There were only 658 responses for Clojure out of 35,695 respondents - see (hover over the data points - for example, Java had more than 10,000 respondents):
My guess is that many of these 658 Clojure respondents are highly experienced engineers. I bet that if we took the raw data and looked at say, the top 1,000 Java respondents by experience that most of the salary differential you see would probably disappear?
I think "niche" language developers may be not only experienced engineers but are also be the type of engineer who is actively seeking out "better" ways of building software. In other words, a programmer seeking to improve their craft and to think critically about the tools they use for software development. This type of self-analysis and self-criticism probably leads to being a better developer. Maybe similar to musicians? I think we all know musicians who can play a few songs from what amounts to muscle memory but we all also know a much smaller number of musicians who are deeply creative and skilled - in my experience, the primary difference between the two types of musicians boils down to time and some form of deliberate practice.
Stack Overflow makes the raw survey data available via CSV. I'm going to download it myself and dig a bit - others can do the same.
Oh, early in my career I was very hung up on the idea that specific programming language skills were the key to making that higher pay. I now believe that being highly paid has very little to do with specific programming language skills beyond some relatively low floor of competence with the language. There is some luck in making a high salary but generally you have to work for an org willing to pay high salaries, be visible to people making salary decisions, and then make actual valuable contributions. Of course, there are also people without those results who climb the salary ladder by simply understanding the organizational politics of how to move into higher paid positions.
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There were only 658 responses for Clojure out of 35,695 respondents - see (hover over the data points - for example, Java had more than 10,000 respondents):
My guess is that many of these 658 Clojure respondents are highly experienced engineers. I bet that if we took the raw data and looked at say, the top 1,000 Java respondents by experience that most of the salary differential you see would probably disappear?I think "niche" language developers may be not only experienced engineers but are also be the type of engineer who is actively seeking out "better" ways of building software. In other words, a programmer seeking to improve their craft and to think critically about the tools they use for software development. This type of self-analysis and self-criticism probably leads to being a better developer. Maybe similar to musicians? I think we all know musicians who can play a few songs from what amounts to muscle memory but we all also know a much smaller number of musicians who are deeply creative and skilled - in my experience, the primary difference between the two types of musicians boils down to time and some form of deliberate practice.
Stack Overflow makes the raw survey data available via CSV. I'm going to download it myself and dig a bit - others can do the same.
Oh, early in my career I was very hung up on the idea that specific programming language skills were the key to making that higher pay. I now believe that being highly paid has very little to do with specific programming language skills beyond some relatively low floor of competence with the language. There is some luck in making a high salary but generally you have to work for an org willing to pay high salaries, be visible to people making salary decisions, and then make actual valuable contributions. Of course, there are also people without those results who climb the salary ladder by simply understanding the organizational politics of how to move into higher paid positions.