State of the Software Developer Nation

2022 was a tough year for the global tech industry: After the tech boom during the Covid pandemic, a lot of fast scaling and the hottest-ever tech hiring market, the tech industry experienced a cool down last year. Some tech companies in the US and Europe even went through mass layoffs, including the likes of Meta and Amazon.

South Africa's tech industry isn't immune to the global cool down, but has avoided the brunt of these overseas trends in 2022: Less than 3% of South African developers have been retrenched.

We have a lot of bootstrapped businesses with solid business models and unit economics, which in turn makes them more robust when funding is less easily available.

For developers, this means that there are still many strong local job opportunities.

At first glance, the positive news continues as South African developers have seen salary increases across the seniority spectrum. Juniors received the biggest increases since last year's report with an average increase of 19.4%. Seniors saw an average salary increase of 6.2%.

To show you how inflation affects developer salaries, we've included the inflation-adjusted figures for 2021 and 2022.

As we enter into 2023, let's see how this year's inflation data plays out.

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.

30% of developers are planning to change roles in the next 12 months. This relatively high number of job seekers is a promising signal that developers are still optimistic about their job prospects in South Africa.

So what are these developers looking for? The data says better salaries, benefits, and remote opportunities.

The search for better monetary compensation has grown in importance over time: More than half of developers list a better salary as their top reason for leaving a role. This is a 9.9% increase from 2022. When it comes to benefits, 1 in 5 are looking for better benefits, up from 16.6% in 2022.

But money is not the only factor that matters. Companies that offer remote have a better chance of retaining their best team members. The share of developers leaving due to a lack of remote work options has increased by 16.1% since our last report. Remote opportunities are especially important to senior developers who remain in high demand and get to take their pick among jobs.

Despite the clear importance of compelling compensation packages for retention, 1 in 5 South African developers still don't receive common monetary benefits at their current company. On a positive note, more developers are receiving medical aid contributions, equity, and bonuses from their employers going into 2023.

We added some new options and removed old ones from our last survey. If you see 0% in a graph, it is due to a change in options between years.

Developers are placing greater importance on work-life balance going into 2023. Remote work options, flexible time, and leave days are among the most important non-monetary considerations for developers when considering a new role.

52.5% of overall survey participants and 61% of seniors prioritise remote work options when assessing a new work opportunity.

The number of developers prioritising the number of leave days also increased by 25%, especially among seniors and tech leads.

In 2022, we saw multiple tech companies across the globe, including Meta, Microsoft, and Apple, trying to enforce a return-to-office movement. South African companies, however, seem to have continued to embrace remote set-ups.

More than half of South African developers work at fully remote companies, while another 1 in 3 work in a hybrid set-up. Fully office-based policies are still the exception: Less than 8% of developers have to come to the office every day. That said, many developers seem to value the option of going into an office to connect with their team.

With the shift to remote work, more developers can now work for companies anywhere across the globe. Despite this, more than two thirds of developers in a remote set-up still live in the same city as their current company.

There are a few possible reasons for this. One might be that companies prefer to hire developers based in the same city to cater for a potential return to the office or a shift to hybrid. Another could be that developers may want the option to work remotely but may prefer to stay rooted in one location as opposed to a digital nomadic lifestyle. Another may be that developers mainly value the flexibility and choice or control over the work environment. This also shows in their remote option preferences.

Interestingly, most developers are already working in their preferred remote set-up. One third of fully remote developers prefer a different set-up whereas one third of hybrid developers prefer a different set-up to their current one.

In fact, only office-based developers show a preference that differs drastically from their existing policy: Less than a fifth of office-based developers prefer this set-up, while 65.6% want the option to work remotely some of the time.

At the start of 2022, Crypto had established a solid 4th place as one of the most exciting industries for software engineers. After a tumultuous year that saw the value of Bitcoin crash and multiple exchanges go bust, developers are cooling on Crypto. As a result, the share of developers perceiving it as the most promising industry has fallen by 51.8%.

