Colombia has many software developers, but not a single major Colombian university teaches software engineering. After I wrote that somewhat controversial article, the directors of several engineering programs reached out to me. What I learned is that the issue has to do with demand: young people don’t want to study systems engineering, software engineering, or computer science. Why? Because they think it doesn’t pay well. Unfortunately, existing salary surveys exclude freelancers and only take into account the salaries of software developers that work in Colombia for Colombian companies.
To shed some light on this issue, and hopefully attract more people (especially Latin Americans) to become software developers, we ran a [non-scientific] survey to find out what Colombian software developers really make. It includes traditional employees, freelancers, people working for companies outside Colombia, and Colombians that have migrated to other countries.
The results are in! A very big thank you if you were one of the ones answering or sharing it.
First of all, some disclaimers:
- This was a self-reported survey.
- Unfortunately, we didn’t ask for the location of person. We’ll do it next time.
- Unfortunately, we asked for ranges of monthly incomes, instead of exact numbers. As such, finding median monthly incomes is almost impossible. We’ll have to settle for averages. Shame on me! We’ll fix the issue next time.
- We removed obvious duplicates (same email address) from the results.
Here are the results of the survey as of January 21st, 2015. Feel free to copy the spreadsheet, analyze it, and share your conclusions. If you want to be notified about this survey next year, subscribe here.