IT salaries: Engineering managers earn the highest salaries in Germany

Contents

The online developer platform Stack Overflow received over 49,0000 responses worldwide in this year's developer survey. The results show that although most developers use artificial intelligence, their confidence in the technology is declining. In terms of salaries, engineering managers, project managers and software or solutions architects are at the top in Germany –, each earning over 100,000 US dollars per year.

IT salaries in Germany and worldwide

Stack Overflow received answers to the salary question from over 2000 people in Germany. These are given in the form of the annual gross median salary, converted into US dollars. In Germany, engineering managers (118,000 US dollars), project managers (110,000 US dollars), architects in the areas of software or solutions (109,000 US dollars), cloud infrastructure engineers (99,000 US dollars) and mobile developers (94,000 US dollars) earn the most.

The global picture is somewhat different: Senior Executives (139,000 US dollars), Engineering Managers (130,000 US dollars) and Financial Analysts or Engineers (104,000 US dollars) are at the top here. Stack Overflow breaks these figures down further according to experience: Even with comparable experience of around twenty years on average, senior executives and managers earn significantly more than founders or software architects, for example, as the following chart shows:

AI skepticism is growing

Last year, 76% of respondents said they used AI tools in their projects or planned to do so, and only 6% were negative or very negative about AI results. This year, both figures show an increase: 84 percent use AI tools or plan to do so, while skepticism continues to grow. Only 60 percent have a positive attitude towards AI tools, while 20 percent have a negative or very negative attitude. The other answers are split between “unsure” and “indifferent.”

Stack Exchange, the operator of Stack Overflow, announced in May 2025 that it would be restructuring the Q&A platform after 16 years due to the impending loss of importance caused by the AI trend. Stack Exchange has not announced the direction in which the platform is to develop.

Python grows significantly, Rust remains the most popular

The most popular programming, scripting, and markup languages used by respondents were JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, Python, and Bash/Shell. The rise of Python is remarkable: after a decade of steady growth, the language has jumped seven percentage points compared to 2024, from 51 to 58 percent. The Stack Overflow team attributes this to the importance of Python for AI, data science, and backend development. Nevertheless, Python fell from third to fourth place in the ranking.

In terms of the “admired” programming languages, Rust is in the top spot with 72% and has been the most popular programming language since 2016 (partly still with the old question of “loved” vs. “dreaded”) – however, it is only actually used by 15% of all respondents. Rust is followed by the newcomer Gleam with 70 percent, Elixir with 66 percent and Zig with 64 percent.

In terms of development environments, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio from Microsoft occupy the top two places. Visual Studio Code has an immense lead: three quarters of respondents use the free source code editor, compared to 29 percent of Visual Studio users (multiple answers possible). This is followed by the open-source editor Notepad++ and JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA with 27 percent each.

Other findings of the study include the fact that Claude Sonnet is the “most admired” AI model, that almost a third of developers are working remotely this year and that YouTube is particularly popular as a community platform among programming newcomers. A quarter of the developers surveyed are happy in their current job – 28 percent are unhappy – and most respondents have at least ten years of coding experience.

Methodology

Every year, Stack Overflow surveys the global developer community as part of the “Developer Survey” – now in its 15th edition. In this year's online survey, 49,009 people from 166 countries took part from May 29 to June 23, 2025, mainly from the USA, Germany, and India. After evaluating qualification questions, around 15,000 people were excluded from the analysis. Stack Overflow used the exchange rate from June 25, 2025, to convert the salaries into US dollars.

All results of the “2025 Developer Survey” can be viewed on the Stack Overflow website.

(mai)