SINGAPORE – Software engineers have long been among the most highly paid tech professionals, but in Singapore, they are being overtaken by those working in artificial intelligence (AI) and cyber security.
The pay of software engineers dipped 0.99 per cent in 2023 compared with an 11.3 per cent surge for data scientists and an 8.24 per cent rise for cyber-security engineers, noted tech talent platform NodeFlair.
A chill in the metaverse world, a crypto winter and tech firms cutting hires enrolled during the Covid-19 pandemic have cast a cold spell over the tech sector, worsened by a drought in start-up funding in South-east Asia.
The implosion of crypto exchanges FTX and Binance, for instance, sent salaries for blockchain engineers tumbling 5.41 per cent in 2023, the firm said in its annual Asia Tech Salary Report released on April 8.
“In contrast to the preceding two years, during which technology salaries experienced substantial growth, there is now an overall decrease in salaries for various tech positions,” the firm wrote.
But it did note that salaries are still higher compared with 2021.
Software engineers – front-end, back-end and full-stack engineers in NodeFlair’s count – brought home median base salaries of $5,000 a month as juniors in 2023 and $11,000 as managers here.
Those salaries suggest that they make more than their peers in other industries.
A survey out in February noted that local graduates in the information and digital technology fields made the highest gross monthly pay at $5,500, although that was down from $5,625 in 2022.
Engineering graduates made $4,500, arts, design and media graduates collected $3,740 and business grads made $4,150.
Still, software engineers, headhunted worldwide during the pandemic as digital services exploded, now face a future where generative AI (gen AI) writes code, faster and with fewer errors.
In contrast, specialists in gen AI or cyber security, more critical now in the light of auto-generated threats, are in hot demand.
Data scientists, who edged out software engineers with the biggest wage growth in NodeFlair’s report, include positions such as AI engineers, machine-learning specialists, deep-learning experts, natural language processing practitioners and computer-vision specialists.
NodeFlair co-founder Adrian Goh expects the next-in-demand skills to be cloud computing and data engineering – both essential for AI to work.
