Developer Salary Survey Lithuania — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:01] about developers salary. Everyone likes to talk about money, especially someone else's money. So, every year in my home Lithuania, in the country of Baltics and Central Europe, I make a poll, a survey for 11 years in a row, where a thousand

[00:18] people, roughly thousand people, tell me how much they earn as developers. And then I compile this table that you see on the screen for now blurred out, but I will show you that in a minute. And then I will discuss the numbers, comparison

[00:33] against last year, which means how salaries are growing, comparison versus average salary of Lithuania as a country, so you would understand is it a lot or not. And also there was a free form question what people think about

[00:47] the dev job market and trends, where we'll read summarized responses. And the survey, for the record, was like this. Let me zoom that in. There were six questions, anonymous survey, with a question, "What language do you work

[01:01] question, "What language do you work with? What salaries do people get after taxes?" This is Google Translate, so it didn't translate everything perfectly, but people should give a number per month in euros after taxes. Then the

[01:16] Lithuanian city, which is not relevant to you. Then how do they consider themselves, junior, mid, or senior? How many years of programming do they have? This was just kind of a validation question, so to speak, and then free

[01:29] form question. Now, let's see the numbers and discuss them. So, this is the main table with the numbers open. This is, again, in euros per month after taxes. This is how we usually calculate salaries in Lithuania. I know in some

[01:44] countries they prefer per year or before taxes, but in my case I serve it in a local way, so people would know how much they earn after taxes. Not everyone knows how much they earn before taxes because companies pay taxes for them.

[02:00] Anyway, what do we see here? Junior developers or people consider themselves developers or people consider themselves junior earn about 1.6 1.7 junior earn about 1.6 1.7 thousand euros per month. Mid-level is

[02:12] at around 2.5 K euros. Also, many of you are familiar more familiar with USD. So, this is how much it's roughly in USD. this is how much it's roughly in USD. So, like 20% more 1 euro is like 120 or

[02:24] 118 dollars. And now if I go back to the table, senior level is at roughly 4K per month, maybe 3.9. We can also discuss the languages' popularity in Lithuania, but this is kind of biased because I shared that

[02:40] kind of biased because I shared that survey in the web developer group on my Facebook local page and local group also LinkedIn. So, this is mostly web developers. And also, of course, for some of the languages the number of

[02:54] respondents was too low to even get to some average conclusions. And also, some languages that were also mentioned but weren't enough to be on the table, which is Kotlin, Ruby, and others. Also, the

[03:07] don't know much about my country Lithuania. So, that 2.5 K per month after taxes for mid-level, is it enough to have a good lifestyle, to afford stuff? So, to compare with, this is the website again translated with Google

[03:22] website again translated with Google Translate. The average wage in Lithuania for all professions, not developers. The newest number is from 25 Q3, and this is the average salary again after taxes per

[03:37] month in the country. So, you would say that developers earn almost two times that developers earn almost two times more, more like 80% more than average person in Lithuania. And to be honest, that difference is shrinking. As I said,

[03:50] I'm making that survey for 11 years already and over 11 years I remember that the difference was more than twice, but the difference gets smaller. Developer salaries aren't growing as quick as the whole economy salaries and

[04:06] averages. Maybe it's the situation in my local country. I'm not sure. We can of course discuss your regional situation. Now we can compare with the last year's survey, for example, how much the salaries have grown. And only on junior

[04:21] it grew substantially 15%, but this number is misleading because there were number is misleading because there were fewer juniors. So 47 versus 59 last fewer juniors. So 47 versus 59 last year. And also I noticed that with fewer

[04:36] junior positions on the market, the requirements are much higher, especially in the age of AI and we'll talk about that when discussing the free form answers by people. So I would interpret that the level you should be at to get

[04:50] that the level you should be at to get even hired as a junior is higher, which means the salary could be potentially higher. Also another interpretation is higher. Also another interpretation is that companies name the position as

[05:02] junior developer, but actually the level of work involved may be not exactly junior. But then the number that I do believe in more is mid-level plus 1%

[05:14] only. Inflation is roughly, I don't know, 4% I would guess and then that salary increase doesn't cover even the inflation and also the real estate prices locally in Lithuania have skyrocketed in recent years and they

[05:30] continue to grow, which means that the real estate that these developers can afford is not the same as the last year. And this is what I see and feel overall in the market that a lot of companies don't raise every like 10% as it used to

[05:46] be like a tradition every like December or every year when they renegotiate the salary something like that. That doesn't happen as much except for senior level. happen as much except for senior level. Plus 9% is also I would believe to be

[06:00] realistic because for the best people, for senior people, these are the people that basically make the most money for the companies with their valuable work. Companies still value their work. They don't have many seniors to choose from

[06:15] locally to be honest from what I understand. So, that's why they keep raising the rates for hiring and also raising salaries for the same people year after year. And now let's read the answers. What do people say with free

[06:29] form question like this? I asked AI to compile the most interesting answers and quote by kind of separate topics. And the first topic is junior dev crisis.

