Software engineer salaries up 9% last quarter?

The returns of (hopefully not) Dubious Data™️

Average salaries for software engineers Hirewell placed in Q1 2023: up 9% from Q4 2022!

But let’s not get too excited. Don’t want to fall in the Dubious Data™️ trap.

But it’s true. Our average software engineering placement salary (all levels junior to senior, all coding languages combined) from $138k to $151k. However…the total volume went down 35%.

We can be honest: the market sucked and the sample size got smaller.

Analyzing further, there’s 2 things to keep in mind:

1. This is our data and not every hire comes from us. We get pulled in when things get hard. And hiring may have gotten a bit easier.
2. Doing these calculations for the past 3 years, we’ve always assumed a fair amount of consistency with levels being hired. In Q1, things skewed more towards senior hires. It would appear that ‘easier’ hiring is at the more junior levels.

Conclusions? “Urgent” demand went down. But no evidence that salaries actually went down.

For engineers, anyway. Indeed did report a wage growth decline year over year from December 2022 of 6.3%. But that’s all jobs in all industries, not engineers specifically.

Now some good news: April tech placements shot up 9% compared to the Q1 2023 monthly average. 

So I’m calling it: we hit the bottom. 

Fun fact: no one knows anything, least of all recruiters. If it all goes to sh*t from here, you know who to blame.

James Hornick

Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.