How can back-end developers feel? Salaries of front-end programmers exposed

Recently, a programmer who has worked in the backend for several years raised a rather confusing question online: "Front-end stuff is so easy and doesn't seem to be that valuable, so why are the salaries so high?" The author asked the front-end developers in the industry, and they generally believed that linking salary to the difficulty of the work is not an Internet way of thinking. Sometimes, even from some macro-structural changes, jobs will not be eliminated due to difficulty!

Therefore, people started discussing online every now and then, started to worry about the future of backend development, and even considered the issue of transformation. In other words, in today's business world, how much money you make has no direct relationship with the difficulty of what you learn. Just like learning artificial intelligence also requires learning algebra and mathematical logic, so your salary will be higher than other developers? Sorry, the Internet does not need so many people to use artificial intelligence now, everything is based on social needs.

Back to the topic just now, the front-end is directly facing customers (the ones who spend money), whether it is PC or mobile applications, the demand is particularly large, and its position in the business world is relatively important. The demand is large, so the salary is naturally high. Maybe many people will refute that if this is the case, then everyone will turn to the front-end, then what about the back-end? Don't do it? Without the back-end, the front-end is nothing. However, this is useless, and other front-ends will stand up to refute, maybe you are right, but there are still heroes behind the scenes. Follow the rules of the business market, how can you break it just like that? Otherwise, let the boss refund you half a year's salary as compensation.

The rhetoric makes the front-end and back-end salary hooks so straight, without considering the feelings of the fish. However, in this mixed industry, many beginners go to training institutions for two months and then come out with sky-high prices, and their skills vary. How should we understand the topic of technical value and business needs that is full of pitfalls?

Recently, 51CTO, as a diamond-level partner, joined hands with Internet giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, and Ubuntu to conduct an in-depth survey of global developer trends with VisionMobile. As the first quarter of 2017, the survey report had in-depth contact with 21,200 respondents through Internet companies and software giants of different sizes, as well as technical communities of different sizes and representative developer samples. With a variety of entrepreneurial projects sweeping across various fields, the macro and micro environments of entrepreneurship have become much more complicated than in the early years, and the competition in the Internet industry is still fierce.

The survey content tracks developers' actual working experience across different platforms, revenues, applications, languages, APIs, market segments and regions from the following groups: mobile, desktop, IoT, cloud, augmented and virtual reality, machine learning, and data scientists.

Chapter 1: The most economically valuable opportunities

Developers in various fields have a high level of technical complexity, or are in emerging fields that have just started, with high barriers to entry, so the salary level of developers is higher than that of other industries. Taking Western Europe as an example, the median income of back-end developers is 12% higher than the median salary of Web developers; the salary level of machine learning developers is 28% higher. Web and mobile development work has the highest level of commercialization.

Below we take the Web as an example and carefully analyze where the most lucrative career development opportunities are in the current Internet industry.

Excellent software skills are very scarce in today's talent market, which means that excellent developers are often the target of competition for various companies. In addition, developers are mobile, which means that they can easily leave remote areas and go to regions and markets that are more recognized for their professional level. So, how should you choose the relevant career?

People often have many considerations and demands when choosing a job, but frankly speaking, developers are clearly entitled to higher salaries, especially considering their important position in the global value chain. As the 12th annual version of this report, we asked developers for the first time about their salary level or how much they can earn from contracting. Through the resulting data, we have sorted out some important conclusions that can help developers increase their own salary levels, and in turn help companies have the opportunity to find development talents that better meet their requirements.

First, practitioners in different regions and different software development fields usually have very different salary levels. In the survey, we found that the highest-paid developer group can earn tens or even hundreds of times more than the lowest-paid group. This difference exists partly due to different geographical locations, which we will explain in a later article. In short, we can conclude that the developer's skills, knowledge and reputation determine their salary level. As long as you invest in these aspects, you will definitely get a return.

Skill scarcity increases the average price level of developer services.

In terms of skills, developers with more complex skills - which means that the entry barrier is always higher, so there are fewer developers - generally have higher salary levels. Developers working in cloud computing and other back-end services are generally paid more than front-end web application developers. Machine learning experts earn even more than back-end developers. Taking the Western European market as an example, the median annual salary of web developers is $35,400, the median annual salary of back-end developers is $39,500, and the median annual salary of machine learning developers is $45,200. This salary progression relationship is common across regions, that is, the salary setting of back-end is higher than front-end, and machine learning is higher than back-end is shown globally. Web and mobile development are the most commercial; the entry barrier to developing simple applications or websites is also relatively low, so such tasks can often easily find outsourcing partners in other regions.

