Wait. Zig Developers Get Paid $100,000?
Instead of working on code, sometimes I take a cup of coffee and look at the state of programming.
I decided to peruse the Stack Overflow developer survey, and saw that Zig is the highest-paying programming language.
So, I have two questions.
What is Zig?
How do I get a job coding Zig?
The answer is that I shouldn’t be thinking about Zig at all and should be working.
What is Zig?
So Stack Overflow gets responses from nearly 100,000 developers across almost 200 countries.
This wide net claims that these developers command $103,000 a year. So, although this amount suffers from the small sample size of Zig developers (so only 273 respondents were Zig coders) it’s still worth investigating what this is.
It’s a general purpose programming language, that intends to replace C. Zig can even compile into and against C code, whilst aiming to be easier to read. As a consequence of this (perhaps) it has manual memory management (good luck!).
So, it’s an option for systems programming, embedded systems and game coding.
How do I get a job coding Zig?
Wrong question. But I’ll answer it anyway.
If you can find an organization that uses Zig the salary can be encouraging. However, Zig is still in the early stages of development meaning that salary comes alongside a steep learning curve.
But, like I said, that is the wrong question.
So, what is the right question?
There are a couple:
Why is Zig highly paid?
The answer might be because it’s new and has a small amount of people working in that area. And that area is systems programming and embedded systems, which is typically better paid than other areas of programming.
What is well paid?
According to Indeed, the best-paid tech skill of 2024 is Gen AI, with an average salary potential of $174,727. Other high-paying skills include system-on-chip, deep learning, Torch, and PyTorch.
Conclusion
There are always people chasing the $ as programmers.
Some programmers will always chase the new hotness.
That’s fine; you do you. I’m all in for the code quality. Yet in any case you shouldn’t learn Zig in the sole hope of getting a highly paid job, that isn’t the right thing to do.