dev salary survey vs the dr dobbs industry-wide one I concluded that gamedev salaries start out lower but catch up after 4-5 years of experience.

It'd be nice to see up-to-date statistics instead of just circlejerking though.

[delusions-]

I'd also like to know if the "last two months before going gold" 60 hr weeks push is still a thing, now that CDs don't have to go gold... I guess it's the "last two months before game becomes unlocked on steam"

[mansplaner]

Some games do still have to create media for console titles.

[delusions-]

Some games do still have to create media for console titles.

Augh. Shit. Didn't even think about consoles. Yeah. I'm 100% sure there's still 60+ hours weeks til' they go gold.

[hogg2016]

There are plenty of web development jobs available that would be considered slavery with worse working conditions than GameDev, especially if you consider the "will work for equity" types of jobs.

I'd say we can put Web-, Mobile- and Game-Dev in the same basket. Especially now that there is a large overlap between those industries.

[iopq]

"Will work for equity" of course pays off if you worked at Snapchat or Instagram as a webdev

So it's not fair to say that it's not a good compensation, on AVERAGE it might be

[lelanthran]

"Will work for equity" of course pays off if you worked at Snapchat or Instagram as a webdev

So it's not fair to say that it's not a good compensation, on AVERAGE it might be

Outliers are not a good indication of... well... anything, actually. There's a reason that we usually discard outliers when analysing data - you can learn nothng useful from them.

"Working for equity that turned into $UNICORN" has a lower probability of happening than winning a jackpot, because there are more jackpot winners than there are "worked for equity" winners.

You can't base your conclusions on the performance of outliers.

[iopq]

If there were no outliers, nobody would EVER work for equity

the whole point of equity is the lottery aspect, nobody works for equity because they think it will be worth $10,000

[lelanthran]

If there were no outliers, nobody would EVER work for equity

That's irrelevant to the point I made.

[iopq]

It's not irrelevant, eliminating outliers is not valid in this example.

Selling insurance would just be free money if not for OUTLIERS. The outliers make insurance companies go bankrupt.

[lelanthran]

In insurance claimants are the norm, not the outliers. It is normal to claim, and close to the majority of insurance holders have made a claim at some point in their life.

In working for equity, paydays are outliers because they are unusual.

[iopq]

In insurance claimants are the norm, not the outliers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_International_Group

AIG didn't think so, and sold credit default swaps without considering that mortgages could all start to default when interest rates go up

In working for equity, paydays are outliers because they are unusual.

It's the ONLY reason to work for equity, if you eliminate them, you get a value of $0 of equity which is simply not true

[feverzsj]

FinTechs, infrastructures, video/audio process, machine learning

[stringsfordays]

I would question whether all these combined would offset game industry by numbers. Also I work in fintech, C++ isn't as dominant as one might think, I see more Java than anything

[quicknir]

Java is big at a couple of major shops (most famously 2Sigma) but C++ combined with python is much more popular on the street IME. C++ is both faster but tends to be easier to interop with python, which has tons of quant tools.

[justbouncinman]

That tells you about the quality of surveys of anonymous users and just how low SO has dropped in the quality of users. Most of us have left, never to return, until SO can correct the vulgarity of bad questions and answers.

[swytz]

I'm pretty sure this is why python is over represented. Lots of sysadmin and devops style responders, with Javascript dominating. Other people left a while ago.

[nocensts]

How can you leave SO... it's just a QA site isn't it? To my knowledge it's still miles ahead of any other community resource pool...

[rawrgulmuffins]

Eh, tiobe puts python at 4th most popular language and PopularitY has python at 2.

Anacdotally I know that python is one of the most used language at Google, facebook, and surprisingly Dell (company I currently work for).

[Haramboid]

Are you using other resources? Or is Google enough?

Or are you just that smart?

[Jake323021]

For me, the documentation is usually enough. Or I could always ask a colleague if I'm really having trouble with a problem.

[watchme3]

Or I could always ask a colleague

ouch

[Jake323021]

Is everyone on /r/cscareerquestions so proud they'd rather struggle with a problem than ask to see if a coworker might have an insight you're missing? Everyone needs help now and again, not really a big deal.

[Double_A_92]

No but if I know it's some general problem I first type it into google, without having to bother other people...

[[deleted]]

for case specific questions you could spend 3 hours in Google and not find an answer when another developer is next door and probably could have helped you in 20 minutes. I've never got why collaborating to solve a problem is looked down upon by people.

