Salaries decline across board for software engineers

TopCV’s latest annual report shows that salaries for software jobs, while still high, were much lower than in 2022.

For the report, TopCV split the dataset for each position into a lower half and a higher half, and used the median from each half to reflect the salary for a position.

This method more accurately depicts the salary distribution for each position compared to using average values, the report said.

Software interns were the only ones unaffected with their median salary ranging from VND3 million (US$121.5) to VND5 million.

For software staff with less than one year’s experience, salaries slid from VND7-16.5 million in 2022 to VND8-15 million last year.

But higher positions saw more pronounced decreases.

The median salary dropped from VND23-40 million to VND19-33 million for team leaders and from VND23-40.7 million to VND22-40 million for department heads.

Chief technology officers had their salary cut by 20-50% to VND48-72 million.

TopCV also noted large salary gaps between different IT fields.

For positions with five years of experience, web programmers had a salary of VND36-48 million, while it was VND26-42 million for security specialists and VND30-50 million for data management specialists.

In the case of jobs requiring three to five years’ experience, bridge engineers and embedded systems developers were among the highest paid with a median of VND25-57 million and VND24-50 million, twice the salaries software testers and system administrators got.

Last year software engineers were the second most in demand behind only business and sales personnel.

Of the 1,500 firms surveyed by TopCV, 13.2% said they had high demand for software staff.

Specialists and engineers with more than three years’ experience accounted for 28.57% of their new hires last year.

Most companies said they had no issue hiring fresh graduates for junior positions.

Salaries decreased despite high demand.

"This shows the IT workforce supply is relatively large compared to demand," TopCV concluded.

The survey also analyzed nearly 30,000 recruitment posts on the platform.