[06:41] And I do agree heavily that for juniors currently it's hard times. It's hard to currently it's hard times. It's hard to find jobs. Juniors aren't needed maybe. I mean, it's not my words. I'm just reading what people say. Juniors, these

[06:54] positions barely exist anymore and I see that on the market. The next trend discussed was salary stagnation. End of the golden age exactly as I told, the salaries aren't growing as much and here are a few examples of people who

[07:10] actually told roughly similar in their own words even including returning to the same company and getting lower salary. Next topic, let's talk about AI, the obvious kind of elephant in the room and some people claim it's a positive

[07:24] change. They produce roughly five times more, boosted productivity, and as a more, boosted productivity, and as a result, my salary. For some cases, if you deliver more with AI, you may ask for bigger salary or the general value

[07:39] for the business is bigger, which means bigger profits for the business, and if some of that profit with their employees. And also interesting twist, I can track more hours per day. This is probably for freelancers. So, for the

[07:53] same amount of work, it gets done faster, and then you can have different clients in parallel. This is on the edge of cheating in a way, but if the person

[08:05] manages to pull it off something like that in ethical way, then I'm all for it. We're getting paid not for hours in the day typing, but actually for delivery of the result. But also with AI, there's another twist, another thing

[08:18] to talk about is push from management. So, managers and company owners push, they read the same news like we do online, and they expect with AI that we as developers deliver more, deliver faster, do everything with AI. Sometimes

[08:34] faster, do everything with AI. Sometimes on the edge of we need to push back to managers and tell them and convince them it's not that simple, and AI doesn't always one shot what they need. So, as with everything, it's a spectrum, and in

[08:46] different companies it happens in a different way, but I guess push from management is a real thing. In total, by the way, we have 12 sections here. Section number five is skepticism about AI and vibe coding. This is probably the

[09:00] biggest group of developers complaining about AI slop and quality code delivered about AI slop and quality code delivered by AI or delivered by juniors using AI, including the fact that with AI we lose the ability to think for ourselves,

[09:15] which is part of the overall problem. And this is probably the biggest problem with AI vibe coders and general AI solution, which look good on the surface, and they are offered cheaper for like 200-300 euros per software

[09:29] unit, let's put it this way. As a result, it's crashing the market, and it's making the salary lower for probably better developers who invest in quality of software. To be honest, it's not that different if you compare for

[09:42] example, ready-made scripts from CodeCanyon or ThemeForest or something like that or WordPress solution which is like quick website for 50 or 100 dollars. So, it's not really a new

[09:54] thing. But, with AI it just happened in more massive ways with more numbers. Okay, next with AI also but shift of the nature of work. talked about that in one

[10:06] channel. So, what we're doing as developers is shifting and will be shifting for better and for worse. For some of you, it's an interesting change and maybe preferred change because you are too lazy to write crowds by hand.

[10:22] So, this is good. But, also if you spend most of your time in the day reviewing the code, this is probably not what you signed up for when you became a developer. So, more architects than the coders. This is probably cool because an

[10:36] architect can think about solution, think about orchestrator layer, and then think about orchestrator layer, and then give LLM to perform the boring stuff. But, in reality, it's not that sexy. Many developers are actually turning

[10:50] more into this, something like PMs with technical skills. So, that was another group of answers. Let's get further from AI and let's talk about job market in general. Many people pointed out that there are generally fewer job offers.

[11:05] Recruiter attention has dropped, fewer postings, job market completely unfavorable to candidates. These are words from totally different people. It may be not the overall trend, but I would agree to at least some extent. And

[11:20] also remote positions, not sure it's probably depending on the country, but at least in Lithuania, I noticed that majority of the companies now demand in office at least half of the week. The next group of answer is the difference

[11:35] between junior and senior. For seniors who are really good, it may be better. who are really good, it may be better. So, good programmers are 2x or even 10x better, and bad ones are not necessarily worse, but let's put it on the same

[11:49] level or 10% better with AI. So, this is another kind of angle, but the gap between strongest and the rest of the market is growing, and that's why partially senior-level salaries aren't shrinking, aren't

[12:02] stopping. They're still growing. Then, the next group of answer kind of about the same thing, but from different angle. Rise in expectations from management to be done is expected 5 to 10x for the same salary, which is

[12:15] probably summarized by this one. AI sped up the work, but didn't make it much easier. Also, some people have some existential threats and philosophical thoughts like, "Where do we go from here? Will there be still programmers

[12:30] writing code by hand in a few years, or in a few years will no longer be needed?" In my personal opinion, developers will still be needed because developers are architects for the final product solution to the market, and

[12:44] writing code is just a part of that. I recently retweeted this thought by Jason Fried, founder of Basecamp, that the last 20% is actually all of the work,

[12:56] and this will be the differentiator between someone wipe coding and releasing some sloppy or average quality software, which AI can help with, and the companies, the product makers who would be the best in the market with

[13:11] useful and usable and maintainable software. That will still be different level, in my opinion, and this is where real developers will always be needed. It's just a question of what those developers will actually do every day.

[13:26] And finally, two more answer groups kind of repeating in a way junior pipeline long-term risk. So, if we don't grow juniors now, who will maintain the solutions in the future? For now, I don't have the answer, but a few people

[13:41] are worried about that. And then about local Lithuania, some people concluded that actually Lithuania caught up to Western Europe in terms of salary. So, our salaries are similar even to Germany or sometimes UK. And if we compare the

[13:56] cost of living, for example, in Berlin or London, this is incomparable. So, it's a good country to live in, to be honest, in 2026, especially the capital. And also interesting kind of twist on the market. So, from Poland, people are

[14:12] hired for cheaper, and Poland is becoming hottest tech hub. I didn't expect Poland to be mentioned in that survey, but yeah, people have spoken. So, yeah, a lot of numbers, a lot of things that people told me. Now, it's

[14:25] your turn. Let's go into the comments and let's discuss all of that. What is your opinion? This is just one country, but is it similar to trend in your country or worldwide in terms of developer salary and the growth? Let's

[14:38] discuss in the comments below. That's it for this time, and see you guys in other for this time, and see you guys in other videos.