2022 Software Engineer Landscape Report: In‑Demand Skills, Salaries, and Hiring Trends

Hired’s 2022 Software Engineer Report, compiled from more than 366,000 interactions between companies and developers and 2,000 survey replies collected between January 2020 and December 2021, aims to give engineers insight for career development and help employers refine hiring and retention strategies.

The analysis shows that demand for software engineers has more than doubled since 2020, with the programming language Go ranking first for two consecutive years; engineers proficient in Go receive interview requests at 1.8 times the market average.

Following Go, developers skilled in Ruby on Rails see interview requests at 1.78 times the average, with Scala, Ruby, and React Native also in high demand. Hired notes that Ruby on Rails remains one of the most convenient and powerful frameworks, while React’s popularity is rising as startups and mature companies rebuild their platforms.

Cloud‑related skills such as Kubernetes, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform rank lower on the list, generating interview requests at roughly 1.3 times the average.

Among the most beloved programming languages, the top five are Python, JavaScript, Java, TypeScript, and C#, praised for useful, well‑maintained libraries and ease of use. Languages perceived as more complex—PHP, Swift, Scala, R, and Objective‑C—rank toward the bottom, with some developers describing their experience as “overwhelming.”

In terms of roles, full‑stack engineers experience the highest demand growth, with interview requests up 2.1 % year‑over‑year, followed by backend and frontend engineers.

Overall demand growth has driven salary increases. Security engineers saw a 7.59 % rise, bringing the average annual compensation to $165,505. The shortage of talent in cybersecurity is a key factor behind this surge.

Voice, chatbot, and AI‑driven transcription technologies are also hot topics; the average salary for natural‑language‑processing roles rose to $160,227, a 2.48 % increase over 2020.

U.S. software engineer salaries remain the highest globally, with San Francisco leading at over $170,000, followed by Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, and Boston.

The pandemic has accelerated remote work adoption; developers open to remote positions receive about 20 % more interview requests than those who are not.