Considering a career in tech? Good choice. The sector is red hot, offering plenty of opportunities to work remotely, work with the latest technologies, and constantly learn and acquire new skills.

Speaking of skills, which ones should you focus on for the most lucrative career options in 2020? Fortunately, a new report has the answers.

The coding information team at StackOverflow have released their annual developer survey. For this report they polled 65,000 coders around the world about the programming languages they use, those they like the most, and which skills can earn the highest pay cheques.

Participants who use Perl, Scala, and Go tend to have the highest salaries, with a median salary of roughly $75,000. Perhaps not coincidentally, the results found that Perl was also amongst the languages that coders like the least. This could cause a lack of professionals using that tech on the market – resulting in the higher wages.

Here are the median salaries reported by 33,534 participants globally. Wages are reported in US dollars.

Wages earned by programming language in 2020 Perl – $76k Scala – $76k Go – $74k Rust – $74k Ruby – $71k Bash/Shell/PowerShell – $65k Objective-C – $64k Haskell – $60k Julia – $59k Python – $59k Swift – $58k C# – $57k R – $57k TypeScript – $57k Kotlin – $54k SQL – $54k Assembly – $53k C++ – $53k JavaScript – $53k HTML/CSS – $52k VBA – $51k C – $50k Java – $50k PHP – $39k Dart – $37k

The survey also determined which specific roles pay the highest wages. Engineering managers, at $92,000 come out on top. Academic researchers make the lowest amount, with median salaries of less than half of that at $41,000.

Median salaries by developer type, 2020 Engineering manager – $92k Engineer, site reliability – $80k DevOps specialist – $68k Engineer, data – $65k Data scientist or machine learning specialist – $58k Developer, embedded applications or devices – $57k Scientist – $57k Developer, desktop or enterprise applications – $56k Data or business analyst – $55k Developer, full-stack – $54k System administrator – $54k Developer, back-end – $53k Developer, QA or test – $53k Database administrator – $50k Developer, game or graphics – $50k Developer, front-end – $49k Educator – $49k Designer – $47k Developer, mobile – $43k Academic researcher – $41k

You can read the whole report from StackOverflow here for much greater detail on regional and demographic differences and trends in programming technology professionals in 2020.