While AI, Cloud, and FinTech are still considered top industries by developers, there seems to be growing interest in Virtual Reality, IoT and Robotics. The popularity of virtual reality has doubled from 6.3% in 2022 to 11.2% in 2023. Robotics and IoT saw a rise in popularity by 32.2% and 26.4%, respectively.

Despite these big movements in 2023's popularity rankings, AI remains the most promising industry for the third year straight and continues to rise in interest for developers.

Despite AI retaining its position as South Africa's most promising industry for a third year in a row, the majority of South African developers didn't build or work with any AI APIs, machine learning models, or code-writing assistants in 2022.

Previously, the cost of accessing these APIs and a lack of AI-specific knowledge were barriers to entry for many developers. However, that's set to change in 2023 following the release of Open AI's ChatGPT and trial versions of Open AI tools like Codex and GPT-3. These tools give developers a chance to explore the possibilities of AI, even if it's just for personal projects.

Last year, the gender pay gap started at 6.4% amongst entry-level developers which is now sitting at 13.2%. This widens to as much as 25.7% for senior developers compared to 16.3% in our previous report.

So what explains this disparity? We've explored a framework for thinking about the gender pay gap to see what might be going on here.

The best-paying programming languages for software engineers are still in the niche options of Go, Kotlin, and Ruby.

Google-developed Go is the best-paying language for intermediate developers. For developers with more than ten years of experience, Android development language Kotlin makes the biggest bucks.

Another factor affecting developers' salaries are the frameworks they've mastered: Java-based Spring and Spring Boot lead the way among frameworks in terms of earning potential.

In fact, developers working with Spring Boot have the highest average salaries from four years of experience onwards.

Is 2023 the year of C#? The Microsoft-backed language saw its popularity rise from 18.2% to 23.9% with its fanbase growing most amongst backend and full stack developers.

Why the surge in popularity? VR's popularity among software engineers has nearly doubled since 2022, which might be why more developers are open to exploring paths and widely-used VR engines, like Unity, that involve C#.

JavaScript retains its position in the top spot as the most used programming language in South Africa for the fourth consecutive year, but its lead over second-placed C# has narrowed by 16%. TypeScript continues to gain ground among South African developers and is the only language in the top 5 to see its use increase since our last report.

The divide between backend, full stack, and frontend isn't as neat as it might appear. More than a third of backend developers are working with previously frontend-only languages JavaScript and TypeScript on a regular basis.

Despite a slight drop in its overall use, C# saw its use among backend devs increase over the past twelve months. In fact, its 12.5% increase has seen it overtake Python and JavaScript for third place among backend developers.

Last year's developer favourite, React, remains South Africa's most wanted framework, but saw a 14.8% fall in popularity. In fact, developers have lost some of their love for many of last year's top frameworks and libraries. Gaining in popularity are ASP.net, Spring Boot, Svelte, and Laravel.

While it's seen its popularity fall slightly, Google-backed Flutter remains in third place. In turn, the gap on the JavaScript frameworks is closing: Only 0.1% separates Flutter from second-placed Angular.

Next.js completes the top ten ahead of Spring Boot: 11.3% of South African developers want to work with the JavaScript framework.

Given C#'s position as the second most widely used programming language in the country, it should come as no surprise that ASP.net has overtaken React as the second-most used framework. In fact, less than 1% now separates it from Node.js in first place.

While JavaScript frameworks take four of the top five spots, they've seen their overall use drop since 2022.

The Java framework, Spring Boot, is one of the few to buck the general downward trend by increasing its popularity share from 11.5% to 12.2%.

While AWS remains South Africa's most used cloud platform among developers, Azure is closing the gap on its cloud-war competitor. In fact, it is the only cloud platform to see its overall usage increase from 29.1% to 31.4%.

AWS has overtaken Azure as the most used cloud platform at companies with more than 10 000 employees. However, Azure has claimed the top spot amongst companies with 51-200 and 1000-5000 people.

Third-placed Google Cloud Platform won't compete with AWS or Azure for the title in 2023, but it is making inroads at smaller organisations with less than 50 people. It is also the dominant cloud platform in South Africa's eCommerce sector.