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2024 South Africa Report

State of the Software Developer Nation

In this report

South African Tech Trends

AI continues to shake up software development — Hybrid is now the most common workplace policy

Methodology

Introduction

2023 was another difficult year for the tech industry as it continued to weather a global economic downturn. Interest rates rose in response to high inflation numbers, VC funding decreased again. Overall, it ended up being one of the toughest years for funding in a decade.

While South African companies have avoided the brunt of the effects, some still had to do layoffs. We've also started seeing local companies passing on the pressure to their remaining employees.

All in all, the balance of power in the tech job market has shifted in favour of companies. They're starting to take back a lot of the control they gave up during the hottest-ever hiring market in 2021. We can see this playing out in this year's data:

  • Salary band growth and annual increases have also slowed down as companies no longer need to compete for the best talent.
  • Over the past 12 months, 17% of developers lost their fully remote status.
  • This is despite over half of surveyed developers saying they'd leave if they were forced to return full-time.

In this climate, it's likely that many companies will continue to downgrade easy perks and conveniences to save money.

Taking every opportunity to seize back control is not without its risks. Companies will need to watch out for attrition as the market recovers. In the long term, all too drastic moves may also undermine their employer brand.

For developers, it's important to realise that applications to tech jobs have tripled in the past year. It's now significantly harder to get interviews and the interviews are harder to pass.

However, there are signs that the market is starting to recover slowly: Tech layoffs are still down relative to their peak and the number of open tech jobs is recovering. I look forward to seeing how our community will leverage AI to make the next phase of growth even better than the one before.

I hope this report provides you with insights that will help you navigate the shifting tech landscape with more confidence.

Philip Joubert
OfferZen Co-founder
Philip Joubert
OfferZen Co-founder

Software developer salaries

Salary growth has slowed for the majority of developers — Tech's gender pay gap narrows in 2024

Software developer salaries

Salaries have increased for seniors but increases overall have slowed

Salary bands for seniors have increased by 6.3% but juniors and intermediates have stagnated

Average software engineer salary by year
2021
2022
2023
2024

Years of Experience

The tougher macroeconomic climate is also evident in developer salaries: Across the board, salary band growth for developers has slowed more and more in recent years. Entry-level and junior developers have seen their salaries decrease in 2023, while intermediates have only seen nominal increases.

When controlling for inflation, many developers essentially experienced a decrease in their buying power in the past two years.

In order to give further context on the distribution of our data, we’ve also included the 25th and 75th percentile salaries in this and the following salary graphs.

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Annual salary increases have slowed over the past 12 months

In your current job, by what percentage did your annual salary increase?
2024
2023

Let's start with some good news: More than half of South African developers received a salary increase in the past year. Also, despite the challenging climate, fewer companies gave no increases.

That said, annual salary increases have slowed over the 12 months.

We added some new options and removed old ones from our last survey. If you see 0% in a graph, it is due to a change in options between years.

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Shifting paradigm for developer rewards? Companies are downgrading perks to save money

Developers' most common monetary benefits

What monetary benefits do you have at your current job?
2024
2023

As companies work to extend their runway or hit profitability, many seem to be downgrading their perks, including training budgets. This might explain the falling confidence of developers who don't believe they can continue growing at their current companies.

We're seeing reductions of perks across the board with only a few exceptions, most notably bonuses. This points towards an attempt to still reward developers making a business impact.

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Software developer salaries

Tech's gender pay gap has narrowed in 2024

Tech's gender pay gap has narrowed

Developers' average salary by gender
Men
Women

Years of Experience

On average, the earning gap for female developers has narrowed by 17% percent over the past year and has decreased across all levels of experience.

Average salaries are practically identical for entry-level developers but a pay gap starts to emerge once they've got two years of experience under their belts. The gap is still widest between developers with more than 10 years of experience: Here, women earn 17.4% less than their male counterparts. This is despite female survey respondents being proportionately represented across industries, languages, and location.

We hope that, by providing salary transparency on our job platform and in reports like these, we will equip all developers with the knowledge and confidence they need to earn the salary they deserve. We're also planning to publish further insights on this topic in the future.

