how much money does a programmer make?

Hi Giovanni,

It varies widely by what technologies a programmer is focused on, what sort of company they work for, and how far along in their career they are. Most of the times when considering a salary, it's helpful to think about it as a range of possibilities rather than an actual number.

Stackoverflow.com, a popular site for answering programming questions has an annual survey of developer salaries that I think you would find very interesting:

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019

Among programmers, there are lots of different things to work on and problems to solve. One of the most important things is to find something that you enjoy working on!

It can vary hugely by company, location, and type of position. On the East Coast I have seen beginning programmers offered anything between $55,000/year and $100,000/year.

A reasonable way to find out is to go to glassdoor.com, and search for salaries for "software engineer" in a city around where you want to work. You don't have to sign up or pay to see the basic answers. You can also search for jobs with individual companies and see guesses.

Do not take the numbers as absolute fact, the can also be notably different from reality. But, they can at least give you a sense of what you could hope for.

Well, some of the most wealthy people in the world are computer programmers. (Ex. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg.)

😉

It depends on what kind of company that you're working for (big company vs startup) and where you're working. Generally, the higher cost of living places like San Francisco have significantly higher salaries than other places that have less jobs and less people.

For specific companies, you can take a look at https://www.levels.fyi/ which will give you a sample of real programmer salaries for a dozen or so companies.

For more general information, this article lays out the averages pretty well - 1b8e08442f2c" target="_blank">https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewdepietro/2019/05/21/software-developer-salary-state/1b8e08442f2c. For the top 10 states, the salaries range from around $106K to 131K.