This is also true for emerging development areas, such as augmented and virtual reality or the Internet of Things, but often at the high end and at a large scale. Emerging areas can provide ideal compensation for high-end developers, but lower-level developers should choose more mature industries as much as possible. Take the augmented reality and backend developer group in North America as an example. The average salary of AR developers in the region is $71,000, which is lower than the median annual salary of backend developers of $79,200. However, at the high end, AR development is clearly more profitable. In the top quartile of high-paying groups, AR developers' annual salary has increased to $132,300, while backend developers are $122,800. In the top 10th of high-paying groups, this difference begins to become more significant: AR developers have a median annual salary of $219,000, while backend developers only make $169,000. The reason for such a huge salary difference is that the commercialization level of the AR/VR and even IoT markets is still not high. Companies are still in the early stages of exploration and are willing to pay considerable salaries for developers with higher technical skills. At the same time, developers with less experience are mainly attracted by market hype, but their relatively low skill levels and scarcer market recruitment mean that their salaries cannot reach ideal levels.

This pattern is also widely seen around the world, with the exception of the South Asian talent market, where developers are more likely to maintain legacy code and less likely to engage in innovative activities (a conclusion also supported by our research on the size of the developer population).

At the beginning of this section, we mentioned that developers can enjoy more favorable compensation packages if they choose to move beyond the restrictions of their region. However, judging by the data, there is still a long way to go before the globalization of the developer market evolves. For example, the average annual salary of web developers in North America is $73,600, while the average salary of web developers in Western Europe is only half of that level - $35,400, which is obviously not explained by the recent Brexit and euro exchange rate crisis. Web developers in other regions are only half of the salary level of the Western European market - $11,700 in South Asia and $20,800 in Eastern Europe. This difference exists not only between regions and countries in the world, but also has a lot to do with the city you live in.

We still have a long way to go in the global evolution of the developer market.

This obviously presents an opportunity for companies that are open to remote workers. You can easily hire 10% of Eastern European backend developers for far less than their North American counterparts. For developers, this means that as long as you have excellent English skills and are willing to seek cross-regional opportunities, you can earn more exciting incomes. However, there are still very few developers willing to take this leap to obtain international salary standards. This also explains why the highest salary levels in emerging regions (including Asia, the Middle East and Africa) are far higher than the local median salary. High-income European and American developers can often earn three times the average salary in their country and region.

In emerging countries, the highest salary can be seven to ten times the local median salary. The best developers in these regions often work for multinational companies or sell their technology services in the international market; in contrast, practitioners based in the local market can only get lower salary levels.

So what steps should developers take if they are interested in entering the international market? First, invest in your skills, actively engage in more difficult work content, and work hard to improve your English. After mastering these prerequisites, you can enter the international market, seize opportunities and enjoy more substantial salary returns.

Preview content:

Chapter 2: Augmented and Virtual Reality: A Paradise for Technology Enthusiasts

Interaction, sharing and access. In his latest book, The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly, the former executive editor of Wired magazine, proposed 12 key technical requirements. These important guiding principles will help us understand the specific process of transforming emerging technologies into applications with practical value. Through three consecutive imperative sentences, he regards augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) as the main technical candidates for creating the next type of tools with broad market appeal and innovation.

Chapter 3: Angular vs. React: A battle for the initiative in future front-end web development?

Google and Facebook are two of the most powerful technology companies in the world, and each has built an excellent framework for web applications. Angular and React are fighting for dominance in the future web world, and judging from the active online discussions and the adoption rate of large consumer applications, the market seems to recognize React more. But can it really dominate the future front-end field? Does React really have a competitive advantage? Our extensive statistical conclusions from nearly 6,000 web developers may surprise you.

Chapter 4: Challengers chasing the holy grail of cloud business

Amazon has a long history of reinvesting in existing businesses to grow profits and create new businesses. As a result, Amazon has expanded into one of the largest companies in the world and has not produced any impressive profit performance in the past 20 years. Jeff Bezos has been very clear that he intends to continue to invest profits in the expansion of the business, but this situation has changed in the past year. Amazon's profit performance last year was beyond normal, and this result was obviously driven by the huge success of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The public cloud market they created is now so large that the profits generated by it are even greater than Amazon can invest. In recent years, other companies have realized the huge value hidden in the holy grail that Amazon is chasing and have begun to compete to get a share of it.

Chapter 5: The rise of the IoT tool community

According to Gartner's August 2016 Hype Cycle report, market expectations for IoT platforms have peaked. Not surprisingly, thousands of IoT solutions continue to emerge. The term "platform" is used everywhere, from network infrastructure to hardware components to cloud services. Ultimately, the IoT boom is due to more and better tools available for developers to choose from and use. In this section, we'll explore some of the types of tools that IoT developers are actually using, as shown in our survey results.

Chapter 6: The Machine Learning Language War

Various Q&A websites and data science forums are repeating the same questions over and over again: I am new to the field of data science, which language should I learn? What is the ideal language option for machine learning? In fact, there are a large number of articles on the Internet that try to answer these questions based on personal experience or work experience. Although a large number of machine learning-related jobs are available in the European and American markets, although such opinions are indeed valuable for reference, their conclusions are often conflicting, making it difficult for newcomers to find the right direction.

Download the detailed report: VisionMobile – Developer Economics - State of the Developer Nation Q1 2017 - 51CTO (CN) - final