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Software developer salaries

Salaries in Gauteng are catching up with Cape Town

Cape Town is still best paying city for developers

Average software developer salary by city
Cape Town
Johannesburg
Pretoria

Years of Experience

Cape Town is still the best place to be for developer salaries: Capetonian developers have earned the highest average salaries in South Africa for four years in a row. However, its dominance might be coming to end as salaries in Gauteng are catching up with those in the Mother City.

Average salaries for entry-level developers are similar across South Africa's three biggest tech hubs, although Cape Town starts to pull ahead after the 2-year mark. The gap between them is widest for developers with four to six years of experience with Capetonian devs earning 15.3% more than Johannesburg-based devs at this level.

This begins to narrow once they reach the senior level and less than 5% separates Cape Town from Johannesburg among developers with more than 10 years of experience.

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Software developer salaries

Niche skills still have the best paying skillsets

Go, Ruby and Kotlin developers have the highest paying skillsets

Software engineer salary by programming language
Bash
C#
C++
Dart
Go
Java
JavaScript
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
SQL
TypeScript
YAML

Years of Experience

Over the past three years, Go, Ruby and Kotlin had the highest average salaries among South African developers. This is due, in part, to the difficulty of finding developers with experience coding in these languages. And they remain in short supply, which sees them retain their position as the best-paying languages in the country.

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Spring Boot and Spring are the best-paying frameworks for senior developers

Software engineer salary by framework
Angular
AngularJS
ASP.net
Django
Flutter
Laravel
Next.js
Node.js
React
React Native
Spring Boot
Spring Framework
Vue.js

Years of experience

While niche languages have the highest-average salaries, when it comes to frameworks Java leads the way. Spring and Spring Boot have the highest average salaries among frameworks and lead to higher average salaries for Java developers across the majority of their careers.

For JavaScript developers, the best salaries come from working with frameworks like React or Node.js.

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Backends devs still earn more, but the gap between frontend and full stack developers is narrowing

Software engineer salary by role
Backend
Frontend
Full Stack

Years of Experience

In our 2023 report, we found that backend developers earned significantly more than their frontend and full stack counterparts. Our latest data shows that while backend developers still earn significantly more, the gap between frontend and full stack developers has narrowed considerably until the six-year mark. This is partly due to salaries for full stack developers stagnating over the past year.

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Get more data to benchmark salaries in 2024

If you’re looking for more salary data to help you benchmark market-related developer salaries, download our 2024 Developer Salary Benchmarking Report

Download the report
Download the report

Software engineer skills

Microsoft-backed languages are on the rise — ASP.Net is SA's most used framework

Is demand for optometrists going to rise as more devs want to C#?

Which of these languages do you want to work with next?
2024
2023

C# is the only language in the top six most popular languages to see an increase over the past year. This makes C# one of the few big languages to see increases in both use and popularity.

Overall, C#'s desirability increased across frontend, backend and full stack developers, indicating its broad appeal to the local tech community. Nearly half of developers say that career opportunities is the most important factor they consider when choosing their next programming language. That might explain C#'s appeal as it gives developers access to the broader Microsoft ecosystem and career opportunities at the thousands of companies who use this tech as part of their stack.

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Microsoft-backed languages are on the rise in 2024

Which of these languages do you use the most?
2024
2023

Microsoft-backed C# and TypeScript have made healthy gains over the past year. While we're seeing an increase in backend and full stack developers working with these languages, a more likely reason for their growth might lie more in the maturity of their respective ecosystems. C# is fully compatible with other Microsoft tools making it a powerful, all-purpose language for everything from cloud computing to game development to AI.

C#'s popularity is also coming at the expense of Java: C# is an alternative to Java, which saw its use decrease from 24.6% to 22%. However, it still manages to retain fifth spot in the rankings.

While JavaScript remains the most-used language for the fifth year in a row, it continues to see its use drop among developers. That's not to say that it's going to be replaced any time soon. It's still a great all-purpose language with loads of great frameworks for frontend, backend, and full stack applications.

