, 3 min read
Never reason from averages
StackOverflow published its list of “top paying technologies“. Worldwide, the best-paid programmers, on average, work in Clojure and Rust (these are programming languages in case you are wondering). In the US, the top paying programmers work in Go and Scala. In the UK, it is TypeScript and Ruby. Yes, these are all programming languages, but I will excuse you if you have never heard of them.
Here is the analysis we are being offered:
Globally, developers who use Clojure in their jobs have the highest average salary at $72,000. In the U.S., developers who use Go as well as developers who use Scala are highest paid with an average salary of $110,000. In the UK, it’s TypeScript at $53,763 (…)
The implication seems clear enough: go study little-known programming languages to improve your salary! Clojure, Go and TypeScript, here I come!
Sadly, for programmers looking to improve their financial outlook, this information may be worse than useless. It might be dangerously misleading. To be fair, at no point does StackOverflow recommends this list as career advice… but I think it might be perceived as such.
There is nothing wrong with learning Clojure, Go and TypeScript, of course… but will it improve your odds of earning the big bucks?
Suppose you have to choose one programming language. You can go for JavaScript or Go. Of course, you can actually learn both in a couple of week-ends, but humor me. You want an income of at least $110,000. There are 100 opened Go jobs and half of them pay that much. So you get to apply to 50 jobs. Great! There may be 10,000 opened JavaScript jobs… but a much smaller percentage offering at least $110,000, say 10%… yet, this leaves you with 1000 jobs. Much better than with Go.
And, of course, the abundance of jobs at a salary below what you value yourself is a bonus. If your current JavaScript job does not pan out, you can find another one quickly. With a niche language? Not so much. You may actually end up unemployed.
These are made up numbers, but my point is that the average salary is only likely meaningful if you are comparing sets having a similar size. In practice, I strongly suspect that you maximize your odds at earning large salaries by focusing on “standard” programming languages.
I submit to you that it is no accident if the StackOverflow list of top-paying programming languages is made of obscure languages. They are comparing the average of a niche against the average of a large population.
We see a similar problem when doing international comparisons regarding academic achievements. It is not uncommon for the US to have a poor standing. Yet the US is a very large and diverse country. Just look at the last two presidents, Obama and Trump. Not very alike, are they?
If you divide the US in states, then you find that their rankings are often all over the place… but that residents of Massachusetts should not be worried in the least about these rankings…
The U.S. continues to trail its peers in global measures of academic excellence. Based on results from the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, of the 65 countries ranked, the US ranks 31st in math, 24th in science, and 21st in reading. (…) if Massachusetts were allowed to report subject scores independently — much the way that, say, Shanghai is allowed to do so — the Bay State would rank 9th in the world in Math Proficiency, tied with Japan, and on the heels of 8th-ranked Switzerland. In reading, Massachusetts would rank fourth in the world, tied with Hong Kong, and not far behind third-ranked Finland.
Statisticians know all about this. They would never let you publish a paper that compares unqualified averages with vastly different populations. The rest of us need to be reminded periodically not to reason from averages.