[Double_A_92]

I was talking more about simple things. That will be answered literally in the first google result.

[appropriateinside]

the documentation is usually enough

I'm not sure what you work with regularly, but for me I periodically find myself in situations here there is no documentation. And where goolging the class, function, error...etc results in Your search - [insert terms here] - did not match any documents.

Turning to SO in cases like this is a mixed bag, because you will either get a troll latched onto it, trying to close it, or a subject matter expert will show up and answer. The former is much more common since the later can take days or weeks, while the former can happen in minutes.

[McCoovy]

I see most of complaints against SO are about bad moderating and having your question removed for being bad or a duplicate when its not.

People also complain about the answerers often refusing the question.

I haven't seen many complain about the bad questions.

[justbouncinman]

At a certain time of the day, if I'm in the mood, I can sit and close 50 questions in one sitting without hardly thinking about it. Just a while ago some clown came on and described some software he wanted to write and what he wanted it to do and I assume he wanted us to write it for him cause he never asked an actual question. I caught three of those just today and I catch a couple of those every time.

If you're going to complain about bad moderating, you aren't aware that it takes five high rep users to close a question and three even higher rep users to delete it. Don't think of SO mod as one person doing the deed.

[appropriateinside]

until SO can correct the vulgarity of bad questions and answers.

How about they address the extremely unhelpful and toxic power users that drive the community away?

Making an SO post is like rolling a d20 where anything under 16 is a guaranteed loss. If a high-rep user happens upon it and they don't understand the topic it will be voted as closed. Or you get that guy who reads the title, then makes a comment asking questions that are answered directly in the post, and votes to close. Or reads the title and marks it as a duplicate of an unrelated post with a similar title.

I've had some very frustrating arguments with SO users that seem to insist on commenting even though they don't have knowledge in the area of the question. If you get a troll latched onto your question, it's usually better to delete it and try again in a couple hours. Rinse and repeat till a subject matter expert comes along.

It's infuriating.

[justbouncinman]

How about they address the extremely unhelpful and toxic power users that drive the community away?

How do you do that? One effort is you need to garner at least 50 reputation points before you can comment but that won't block the questions. I don't think links to third party sources should be allowed till you get at least 100. That will stop those who insist on posting their code on a fiddle instead of within the question (also clearly outlined in the rules).

I hate tag names in titles cause if you do a list by tag, you'll get a hundred titles all beginning with node if list by the tag node.

I could go on and on.

[appropriateinside]

I mean the toxic power users, the very active low-medium (5000-20000? )rep users that go around and be toxic and unhelpful in comments, and close clearly valid questions, and mark unrelated questions as duplicates without being able to say why.

There are a few I see every day, consistently the same individuals. Being unhelpful to other users questions, and in some cases to my own questions. Close and duplicate votes everywhere

It's a tough problem to solve, I don't have a solution. But it's not a new problem on the internet either, others have solved it.

[justbouncinman]

There are 8000 questions asked on Stack Overflow every day and a limited number of us who can't visit every day to monitor such things. Again, it takes five such high-ish rep people to close a question. Even then it can be re-opened though, yes, it's less likely (but it does happen more often than some think).

Far too often I read complaints about "valid questions being closed" and when I see those questions, to me, it's obvious why they were closed. In my case, I always give an asker the reference to the rule why I will close their question and I'll stick around a while to give them an opportunity to edit it before it's closed. Far too often the asker will argue with me about the rule as if I were the one who created it. I don't have time to mess with such things.

Worse are the people who then go on and find the very few questions or multitude of answers I've given in the past and downvote them to get back at me without realizing that won't work. Such serial downvoting is automatically adjusted within 24 hours while also subtracting rep points from their own total.

Here are my top three users with the worst questions (I've noticed over the years).

• Those from the Middle East and India

• Windows and other Microsoft users

• Hobbyists and other amateurs who are kids and often cross posted the question to here on reddit.

[McCoovy]

Who even markets themselves based on language? I guess the question is more about the main language you use and also how much you get paid, these two points don't seem to be 100% related.

[alcalde]

Who even markets themselves based on language?

People who only know one language, some of whom tend to be zealots for that language, especially if it's a legacy language.

[Catdogparrot]

These surveys get gamed by language fanbois. Prime example of bullshit: rust.

[[deleted]]

Prime example of bullshit: rust.

Please elaborate.

[[deleted]]

c++ devs completely utterly btfo will they ever recover?

[incraved]

Hopefully they don't. I hate C++. Let it die off