Machine learning specialists command the highest salaries among developers in the UK and Ireland, averaging £56,851.
This figure is 24% higher than the mean wage for developers in the British Isles and nearly £15,000 more than a mobile developer, according to a global survey of 64,000 developers by Stack Overflow.
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Regardless of what language developers specialise in, they can continue to expect a generous pay packet. The UK national average salary for 2016/17 was £28,000, while on average developers earn approximately £44,000.
According to the research, 94% of developers are at least partially self-taught and just 43% of software engineers in the UK and Ireland have a Bachelor’s degree.
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These statistics would suggest that the rise of free online classes and coding crash courses are increasingly being used to offer a fast track to a more lucrative career.
“Today’s developers can earn almost twice the national average salary despite many of them being self-taught, with only a few years of coding under their belts,” says Kevin Troy, director of insights at Stack Overflow.
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“This data should incentivise more young people to take up the rewarding challenge of software development.”Three quarters of the survey’s respondents in the UK and Ireland identified as a web developer, making it the most common developer type. By contrast, only 2.4% of respondents identified as a machine learning specialist, Such scarcity, coupled with high demand from employers, contributes to their higher earnings.
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