What you need to know:
Our State of Software Engineers reports have provided meaningful and actionable insights for engineers and companies across the globe over the past years, informing them about relevant industry trends and delivering unique visibility into hiring demand, preferences, and processes. Following Hired’s acquisition by Vettery in November 2020, this report further builds upon Hired’s data, by leveraging Vettery and Hired insights from a larger pool of software engineers across both platforms. Together, Vettery and Hired are uniquely positioned to bring this vast amount of analytics and intelligence to life as the leading AI-driven hiring marketplace that helps innovative companies build amazing teams.
We strive to empower hiring companies and job seekers through data. That’s why we’re excited to share actionable insights and trends for the engineering community and tech companies, including top software engineering skills by market, leading programming languages, and workplace preferences within our 2021 State of Software Engineers report. The report shows an accurate representation of the salaries offered to top talent in various roles and markets based on data from the Hired and Vettery marketplaces. Additionally, it uncovers the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the engineering community and what skills, roles, and location preferences have seen higher demand as a result.
Key findings:
- In 2020, average salaries for top engineering roles went up by 5% in the SF Bay Area, 3% in New York, 7% in Toronto, and 6% in London, continuing to grow despite the massive economic downturn and overall drop in hiring demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Backend, full stack, and frontend engineers still saw the highest demand, making up more than half of all interview requests for software engineers.
- In the major U.S. tech hubs, machine learning engineers salaries range between $115k/year to $171k/year on average.
- The highest in-demand skill for software engineers is Redux.js, landing engineers 2.9x more interview requests than the marketplace average. Engineers with Google Cloud, AWS and React.js skills received 2.7x more interviews than average. When it comes to coding languages, Go and Scala saw the highest demand with 2.3x and 2.2x more interview requests respectively.
- AWS saw 8x the demand from employers compared to Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure skills. Kubernetes and Docker are also among the 10 most requested skills—likely a result of the increasing shift to the cloud.
- Engineers in smaller markets are more likely to get remote job offers compared to those in major tech hubs. They also receive a higher salary for remote jobs compared to local job offers.
- 54% of software engineers are more productive when working remotely.
- Most software engineers’ primary motivation for learning a new programming language or framework is simply because they enjoy it. They specifically love the opportunities for new challenges and continuous learning.
- Lack of economic opportunity and unemployment, public health issues, and global warming are the top three problems software engineers are most passionate about solving with their coding skills.
- Software engineers are increasingly self-taught and traditional university degrees are becoming less relevant compared to the previous year. The pandemic has accelerated this trend around upskilling even further, showing that companies are increasingly hiring for skills instead of credentials.
Methodology
This report is based on proprietary information gathered and analyzed by Hired’s and Vettery’s data science teams. For the purpose of this report, we examined Software Engineer interview requests (IVRs) and IVR salary data from January 2020 through November 2020 inclusive. We required a minimum of 50 IVRs or job seekers for a data point to be valid and included in the report. As we saw an overall decrease in demand in IVRs last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, growth numbers were normalized to reflect actual growth. The data included reflects 72,000 job seekers and 148,000 IVRs during this time period, facilitated through Hired’s and Vettery’s combined marketplaces of more than 10,000 participating companies and 245,000 job seekers. In addition to our proprietary data, we collected survey responses from more than 1,300 software engineers on the Hired marketplace to inform our understanding of software engineers’ working preferences. You won’t find this data anywhere else.
Our hope is that publishing this report will continue fueling meaningful career conversations among the developer community and give software engineers the actionable data they need to achieve their professional goals while helping companies build their best talent pipeline to meet their 2021 business goals.
About Hired
Hired (Hired.com) is a marketplace that matches top tech talent with the world’s most innovative companies. In November 2020, Hired was acquired by Vettery, creating the largest AI-driven marketplace for high-intent technology and sales talent. Combined, Hired and Vettery have helped over 17,000 companies build top technology teams by connecting over 3 million diverse, vetted job seekers to opportunities. Through Hired and Vettery, job seekers and companies have transparency into salary offers, competing opportunities, and job details. This level of insight is unmatched, making the recruiting process quicker and more efficient than ever before.
Hired was founded in 2012 and operates in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Looking to build your best pipeline or find a job you love? Find more information, news, and tips for job candidates and employers at Hired.com.
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