The six best-paid IoT programming languages

One of the top factors slowing down IoT implementations is the talent gap: Existing market supply just cannot keep up with the demand for engineers with IoT skills. Some 68% of companies are struggling to hire developers for their IoT projects, according to research from Canonical. But the flipside to the skills shortage is that career prospects are bright for professionals with in-demand skills. Here, we focus on the programming languages that are most often used in IoT, namely, Java, C, C++, Python, JavaScript and Go, and then analyze how much professionals specializing in these languages can expect to earn. We also take elements such as seniority and location into account.

As a technology powerhouse, the United States often serves as a benchmark for the rest of the world when it comes to standards in IT salaries. Here is a brief overview of the top IoT programming languages along with corresponding developer salary data in the United States based on data from Payscale.

An overview of average salaries for the most popular IoT programming languages in the United States.

Java and C developers can, on average, expect to earn higher salaries than specialists in the other languages used in the IoT although senior Go coders have the highest salary potential. Skilled Go developers are among the best paid in the industry, even though junior and mid-level Go developers earn modestly compared to their peers.

Let’s take a look at the average salaries for the most popular programming languages in IoT, starting with Java.

Java: The IoT’s most popular programming language

Java has multiple fields of application, from backend programming to mobile apps for Android. According to the IoT Developer Survey 2017 performed by the Eclipse Foundation, Java tops the list of the programming languages used for IoT development, specifically for gateways and the cloud.

One of the major benefits of using Java for IoT development is its portability. Java doesn’t have any hardware limitations, meaning that you can write and debug your Java code on a computer and deploy it to practically any device that runs Java Virtual Machine. For this reason, many companies choose to hire Java developers for IoT projects.

The average paycheck for Java developers in the United States is around $88k, according to Payscale. Java developers in Switzerland have higher rates on average, at about $96k per year. Meanwhile, average salaries for Java developers in the United Kingdom and Israel are significantly lower, at $45k and $33k respectively.

An overview of the average salaries for Java developers, according to Payscale

However, an average Java developer salary is perhaps unrepresentative, as individual paychecks vary greatly according to the experience and seniority of the candidate in question. For example, the jump from junior to senior Java developer salaries is $66k to $97k in the United States and from $41k to $61k in the United Kingdom.

Average junior, mid-level, and senior Java developer salaries in the United States and the United Kingdom

Our research on U.S. Java developer salaries shows that the average paycheck in different states can be much higher than the national average. For example, developers in California have the highest average paychecks for developers in the US ($133k). This fact is in no small part a function of the overall high demand for IT skills in the state.