State of the Software Developer Nation

Since our first report in 2019, developer salaries have, on average, increased by 7.4%.

Developers with more than 10 years of experience saw the biggest increase: They are now earning a whopping 19% more than in 2019.

In order to give further context on the distribution of our data, we’ve also included the 25th and 75th percentile salaries in this and the following salary graphs.

On average, female developers earn 17% less than their male counterparts. This gap has increased by 2% since our 2021 report. At the 6-10 year experience mark, this gap even increased from 3.5% to 15.5%.

The gender pay gap is widest between developers with more than 10 years of experience: Here, women earn 19% less than their male counterparts. This is despite female survey respondents being proportionately represented across industries, languages, and location.

We hope that, by providing salary transparency on our job platform and in reports like these, we will equip all developers with the knowledge and confidence they need to earn the salary they deserve. We're also planning to publish further insights on this topic in the future.

In 2022, JavaScript is still the most used programming language, followed by C# and TypeScript.

TypeScript seems to be up and coming and has overtaken Java to claim third place, narrowly beating developer-favourite Python.

But how does this picture change across the different developer roles? It's no surprise to see that frontend and full stack developers are using JavaScript most. Developers working on the backend use Java as their top programming language.

Python remains unchallenged as the most desired programming language among South African developers – across frontend, backend, and full stack developers!

TypeScript is still the second most desired language, but only just: It's getting some hot competition from Go which has overtaken JavaScript to claim a pretty tight third place.

Since our 2021 report, there's been a lot of movement in framework rankings: Node.js is now South African developers' most widely used framework and React has moved from fourth to second place! That's the biggest jump in usage for a framework since our 2021 report.

React is also the framework most used by frontend developers, while backend and full stack developers work mostly with ASP.NET.

Given its surge in usage, it should come as no surprise that React is still the framework South African developers want to work with most.

The real surprise? Even backend developers chose it as their most desired framework: 1 in 4 backend developers want to work with the frontend framework in 2022!

We also asked South African developers which industry they thought was up and coming:

While AI, Cloud computing, and FinTech continue to be their most promising industries in 2022, there's an exciting new up-and-comer: Cryptocurrency. The percentage of developers viewing it as the most promising industry has doubled since our last report moving it from 7th to 4th place.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the three top competitors in the "cloud wars".

When it comes to what South African developers use most, AWS is the clear leader, way ahead of Microsoft Azure in second place, across industries and almost all company sizes. In fact, Azure only seems to take the lead for developers at companies with a team size of between 5000 and 10 000 people.

2022 looks like another great year for the tech industry. That means, there will be even more competition for the best developers. Over 30% of South African developers are looking to move jobs within the next 12 months.

At the same time, there's been a 12% increase in South African developers planning to stay in their current roles for the next five years, and a 16% decrease in the number of developers currently looking for work since our last report.

So what's keeping the majority of South African developers attached to their current jobs? Turns out it's a holistic work environment: Since last year, developers' emphasis on work-life balance has increased by 10.8% which means it has over taken growth opportunities as the most important factor in a role.

Indeed, the top four most important reasons all speak to a great workplace: A good work-life balance, growth and learning opportunities, company culture and great colleagues.

Over all, fewer South African developers are looking to move abroad this year than in 2021. At the same time, the majority is still open to finding jobs overseas and 1 in 5 are actively exploring opportunities internationally.

Senior developers are the most likely to already be exploring new pastures, while tech leads are most likely to stay put across the different seniority levels.

The pandemic has brought a lot of difficulties, but one positive to emerge is more flexibility. 92% of South African developers now have the option to work from home.

More specifically, 51% of developers find themselves in a remote-first set-up, while 41% split their time between the office and home.

The majority of software developers, unsurprisingly, chose Computer Science as their field of study.

What's more interesting is that one third studied other fields: STEM subjects are the second most common educational background, followed by Business and Humanities.

In our 2019 report, we found that 1 in 4 developers are self-taught.

So how did these developers learn to code? 72% used online tutorials to teach them the basics of their craft. Another 49% spent time working on side projects, while 46% completed an online course.

Across the experience levels, only tech leads indicated that their most prevalent way to learn to code were books and other physical media.

Practical experience is the best teacher and mistakes are an important part of a developer's education. Bringing down production is one such opportunity for learning.

Over half of South African respondents admit to having brought down production at least once during their careers!