[fractionalhare]

> Well I don't know how accurate this is, but in 2019 Stackoverflow survey, Clojure practitioners averaged the highest pay of any languages.

Well I didn't believe it, but wow: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#top-paying-te...

I'm not sure if I should conclude that I'm incredibly ignorant of the engineering market, or that Stack Overflow's survey is not representative.

It makes me suspicious that Clojure is shown as the most highly paid language at $90k. Basically any non-new grad developer in a high cost of living area earns more than that, regardless of the language. I'm also suspicious that only 1.4% of survey respondents use Clojure, which may show a bit of a base rate fallacy here.

What would be the explanatory thesis for Clojure programmers being the most highly paid? None of the most highly paid roles I'm personally familiar with in big tech or finance use Clojure, and people who work in those roles earn well into the six (and sometimes seven) figures.

[discreteevent]

>Basically any non-new grad developer in a high cost of living area earns more than that, regardless of the language.

SO is used by developers all over the world, not just in the US.

[deckard1]

> What would be the explanatory thesis for Clojure programmers being the most highly paid?

I couldn't find a breakdown of the stats by state or city, but here's my guess: Clojure is only used at companies that can take the risk. That is, SF, NYC, and a few other metros. There are businesses that probably run Java or something on their cash cow and want to throw a few bones to the developers for recruitment/resume-driven-development purposes. Whereas JavaScript/C++/Java developers exist at every company and in every tiny city with a much broader pay scale.

Anecdotal, my company does some Clojure. But it's limited to a handful of internal tools and we pretty much ended the experiment years ago. Nothing new is made in Clojure. To my knowledge, we've never hired specifically for Clojure. It's always some dev that knows another language.

[didibus]

It's interesting too that of the top 5, only Go is a non-functional language, the others all are: Clojure, F#, Scala, Elixir.

Right now my guess is that, if you also look at one of the other questions, it turns out Clojure has one of the highest ratio of senior to junior, like Clojure devs average a higher amount of experience as well. I haven't checked the others like F#, but my guess is that most dev using functional programming languages actively and professionally tend to be more senior and thus command a higher salary mostly. That means there isn't as many junior or mid-levels to skew the average salary down, where as my guess is other languages might have an even bigger number of new devs using them like JavaScript for example, which would skew the salary average towards their pay levels.