If you think the traffic is bad now, just wait: Seattle is the fastest growing market for software developers in the U.S., and developer salaries are higher here than in New York City.
LinkedIn plans to release some new data on the market for software developers later on Thursday, and while the Bay Area and New York City remain far ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to the number of software developers, Seattle is rising. The city is ahead of New York when it comes to demand, and talent supply rose 7.5 percent in the last year, the largest rise among the cities on which LinkedIn gathered data.
This is no surprise, of course. CBRE, a commercial real estate firm, ranked Seattle as the second best tech market in the U.S. just this week, and the huge growth in tech hiring in Seattle over the past few years has been impossible to miss. It’s driven both by the expansion of Amazon and Microsoft, but also by the engineering centers that Bay Area companies are setting up in Seattle to take advantage of that supply of talent.
The median salary for software developers in Seattle is $132,000, behind only the Bay Area when it comes to compensation. Anyone looking for housing in Seattle will be pleased to know that LinkedIn chose to highlight that “the cost of living in Seattle is still well below that of the ‘Big Apple’ or the Bay Area,” which will be a fun historical fact some day.
Machine learning and data science are the most in-demand skills in software development at the moment, according to LinkedIn. You can expect to earn a median salary of $129,000 if you’re proficient in those fields, compared to the U.S. median salary of $112,000 for software developers. Interestingly, this category was also home to the least experienced engineers, with the highest percentage of developers with less than five years experience of any category surveyed.
