See Figure 6 below.
There are clearly come issues with these “related” jobs, but a couple do offer some limited relevant comparison.
For some additional better insight on salary comparison by position, lets turn to the Stack Overflow Coding Salary Calculator (Oct 16, 2019).
This report is an overview of the salary calculator, which “is based on the comprehensive data from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, and this large, extensive survey data allows us to build an accurate model that reflects trends in how coding work is being compensated around the world.
“Still focusing on the US, Figure 7 shows what Stack Overflow reports as the median salary for different types of developers.
Data roles such as data scientists and data engineers sit very high atop the list of developers types in terms of salaries.
Stack Overflow offers this observation: [W]e have evidence here that high salaries for data scientists and data engineers can be accounted for by high education and high experience levels alone.
Data scientists are highly paid, but not more so than a similarly educated developer doing other kinds of work.
(Both bachelor’s degrees and even higher degrees are associated with significantly increased pay for people who code.
) Over the past several years, data science and data engineering work have been moving away from an extreme outlier position into the mainstream of software work.
While thinking of data scientists as “developers” is somewhat problematic, there is undoubtedly a lot of crossover in the types of skills that a contemporary coding data scientist possesses and those which a developer does, on a technical level.
That said, the comments on higher education acting as a primary (they allude to it being a sole) contributor to higher salaries for data scientists is not outlandish.
However, these may be apples to oranges comparisons; we would need to have access to the raw data of the salaries of similarly highly educated data scientists as well as non-data scientist developers, otherwise normalized, in order to draw such conclusions.
Finally, lets use the Stack Overflow survey to bring an international aspect to our discussion.
Figure 8 looks at the top salaries for different types of developers in 4 countries: So, what is a data scientist salary in 2019?.As it turns out, thats a really good question.
without much of an answer.
Of course, you probably knew coming into this that there would not be a single, magical number once we were finished.
You do, however, now have some data to help make some reasonable forecasts as to what fair salaries would be under a variety of different circumstances.
Lets see what 2020 brings to the data scientist salary discussion.
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