The UK's best-paying technology jobs and coding languages

If you want to earn a good salary working in a UK-based technology job, which coding language should you learn and which job title should you aspire to?

Stack Overflow's new salary survey for the UK and Ireland suggests the answer to the first question is Kotlin, Scala or Swift, and that the answer to the second is generic 'engineering manager' followed by site reliability engineer. DevOps specialists, who enable developers and operations teams to collaborate for continuous delivery, rank third.  

Stack Overflow's developer pay survey isn't finance-specific and the company doesn't break out numbers for finance-only salaries. However, 16% of the over 6,000 respondents who took the survey work in finance, more than any other sector. 

Not all developers in the UK are going to earn the sums in the tables below. 65% of Stack Overflow's respondents have 10 years+ coding experience. These are (mostly) not junior developers. 

Finance professionals looking at the tables below might think that pay looks meagre compared to front-office jobs in banking and trading, and it does. In the first year out of university, new front-office hires in London can expect to make up to £91k ($113k) in total compensation (at Bank of America Merrill Lynch - BAML) or £92k at Goldman Sachs. 

However, it's worth considering that bankers work far harder than the average technologist. While 80-hour weeks or more are still common in banking, most technologists in the UK say they work 40 hours or less.

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