Tableau Developer — Income and Opportunity

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Before we learn about the money, let’s get this question out of the way:

What is Tableau?

Figure: Example of a Tableau dashboard (source)

Let’s have a look at the definition inspired by the official Tableau website:

Tableau is a visual data analytics platform focused on the business analytics use case that helps you use data to solve problems. It is great to visualize data (e.g., using dashboards) and perform complex data analytics tasks with relatively simple-to-use operations.

I recommend you watch the following 10-minute video at 1.5x speed to get a first intuition of the platform quickly:

Here’s a screenshot of the video that shows the data analysis process relevant for Tableau:

And here’s a screenshot of all the subproducts of the Tableau platform—all of them may be a potential specialization for a Tableau Developer:

So, Tableau helps you accomplish all five steps of business process and business intelligence:

  1. Storing transactions
  2. Analyse data
    • Data preparation
    • Data analysis
  3. Sharing insights
  4. Making decisions
  5. Monitoring outcomes and results

What is a Tableau Developer?

A Tableau Developer analyzes data, develops software, and creates data visualizations using Tableau to make businesses more efficient and effective.

Tableau developers routinely generate Tableau dashboards, business intelligence (BI) reports, and data visualizations to improve decision making in a data-driven organization.

Now that you know about what it is, let’s have a look at what it earns next!

Annual Income of Tableau Developer (US)

💬 Question: How much does a Tableau Developer in the US make per year?

Average Income of a Tableau Developer in the US by Source.
Figure: Average Income of a Tableau Developer in the US by Source. [1]

The expected annual income of a Tableau Developer in the United States is between $71,807 and $114,559, with an average annual income of $93,564 and a median income of $93,460 per year.

This data is based on our meta-study of 8 salary aggregators sources such as Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter, and PayScale.

SourceAverage Income
Glassdoor.com$97,578
ZipRecruiter.com$114,559
Talent.com$110,000
Indeed.com$105,000
PayScale.com$75,401
Comparably.com$71,807
Zippia.com$89,343
Salary.com$84,829
Table: Average Income of a Tableau Developer in the US by Source.

💡 Note: This is the most comprehensive salary meta-study of tableau developer income in the world, to the best of my knowledge!

To learn more about the income potential and opportunity in the broad data space, have a look at our full guide on the Finxter blog:

Let’s have a look at the hourly rate of tableau freelancers next!

Hourly Rate of Tableau Freelancers

Tableau Developers are well-paid on freelancing platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr.

If you decide to go the route as a freelance Tableau Developer, you can expect to make between $40 and $80 per hour on Upwork (source). Assuming an annual workload of 2000 hours, you can expect to make between $80,000 and $160,000 per year.

⚡ Note: Do you want to create your own thriving coding business online? Feel free to check out our freelance developer course — the world’s #1 best-selling freelance developer course that specifically shows you how to succeed on Upwork and Fiverr!

Join Freelancer Course

Industry Demand

But is there enough demand? Let’s have a look at Google trends to find out how interest evolves over time (source):

Tableau is now a Salesforce company. So, here’s the general interest in Salesforce for your reference:

Both trends look optimistic—up into the right!

Learning Path, Skills, and Education Requirements

Do you want to become a Tableau Developer? Here’s a step-by-step learning path I’d propose to get started with Tableau :

You can find many additional computer science courses on the Finxter Computer Science Academy (flatrate model).

But don’t wait too long to acquire practical experience!

Even if you have little skills, it’s best to get started as a freelance developer and learn as you work on real projects for clients — earning income as you learn and gaining motivation through real-world feedback.

🚀 Tip: An excellent start to turbo-charge your freelancing career (earning more in less time) is our Finxter Freelancer Course. The goal of the course is to pay for itself!

You can find more job descriptions for coders, programmers, and computer scientists in our detailed overview guide:

The following statistic shows the self-reported income from 9,649 US-based professional developers (source).

💡 The average annual income of professional developers in the US is between $70,000 and $177,500 for various programming languages.

Question: What is your current total compensation (salary, bonuses, and perks, before taxes and deductions)? Please enter a whole number in the box below, without any punctuation. If you are paid hourly, please estimate an equivalent weekly, monthly, or yearly salary. (source)

The following statistic compares the self-reported income from 46,693 professional programmers as conducted by StackOverflow.

