IT Salaries Edge Up Back To 2008 Levels

tsamsoniw writes "A soon-to-be released salary survey finds that the average salary for IT professionals in the U.S. is $78,299, putting overall compensation back at January 2008 levels. More heartening: Midsize and large companies are both aiming to hire more IT pros. The midsize are seeking IT executives (such as VPs of information services and technical services), as well as programmers, database specialists, systems analysts, and voice/wireless communication pros. Enterprises are moving IT and data center operations back in-house, which means greater demand for data center managers and supervisors."

Comments

Average

[Dyinobal]

The average is going up because all the lower end IT positions are over seas mostly now, at least that is my guess. I always found these 'average' salaries to be very misleading. Because I always seem to be making below the average.

Re:Average

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yes, but if they're just reporting an average salary half of the people will be getting below average salaries."

Nope. Given the usual pay scales, far more than half the people will be getting below average salaries. Exactly half the people will be getting below the median salary. Different things.

Re:Average

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop bitching and follow the money. Some of us are making the 130k even though the economy is "fucked".

Or you're still pimping your vertas+solaris skills and not following the buzzwords. There's at least another year on the cloud train, time to hop on it buddy.

Re:Average

[Grishnakh]

No shit. We are almost done virtualizing our entire datacenter, I assume the next step is to realize that having a single point of failure for 20 virtual servers isn't as cool as having 20 dirt cheap real servers, each independant.

What are you virtualizing them onto? If it's a big machine that's highly redundant, then the "single point of failure" mantra is false. On a big iron machine where you can hot-swap power supplies, hard drives, memory, CPUs without missing a beat, there is no single point of failure, and you get much higher availability than 20 dirt-cheap servers where something could break at any time.

Re:The Orwellian Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

1999 was in the middle of the dot com bubble. You might as well be a real estate agent complaining you aren't making as much as 2006.

Also, I have no idea what technology you worked on then compared to now to assess your statement.

YOU must let your boss know

[Anonymous Coward]

Your boss isn't going to go out of his way to pay you more than he thinks he needs to in order to retain you. The only person who will always have your best interests at heart is you. YOU must ask your boss for a raise and present evidence that your market value has risen to justify it.

If he doesn't pay up, jump to a new job that will. Apparently, there are some openings now.

Except for inflation...

[DoofusOfDeath]

According to the inflation rate calculator I used, the consumer price index (one measure of inflation) has increased 5.08% from 2008 to 2011.

So, on average, IT pro's are effectively paid about 5% less than in 2008.

Oversupply *and* higher wages?

[prisoner-of-enigma]

I've noted two trends in the job market lately: the jobs are paying a good deal more, but there are a lot fewer of them. It seems counter-intuitive because an oversupply of candidates would tend to drive wages down. However, what I see happening is companies almost *want* to pay top dollar...but only because they want absolutely stellar, walk-on-water, can-do-no-wrong, all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips candidates. I'm making *more* than I was during the dot com bubble. I'm also working my ass off managing projects that would've taken a team of people to do a few years ago. They're certainly getting their money's worth, but I have no room to complain because I'm making top dollar. And that's just how they want it: I have no incentive -- and no opportunity -- to jump ship for something better paying because I'm already way above the average wage, and a less stressful position would pay me so much less that it's not worth searching for.