SINGAPORE – Software engineers have long been among the highest-paid technology professionals, but in Singapore they have been overtaken by those working in artificial intelligence (AI) and cyber security.
Salaries for software engineers fell 0.99 percent in 2023, compared with increases of 11.3 percent for data scientists and 8.24 percent for cybersecurity engineers, tech talent platform NodeFlair noted.
A chill in the metaverse, crypto winter and tech companies laying off employees during the Covid-19 pandemic have cast a chill over the tech sector, exacerbated by a drought in Southeast Asian start-up funding.
The collapse of crypto exchanges FTX and Binance, for example, led to a 5.41 percent drop in salaries for blockchain engineers in 2023, the company said in its annual Asia salary report, published on April 8.
“Unlike the previous two years, during which technology salaries experienced significant growth, there is now an overall decline in salaries for various technology positions,” the company wrote.
But he noted that wages are still higher compared to 2021.
Software engineers—front-end, back-end, and full-stack engineers in NodeFlair’s count—took home median base salaries of $5,000 per month as juniors in 2023 and $11,000 as managers here.
These salaries suggest that they earn more than their colleagues in other industries.
A survey conducted in February found that local graduates in information and digital technology had the highest gross monthly salary of $5,500, although that was down from $5,625 in 2022.
Engineering graduates earned $4,500, art, design and media graduates earned $3,740, and business graduates earned $4,150.
Yet software engineers, hounded around the world during the pandemic as digital services exploded, now face a future where generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) writes code, faster and with fewer errors.
In contrast, experts in genetic artificial intelligence or cyber security, which are now more critical in light of automatically generated threats, are in high demand.
Data scientists, who displaced software engineers with the highest salary growth in NodeFlair’s report, include positions such as artificial intelligence engineers, machine learning specialists, deep learning specialists, natural language processing practitioners and computer vision specialists.
NodeFlair co-founder Adrian Goh expects the next skills in demand to be cloud computing and data engineering – both critical to AI work.