💡 The average annual income of professional developers worldwide (US and non-US) is between $33,000 and $95,000 for various programming languages.

Here’s a screenshot of a more detailed overview of each programming language considered in the report:

Here’s what different database professionals earn:

Here’s an overview of different cloud solutions experts:

Here’s what professionals in web frameworks earn:

There are many other interesting frameworks—that pay well!

Look at those tools:

Okay, but what do you need to do to get there? What are the skill requirements and qualifications to make you become a professional developer in the area you desire?

Let’s find out next!

General Qualifications of Professionals

StackOverflow performs an annual survey asking professionals, coders, developers, researchers, and engineers various questions about their background and job satisfaction on their website.

Interestingly, when aggregating the data of the developers’ educational background, a good three quarters have an academic background.

Here’s the question asked by StackOverflow (source):

Which of the following best describes the highest level of formal education that you’ve completed?

However, if you don’t have a formal degree, don’t fear! Many of the respondents with degrees don’t have a degree in their field—so it may not be of much value for their coding careers anyways.

Also, about one out of four don’t have a formal degree and still succeeds in their field! You certainly don’t need a degree if you’re committed to your own success!

Freelancing vs Employment Status

The percentage of freelance developers increases steadily. The fraction of freelance developers has already reached 11.21%!

This indicates that more and more work will be done in a more flexible work environment—and fewer and fewer companies and clients want to hire inflexible talent.

Here are the stats from the StackOverflow developer survey (source):

Do you want to become a professional freelance developer and earn some money on the side or as your primary source of income?

Resource: Check out our freelance developer course—it’s the best freelance developer course in the world with the highest student success rate in the industry!

Become Freelance Developer (Course)

Other Programming Languages Used by Professional Developers

The StackOverflow developer survey collected 58000 responses about the following question (source):

Which programming, scripting, and markup languages have you done extensive development work in over the past year, and which do you want to work in over the next year?

These are the languages you want to focus on when starting out as a coder:

And don’t worry—if you feel stuck or struggle with a nasty bug. We all go through it. Here’s what SO survey respondents and professional developers do when they’re stuck:

What do you do when you get stuck on a problem? Select all that apply. (source)

To get started with some of the fundamentals and industry concepts, feel free to check out these articles:

Where to Go From Here?

Enough theory. Let’s get some practice!

Coders get paid six figures and more because they can solve problems more effectively using machine intelligence and automation.

To become more successful in coding, solve more real problems for real people. That’s how you polish the skills you really need in practice. After all, what’s the use of learning theory that nobody ever needs?

You build high-value coding skills by working on practical coding projects!

Do you want to stop learning with toy projects and focus on practical code projects that earn you money and solve real problems for people?

🚀 If your answer is YES!, consider becoming a Python freelance developer! It’s the best way of approaching the task of improving your Python skills—even if you are a complete beginner.

If you just want to learn about the freelancing opportunity, feel free to watch my free webinar “How to Build Your High-Income Skill Python” and learn how I grew my coding business online and how you can, too—from the comfort of your own home.

Join the free webinar now!

References

[1] The figure was generated using the following code snippet:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import math

data = [97578,
        114559,
        110000,
        105000,
        75401,
        71807,
        89343,
        84829]

labels = ['Glassdoor.com',
          'ZipRecruiter.com',
          'Talent.com',
          'Indeed.com',
          'PayScale.com',
          'Comparably.com',
          'Zippia.com',
          'Salary.com']

median = np.median(data)
average = np.average(data)
print(median, average)
n = len(data)

plt.plot(range(n), [median] * n, color='black', label='Median: $' + str(int(median)))
plt.plot(range(n), [average] * n, '--', color='red', label='Average: $' + str(int(average)))
plt.bar(range(len(data)), data)
plt.xticks(range(len(data)), labels, rotation='vertical', position = (0,0.45), color='white', weight='bold')
plt.ylabel('Average Income ($)')
plt.title('Tableau Developer Annual Income - by Finxter')
plt.legend()
plt.show()