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Angular closes in on React for the title of most popular framework

Which of these frameworks do you want to work with next?
2024
2023

While React remains the most wanted framework in 2024, it faces stiff competition from Angular. In fact, less than a percent separates these two frameworks in the standings.

Taking a closer look at the data also reveals that Angular and Next.js are the only frameworks in the top 10 to see an increase in their desirability over the past 12 months. Both frameworks have also seen a big increase in desirability among backend developers in South Africa. Bun is the biggest winner outside of the major frameworks and saw its popularity triple.

The same data also suggests that the boundaries between the front and backend continues to blur heading into 2024 as more backend developers report wanting to work with traditionally frontend frameworks like React, Next.js and Blazor. For many of these developers, they are looking to make the switch to full stack and this is their main motivation for wanting to work with these frameworks.

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ASP.Net overtakes Node.js as South Africa's most used framework

Which of these frameworks do you use the most?
2024
2023

ASP.Net and React have overtaken Node.js to narrowly become SA's first and second most used frameworks, respectively. Angular and Java-framework Spring Boot round out the top 5.

Part of ASP.Net's rise can be tied to more backend and full stack developers working with the C# framework. At the same time, more backend developers report working with frontend frameworks React and Angular as part of their roles. On the frontend, Vue.js and NextJS continue to grow in popularity.

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Want more detailed salary information?

Check out our articles on developer salaries.

Backend
Frontend
Full stack
Java
Python
PHP
JavaScript
C#
TypeScript
Go
Ruby
Kotlin
SQL
Angular
React
Node.js
ASP.Net
Flutter
Vue.js
Software engineer skills

AWS still leads the way as South Africa's most used cloud platform

Are AWS and Azure the only competition in SA's cloud wars?

Which of these cloud platforms do you use the most?
2024
2023

When it comes to South Africa's cloud wars, it appears that AWS and Microsoft's Azure are cementing their duopoly as the most used cloud platforms. They are the only platforms to see their use rise over the past 12 months. And second-placed Azure has more users than the rest of the list combined. However, Google's Cloud Platform still holds an advantage among startups with fewer than 50 employees and companies working in web development and eCommerce.

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33% of developers are looking for work in the next year. Are you?

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Demographics

The data in this report does not claim to be representative of the entire South African developer population. Any time the term, 'software engineer, ‘developer’ or 'South African developer' is used, it refers to the group of developers who took our #DevNationSurvey between 3 October and 27 November 2023.

In terms of location, we only used Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town in location comparisons due to sample size. In cases where no data slicing occurs, all 3935 valid responses were included. In order to shed light on survey participant characteristics, we’ve included the demographic breakdown of all 3935 valid responses below.

Gender

Race

Location

Role

Industries developers currently work in

Organisation size by employees

Coding experience

Methodology

OfferZen conducted a survey to find out more about skills, work experience and job search behaviour of developers. A total of 5402 people took the online survey between 3 October and 27 November 2023. Of these responses, 3935 were counted as valid because they were from developers, or developers who manage other developers, and are currently living in South Africa.

We hosted the survey itself on Typeform and recruited respondents via emails sent to more than 40 000 software makers in the OfferZen community and social media posts to the public. Data was anonymised in accordance with GDPR guidelines and is housed separate to any and all of OfferZen’s platform data. Percentages may not always add to 100% due to rounding.

Salary in this report refers to gross salary before tax and excludes benefits. Statistical analysis was conducted to verify insights regarding salaries and we have only included claims where we have at least 95% confidence.

About OfferZen

OfferZen is a developer job marketplace by developers for developers. Our platform matches job-seeking developers with exciting opportunities at companies, but this effort actually encompasses a much wider mission: To help developers and their teams thrive in the tech ecosystem.


Over the last seven years, this has manifested in a multitude of ways from our core business of helping developers find awesome new jobs, to hosting local maker evenings and tech events, or helping developers share their experiences on our blog. We want to help build an inclusive, transparent, and thriving tech ecosystem.

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