It's no secret that software developers can earn strong salaries.
A new report shows that average software salaries are growing faster in Austin than anywhere else in the nation.
Silicon Valley still offers the biggest paychecks. But when job search website Hired.com crunched data from its surveys, it found Austin had the largest increase in average salaries between 2020 and 2021. Local software salaries averaged $139,000 in 2020 and climbed 9% to $151,000 last year, the data showed. That includes both local and remote salaries in Austin from 2020 to 2021.
Map: Hired.com examined salary increases for remote and local software developer jobs across the United States
A significant amount of that growth was driven by the boom in remote work, where folks can live and work from Austin for a company that may have its headquarters in Silicon Valley or elsewhere — just as many Austin-based tech companies have remote workers around the globe.
"Companies of all sizes – from small companies to enterprises – are hiring remote talent in smaller markets and are hiring less talent in big tech hubs," the report stated. "However, the shift towards hiring in lower cost of living regions presents as more drastic for mid-sized and large companies compared to small firms. Why? Because small ones have already hired more in smaller markets in previous years."
This, of course, is compelling news for people with software skills, especially if they work in highly sought-after programming languages including Go, Ruby on Rails and Scala, which ranked No. 1-3, respectively, in Hired's surveys.
While experience is almost always king, the report shows some promise for those without a traditional degree.
"The vast majority of software engineers use free online resources to learn new skills," the report stated. "Some also cited books as their main way to stay educated."
The new report adds credence to the idea of Austin becoming even more of a tech hub during the pandemic, a source of pride for the local innovation ecosystem but also a pain point when it comes to competition for talent and rising costs of living.
Back in 2020, Hired found Austin was No. 1 for tech salary growth, tied with Toronto. Both tech hubs logged average salary growth of 10% in 2019, Hired found.
Going back to Hired's 2019 report, average salaries for tech workers, which included engineers, product managers, data scientists, product designers and more, increased to $125,000 in 2018. That was up 6% from 2017, when the average was $118,000, and way up from 2015, when the average was $108,000. Austin ranked fifth for overall pay in that report, while San Francisco led with $145,000, followed by Seattle, New York, and Boston.
In the new report, San Francisco, Seattle, New York and Boston had higher average salaries than Austin, which was tied with Los Angeles.
In another survey of Austin software salaries released earlier this month, professional social network Blind used data from its platform to show Austin ranked No. 1 in Texas for pay for software workers. It found total average compensation, including stock options, was $171,981. The median was $151,843 and the average base salary was $128,524.
Tech industry organization CompTIA, meanwhile, recently named Austin the top tech town in the nation for the third year in a row. Its data found a median salary for tech workers in general at $90,459.
