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Published Nov 5, 2021

SDS 520: The Highest-Paying Programming Languages for Data Scientists — with Jon Krohn

Explore the lucrative realm of programming languages for data scientists with Jon Krohn, as he reveals the top-earning languages based on O'Reilly's 2021 salary survey, including insights into how emerging languages like Julia are shaping future opportunities in web development and data science.
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  • High Salaries

    highlights the programming languages that command the highest salaries for data scientists. Rust leads the pack with salaries over $180,000, followed closely by Go and Scala, which are valued at $179,000 and $178,000 respectively. Scala is particularly beneficial for data scientists due to its use in the Spark distributed computing platform, which is essential for handling large data sets 1. Julia, although less popular, offers a high average salary of $170,000, indicating its demand and signaling to employers that one is keeping up with new data science languages 2.

    If you're thinking, however, about becoming a software developer or topping up your engineering toolkit, then perhaps consider taking up one of these functional programming languages.

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    These languages, while not widely used among data scientists, are gaining traction in the software development community.

       

    Popular Languages

    Popular programming languages like Python, SQL, and R are staples in the data science community, with Python leading in usage among 61% of respondents in the O'Reilly survey 3. SQL follows closely at 54%, while R is used by 20%, ranking it sixth in popularity. Despite their widespread use, these languages offer salaries around the average annual salary of $146,000, with Python slightly above at $150,000 and SQL and R just below at $144,000.

    Unsurprisingly, the most popular programming languages are staple languages for data scientists that we mention all the time on this show.

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    Their prevalence makes them essential skills for data scientists, though they do not command the highest salaries.

       

    Lower Salaries

    Languages like Matlab, Octave, and Visual Basic for Excel are positioned at the lower end of the salary spectrum for data scientists. Matlab and its open-source cousin Octave fall below the middle of the salary pack, while Visual Basic, used for automating Excel tasks, is near the bottom with an average salary of $135,000 1.

    On the flip side, from a salary perspective, at least, a data science language you can probably ignore for now is Matlab, as well as its open source cousin octave.

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    These languages, while useful for specific tasks, do not offer the financial incentives seen with newer, more specialized programming languages.

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