Senior software developers in Cape Town are, on average, paid more than those in any other city in South Africa, new research by OfferZen has found.
Senior developers in the Mother City earn an average salary of R53 467/month. And Pretoria has caught up with and overtaken Johannesburg to become the second highest-paying city for senior coders.
Indeed, developer salaries in Pretoria are now on par with Cape Town for those with six years or more of experience, according to OfferZen.
OfferZen is a large South African developer jobs marketplace, and the findings are contained in the company’s 2022 State of the South Africa Software Developer Nation report, published on Monday.
It’s the third such report from the company and covers topics such as the increase in software developers’ salaries as well as which are the best-paying jobs by programming language in South Africa.
According to the 2022 report, pay is increasing for developers in South Africa, especially for those with experience. Backend developers earn the highest average salaries in the country, followed by full-stack and frontend developers.
According to OfferZen CEO Phillip Joubert, juniors in the industry have not seen a big bump in salaries because companies want to hire people with experience. As a result, salaries for junior developers have remained stagnant for the past two years.
“Since 2019, fintech and cloud technology have continuously been the best-paying industries for software developers,” said Joubert. “However, since last year’s report, developers working in retail or e-commerce and telecommunications have seen the biggest salary growth — an average of 9%.”
OfferZen’s data also shows that the gender pay gap remains persistent across all experience levels, and is widest at the senior level. “Female developers earn 17% less on average than their male counterparts, despite female survey respondents being proportionately represented in higher-paying languages, industries and locations,” Joubert said.
Niche languages in software development are important when it comes to salary, according to the report. For those looking to earn good money as a developer, it still pays to master niches.
Joubert said South African developers working with Go, Kotlin and Ruby continue to earn the highest average salaries.
Python is still the most desired programming language across frontend, backend and full-stack developers in South Africa, and TypeScript is the second most desired language, but only just: it’s getting some tough competition from Go, which has overtaken JavaScript to claim third place. – © 2022 NewsCentral Media
