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What Are The Highest Paying Software Developer Jobs & How Can I Land One?

James Hickey on July 31, 2019

Originally from yourdevcareer.com Have you seen tech articles that talk about how certain software development fields pay more than others? Cert...
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Ola' John Ajiboye • Edited

I particulary liked the last part. I was kind of scared of pushing myself out to the community. I am very much like candidate "b" probably with considerbale less experience. I have only worked 2years Freelance and less than 4 months remote. I couldn't even get an internship in my locality just last month.

But within the first month I started writing my confidence has grown. I feel a part of the community. Taken a lot of feedbacks. Many people followed my tutorial. I have closed 1 amazing offer and have another one in hand. Its an amazing turn around in less than a Month.

Maybe my employer saw my article or not, I have no clue. I was asked about Redux, I said I had no clue because I barely started learning React. I told the interviewer that I knew Hooks and Context instead. He was excited to talk about it. Because I had written an indepth tutorial about it, just days after learning. I had a thorough understanding of what I was talking about . That helped me greatly in sealing the offer

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James Hickey

Man - this is awesome 👌 I LOVE to hear stories like this!

You've proved that even putting in the extra time to learn stuff on the side (that's relevant) can really help! I'm really excited for you 😊

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Ola' John Ajiboye

Thanks @james . Reading articles from folks like you who take the time to do it was inspiring to me. I am glad I started and growing little by little.

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Joe Zack

I have a hard-time believing the average salary for web developers is $90k. I did a quick google and I'm seeing reputable sites reporting the average between $59k and $75k in the US. (links below)

That said I agree with your point, it's good to invest in your career especially since that low barrier of entry to general web development means there are always newcomers coming into the market to compete for those jobs.

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James Hickey

Ya, I would agree with you on that. I almost grabbed the stats from 2019 but felt that they seemed to be more realistic/relevant from 2017

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yucer • Edited

Hi.

I took once one job that was offered to many previous candidates. He had rejected it because it was "too complex" for the planed schedule. One of them even wrote a book over the programming language and had many publications, as he did share with me later.

I did knew the basic structure of the language but a lot of components that could be combined, because of my previous experience in other works.

Also I had some previous knowledge over the required problem domain.

In that case "candidate a" was more effective.

Some years later I was hired as "candidate b" for an application with a lot of knowledge over the arquitecture. But most of hard requirements came from the business logic (the problem domain). And the result was not the same.

Don't trust blindly on the publications. At the end you need working code not theory.
At least that your are hiring an architect...

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James Hickey

Def. There has to be some investigation into a candidate and the quality of these extra "leverage points" too.

Trying to figure out what candidates are better can be really hard too.

But overall, putting in the extra work will help you excel.

As you said, sometimes the raw domain knowledge and experience is what counts more. I would expect this in more enterprise type positions though.

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Rémi Lavedrine • Edited

I didn't start reading that post expecting to have a discussion about what you said, but I actually really enjoyed it.
It is really true that participating into the community is a very proper manner to prove your knowledge.
And much more than that explaining a technical concept (or anything else) is the perfect way to really understand that specific concept.

Indeed as you have to explain it you can't do something implicitly in front of your audience. That's why you really have to deep dive into the core concepts in order to explain them clearly.

And as Einstein said

If you can't explain something in a simple way, that means that you don't understand it enough. (I think it is Einstein but not a 100% sure 😄)

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James Hickey

🤜🤛 Well said.

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Johan Wigert

Great article! You do an excellent job of explaining why learning in public is such a powerful concept.

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James Hickey

Thanks Johan!

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Dylan Miracle

Unless I'm missing something there is a calculation error in step 1:

120k - 90k = 30k more
.6 * 30k = 18k take home

Those classes are starting to look a bit better

I still take your point

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James Hickey • Edited

Ha! That's a typo 🙃 I'm gonna fix it 👍

Should be $108,000... I was messing around with the 2019 stats and then decided to stick with 2017 since I had already done the math. Forgot to revert that one 😋

Thanks for pointing it out!