Are you wondering why Zig programmers make so much money? Guess what? It is not what you are thinking.

Disclaimer

I am not Zig evangelist. Even more, I cannot see a clear reason for what type of projects I would use it for. In my opinion, if the language is not revolutionary enough, it is not worth spending time building a whole new community ecosystem and tooling around it.

People love counting other people’s money.

A few months ago, after StackOverflow published another round of surveys, the programmer’s community was overflowing with questions: Why is Zig the highest-paid programming language on the market?

YouTube bombarded me with videos in which yet another “programming teacher” said something like, “I do not understand why Zig developers are paid so much.” It is wordy, pure VS code support, with no class, blah, blah.

Generally, if a programming teacher tells you “do not understand why a programming language is paid well or not,” find another teacher. It is very likely that your teacher does not have enough experience to teach. Many artists use the same brushes, but you do not think they must all be equally paid.

Simple stuff first

First, look at the companies using Zig:

Zig Software Foundation

Andre Kelly is making — $159,790

Employees are making — $102,000

And contractors are making — $60, which would be 60 * 160 * 12 = $115,200

They are core developers and programming language experts. Is it surprising that they make good salaries?

Bun

Bun is a well-funded startup that raised seven million dollars and received much publicity. Do you think its funding members, including the CEO and senior engineers on its team, make pennies?

TigerBeetle

The startup raised 24 million dollars in A round. Same story — funding members and core developers are fintech and database experts, making the next-generation database able to process massive transactions.

Do you still not get it? It is not about language at all; it is about the experience of those using it.

Uber

Do you need any comments here? However, I think Uber would be an even better example than the companies I mentioned earlier. Let’s dig a bit deeper:

It is not about language at all.

Let’s continue with Uber, one of the highest-paid companies on the market.

What do we know about Zig?

• We want to use a technology that is very far from maturity.
• There is no tooling available.
• No experts on the market.
• Tiny community.

What do we know about the company?

• It is rich enough to pay $100k plus salaries.

What do we know about the person who would be able to propose using Zig?

• Someone experienced enough to evaluate such technology.
• A person who can justify benefits using it, manage risks, and propose a rollback strategy.
• Expert who would be able to integrate it into their existing pipeline.

Those facts above clearly picture someone in a leadership position like a Staff or Principal Software Engineer with enough credibility to propose solutions like Zig, defend such proposal, execute it, or lead the team to success.

Such a person is already quite an expert, and his annual income has nothing to do with Zig and its syntax.

Finally, why would they choose Zig?

TigerBeetle and Bun are less exciting examples because they could use other languages, such as C, C++, or Rust. You can find their blogs where they explain why it is Zig.

But again, Uber is very interesting — the Zig compiler executable is not only a Zig compiler but an entire LLVM, meaning the Zig compiler can compile C and C++ as well. This means you can use Zig only for a build script, like an advanced alternative to CMake.

And that is exactly what engineers at Uber did. Not because they fell in love with Zig but because of existing C/C++ projects and the use of Zig as a build system. And, while they might like Zig very much, this use case has nothing to do with Zig itself. They will not have to migrate their C/C++ codebase, they will not need any advanced tooling, and they will not need any low-level zig expertise. They do not even need to use it in critical mission software, only in limited scenarios like unit testing.

Conclusion

The fact that Zig developers are making one of the highest salaries on the market has nothing to do with Zig itself but with the developers’ skills and their position in the company. They likely had those salaries long before they started using Zig or they are startup early members who were able to build the business from scratch.