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Software development can clearly be classified as one of the most dynamically developing areas of the R & D sector. The development of a country's R & D sector is well characterized by the wages of workers in this sector, among other things. That is the reason for examining the factors that contribute to the salary of a Hungarian software developer in our paper. We have analysed the data collected by the Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey by applying traditional econometric models. By utilizing Blinder–Oaxaca-decomposition, the endowment and discrimination effects of a university degree on programmer salaries are analysed in detail. In our paper, respondents who are members of the Stack Overflow user community are considered to be programmers. These specialists are mostly software or web developers or system operators. Our results, among others, highlight the important role of the interaction between coding experience and knowledge of modern technologies in the wages of Hungarian programmers. Extensive experience in an outdated technology can even have a wage-reducing effect. Furthermore, our results indicate that in Hungary it is still authoritative if a programmer has at least a bachelor's degree. Based on our model, the average salary of programmers who did not graduate from university is expected to be 7% lower than that of their counterparts with a bachelor’s degree. Examined separately, almost no programming language has wage-increasing effect on its own. However, the number of programming languages a person knows or wants to learn has a significantly positive effect on salaries. Due to the shortage of IT workers in Hungary, it is probably sufficient for employers if an employee has already gained coding experience in an arbitrary language and has basic algorithmic thinking, so they can easily be retrained to program in the language desired by the employer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]