Salary Versus GDP

NATIONAL MEDIAN SALARIES SHOULD BE EXPECTED TO VARY according to the economic conditions of the country, so the question becomes: given a country’s economy (in particular, its per capita GDP), do the salaries of data scientists and engineers vary? Here, we plot per capita GDP and median salary of each country in the sample. The resulting graph is remarkably linear, with outliers largely explained by small sample size: Greece, for example, has a higher- than-expected median salary given a relatively low per capita GDP, but this is based on just one respondent.

One shortcoming of this plot is that it does not take into account years of experience, which turns out to be very uneven in the sample among different countries. In particular, respondents from Western Europe tended to be much more experienced (with an average of seven years) than respondents from Eastern Europe (with an average of four years). Since experience correlates with salary, the West-East salary difference is exaggerated due to this experience differential.