The Business Times (Garage)
March 7, 2023
BASE salaries for software engineers in Singapore registered a smaller increase in 2022 compared to the year before, following tighter economic conditions that forced tech companies to scale back on hiring.
Salaries rose by an average of 7.61 per cent in 2022, according to a report from tech recruitment startup Nodeflair and Southeast Asian accelerator Iterative. That is lower than the increase of 22 per cent in 2021, a bumper year for tech hiring.
Jobs in the tech sector are among the fastest growing in Singapore, in terms of salaries and headcount. The city-state is the Asia hub for several global companies, including ByteDance and Google.
A wave of online activity from consumers during the pandemic led tech companies to splurge on employees, with Meta increasing its global team by 40 per cent, said Nodeflair co-founder Adrian Goh.
But layoffs began to mount in 2022 amid rising inflation and interest rates. "Talents have less competing offers so their leverage for negotiating for higher calary is lower, be it new offers at other companies or asking for a pay raise in their current company," said Goh.
"For Nodeflair, we are expecting demand and salary increases to normalise to a more sustainable trend, which is about 7.2 per cent," he told The Business Tines.
The report based its salary estimates on Nodeflair's database of over 169,000 data points. Data was sourced from user submissions verified by documents, such as payslips and offer letters, and job advertisements from job portals. Verified data was given a higher weightage when compiling salary ranges.
Despite a slowdown in hiring, the hunt for top software engineers drove salaries to a record high last year. Competition for the cream of the crop resulted in a large disparity between top earners and those at the bottom of the ladder, with the salary difference between the 10th and 90th percentile as high as three times.
Junior engineers earned a median base salary compensation of S$5,000 in 2022, up 5 per cent, while the 90th percentile earned S$8,500, up 13 per cent. Junior engineers refer to those with up to two years of experience.
Salaries at the 90th percentile for mid-level roles, representing two to five years of experience, rose 16 per cent to S$11,000.
Some roles did not enjoy the same increases. For lead roles, with the main responsibility being leading a small team in technical areas, the median salary was flat at S$9,000. The 90th percentile saw a dip of 6 per cent to S$15,000.
Still, technology remains a strong driver of job growth in Singapore. A graduate employment survey released in February found that fresh graduates of information and digital technologies courses commanded the highest starting pay among their peers at S$5,625 in 2022, up from S$5,000 in 2021.
The information and communications sector is one of Singapore's fastest-growing sectors, with the resident workforce growing 42 per cent over the past five years.
Government estimates showed that even with the recent wave of tech retrenchments, around 9,000 job openings remain available as at September 2022. Seven in 10 retrenched locals in the sector were able to find another job within six months.
Competition between top companies continues to be fierce. According to the tech talent report, six out of the 15 most-searched companies in Singapore, which include ByteDance, ShopBack and Binance, pay 20 per cent above the market median for software engineers.
Besides software engineers, Nodeflair and Iterative's research found that average base compensation for roles such as mobile engineer, data analyst and site reliability engineer increased as well.
However, average salaries for roles including systems engineer, cybersecurity engineer and quality assurance dipped as much as 2 percent.
The report noted that experts in artificial intelligence (Al) would be in high demand, following the recent explosion of generative Al tools such as ChatGPT.
Companies are also increasingly interested in multidisciplinary individuals. "Rather than solely focusing on specialists, companies are now looking for individuals who are capable of wearing multiple hats, such as a full-stack developer who can handle both front-end and back-end development," the report said.
