Software developers beat average UK salary by 154 per cent
Top developers earn 154 per cent more than the average Brit, a report released today has revealed, with blockchain fuelling a rise in employer demand for such skills.
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Software supremos command an average salary of £71,000 a year compared with the UK average of £29,000.
The report, released today by the job search marketplace Hired, showed that despite London being the leading European city for developers, it was still overshadowed by San Francisco and New York.
London’s best software engineers take home £67,920 a year on average, compared with £118,480 in the Bay Area and £103,390 in New York.
The most lucrative role is that of an embedded engineer, followed closely by blockchain engineer and data engineer.
| Software development role | Average salary in London |
| Embedded engineer | £71,000 |
| Blockchain engineer | £69,000 |
| Data engineer | £68,000 |
| Machine learning engineer | £68,000 |
| Search engineer | £67,000 |
| Security engineer | £67,000 |
| Natural language processing engineer | £66,000 |
| Gaming engineer | £64,000 |
| Backend engineer | £63,000 |
| Full-stack engineer | £61,000 |
Blockchain skills gained the most traction in 2018 with a 517 per cent surge in demand for jobs in the field.
Mehul Patel, Hired chief executive, said the growth in demand for blockchain skills has gone "through the roof".
"It's staggering growth," Patel said.
Speaking to CNBC on Monday, Warren Buffett hailed blockchain as “ingenious”.
Jobs in cyber security are also increasingly in demand, with a 132 per cent rise in employers searching for people to fill such positions.
Last week, the Financial Conduct Authority reported a five-fold rise in data breaches in 2018, leaving companies desperate to find skilled people to protect them.
Despite the high-skill level of jobs in the industry, one in every five software engineers said they were self-taught and only 50 per cent held a computer science degree.
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Almost half of developers said they prefer to work from home rather than work in an office.
Hired sourced the data for the report from job ads from more than 10,000 companies worldwide.