Montreal Developer Jobs

It’s hard to ignore that software engineer salaries increased a lot in the past few years, at least in North America. But it might still be hard to have a clear idea of how much developers earn, as not everyone is okay to share their compensation in public.

Fortunately, some websites offer people the ability to share their salary anonymously, as well as information about their role: title, seniority, language… We spent some time on Glassdoor to present you an overview of how much developers in Montreal earn in 2022.

Developers’ salary by seniority

Without looking at specific developer roles, we can see that there is a significant difference between the salary of a junior developer and the one of a senior.

Looking at these numbers, it looks like a developer can expect to double their salary in the first ~10 years of their career. But assuming that salaries will keep increasing, they can probably expect even more! Likely, senior developers today weren’t paid as much as junior today when they started their careers.

Web developers: Front-end, Back-end, and Full-stack

When looking at web developer roles, it’s not uncommon that they fall into one of these three categories: front-end, back-end, or full-stack. What is the impact on compensation?

The difference does not seem significant. A good reason for choosing between a front-end, back-end, or full-stack career, not basing your choice on salaries but on what you like the most!

Salaries by language

The next obvious question is: what language pays the most? Is there a correlation between language and salary? Let’s have a look at the four most present languages in job titles:

There seems to be a pretty high advantage for Ruby on Rails and Python, especially for senior roles. But let’s take these numbers with caution: the closer you are to senior, the more likely you stop using the language in your job title. You’re not a JavaScript developer anymore, you’re a front-end or back-end developer.

What about mobile developers?

Many developers chose to specialize in mobile development. Does it pay better than other kinds of programming jobs? Is there a difference between specializing in iOS or Android?

It doesn’t seem so. The salaries are significantly the same as other specializations and don’t vary whether you look at iOS or Android developers. This is quite reassuring, isn’t it?

What can you take from these numbers?

It would be easy to look at these salaries and use them to choose to pivot your developer career or to go see your manager ask them for a raise. A word of caution though:

• Salaries can vary a lot from one company to another, especially for senior roles. If you see that the average salary for your criteria is around $100,000, it can mean that actual salaries go from $85,000 to $130,000.
• “Senior” does not mean the same for all companies. It’s not uncommon to be considered senior in a company and start as an intermediate developer for the next job. It usually means that you’ll get more technical challenges in this new job.
• The data we used for this overview is not perfect and possibly incomplete or biased, as it comes from what developers are willing to share about their compensation. For instance, there is a lot of data for “developers”, but not as much for “senior front-end developers”.

Still, there are a few lessons you can take from this overview:

• If you are considered senior in your current role and you are paid less than $80,000, it might be a good time to ask for a raise or start looking for a new job.
• If you feel stuck at a medium compensation, it might be because you have trouble passing from intermediate to senior. Try to go out of your comfort zone, for instance by attending developer meetups and chatting with other developers.
• If you want to earn more than $130,000, you can either aim for principal or staff engineer roles, or look for other ways. One of them is to look for remote roles in companies located in places with higher salaries, like Toronto, New York City, or even the Silicon Valley. You should expect challenging roles (and interviews!), but a way higher compensation than the ones you can find in Montreal.

If you are looking for a new developer job, the best way to use Glassdoor’s salary data is to look at the companies you are targetting and ask for the salaries there. For big companies, you can expect pretty relevant data (for instance, salaries at Ubisoft).