The information in these reports from O’Reilly is gold for leaders of digital agencies and tech consultancies. They headline with salary surveys, but the reality is that I think especially for those of us in the UK, they suffer from the fallacy of averages. As the survey is global, the UK is simply bucketed in as part of Western Europe, and the data crosses multiple sectors.

Nonetheless, there is a lot of really interesting salary information here. Including:

• trends on salaries;
• gender impact;
• the impact of education (for a web developer, you’ll earn $10k more for a doctorate. But only do a masters if you plan to continue to a doctorate, as a masters earns you less than an undergrad degree!);
• negotiation impact;
• impact of team and company sizes;
• impact of industry / sector;
• impact of age vs experience (e.g. that each additional year of experience for a web developer on average increases earnings by $1,350).

More than that, though, there’s a mine of useful info on work beyond just salaries. Such as:

• Time spent in meetings vs coding or designing;
• Typical tasks performed, and impact on salary;
• Tools and frameworks used – past, present and future (Excel remains the data scientist’s tool of choice, while in design pen and paper still rule the roost);
• Impact of non-monetary aspects on job satisfaction, including culture, opportunities for growth and location;
• Career development preferences.

The reports themselves are “free” (meaning you pay O’Reilly by giving them your name and email address). I could have posted the links directly to the downloads here, but that feels a little unethical. So here are the links to the registration pages – note that even in those pages, you are given the option not to be marketed to by O’Reilly, so you can opt out straight away.

Finally, I have no relationship with O’Reilly whatsoever, other than that I regularly read some of their books and blogs and think they’re pretty good.

Without further ado, the four reports:

• The 2017 Software Development Salary Survey, including tools, languages, salary factors, non-salary data;
• The 2017 Data Science Salary Survey, including tools & impact (e.g. proprietary vs open source), impact of age, salary and non-salary data;
• The 2017 Web Salary Survey, again with tools and preferences, and salary and non-salary data;
• The 2017 Design Salary Survey, meaning in O’Reilly’s language interactive designers (UX, UI, IA, user research, etc).

Post script…

In case you didn’t get the Caroline Aherne (RIP) reference, from which I shamelessly pilfered and amended the caption in the image, here’s the original. Side-splittingly funny.