They work hard and make good money — which got even better in 2012.

Source: Riviera Partners

Average salary by programming language

The average salary of a Silicon Valley developer jumped about $4,300 in 2012 to reach $118,900, a new study by Riviera Partners, a technical recruiting firm in the Bay Area says.

Database specialists brought home the most bacon, at $130,500, while lowly front-end developers wrangling CSS, Javascript, and some small remnants of HTML pulled in a relatively lowly $109,200.

Interestingly, when you break down the numbers by coding specialty, relatively out-of-favor Java developers make the most money, at $122,400. Developers in the popular but perhaps more accessible PHP programming language make $106,700, while devotees of relatively new languages Python and Ruby bring home $117,900 and $121,400, respectively.

So what else is new?

Not gender equality. Silicon Valley engineers are still overwhelming male, with 86 percent of developers prominently featuring a Y chromosome.

More details in the infographic below:

photo credit: Carsten Schertzer via photopin cc

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---