Link to sectionYearly Income
Link to sectionIncome Evolution
Link to sectionCompany Size
While working for larger companies remains correlated with earning more and seeing your income increase, it's also interesting to look at what happens when you don't work for a company at all.
In addition to working fewer hours per week, freelancers also reported lower AI usage and more negative attitudes towards AI in general, pointing to a possible solution for those seeking an alternative path–at the cost of lower revenues.
Link to sectionJob Title
Carrying the “engineer” still comes with an income premium compared to being “just” a developer.
We can also see front-end development still makes up the bulk of the work, which makes sense given the web-centric focus of the survey's audience.
Link to sectionWork Areas✨
Plotting work areas against average yearly income and average years of experience reveals a fairly strong correlation between the two.
Yet a few areas (such as AI and platform engineering, and hiring/interviewing) sit above the trendline, meaning they correlate with higher incomes than what you'd normally expect to see.
Link to sectionNumber of Applications
Link to sectionJob Finding
Interestingly, the data shows that finding your job through open-source or community work leads to a 39% income premium compared to the overall median.
And when it comes to effectiveness, generic job-finding methods such as LinkedIn or job boards require submitting more applications than going through your own personal network, or even applying to a company directly.
Link to sectionRemote Work
Link to sectionWork Hours
While it may look like working more means earning more, income varies much more due to other confounding factors (years of experience, company size, etc.) than due to sheer amount of time spent at work.
In fact, if we isolate U.S. developers with 10-14 years of experience in order to eliminate those factor's influence, we see that the correlation between work hours and salary all but disappears.