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Tech Salaries Had Biggest Year-Over-Year Leap In 2015 (dice.com)
Nerval's Lobster writes: Average technology salaries in the U.S. saw the biggest year-over-year leap ever, up 7.7 percent to $96,370 annually, according to Dice's new survey data. Bonuses and contract rates also rose from 2014, and tech salaries in seven metro areas reached six-figures for the first time since the survey began more than a decade ago. Contract workers saw a rise (5%) in hourly compensation, with contractors earning $70.26 per hour. Other Websites have shown similarly high salaries for tech professionals; Glassdoor, for example, called data scientist the best job in America, with an average salary of $116,840 and bountiful job prospects. But while everything might seem great on a macro level, that doesn't mean tech workers don't face their share of stagnant salaries, brutal workplaces, and annoying managers.
That's consistent with my own experience, except the jump was closer to 38%. After 15 years in tech, I finally figured out how to negotiate with I'm worth.
Amazing what can happen when Steve Jobs and his criminal conspirators don't collude to no-poach rob working families of billions of dollars.
The next dot-com bust is going to mirror what is currently happening to oil. It's an over-inflated artificial market with no real substance behind it. Don't expect pay like this to last much longer.
I was making $120,000 back in 2000 - that's $165,000 in today's dollars. That same job in the same area pays about $70,000 these days for an American; less for a H1-b. But I guess C++ programming is an outdated skill. /s
For once I feel good about one of these reports. I'd need 50% more to have the same standard of living in SF as here in Cleveland but I'm at 10% above the High range for my position in that market. That means I'm effectively making 155% of the max range, add to that the 7.5% retirement give plus 2-3% 401k match and the package at the new place is looking really, really good.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You are probably making more money.
When I did the contractor thing, I was increasing my salary by 6-10% every time I moved to a different company.
I then landed a very secure full time job where I am not really challenged and ended up taking about a 20% cut for that security. I am basically back to where I started before contract work.... but, I have serious job security, good retirement plan + matching, great health coverage, yearly raise + bonus, free metro transit and a bunch of other perks...
So, I guess it is all about what you are willing to handle.
I do miss the days of challenge and uncertainty a little bit. I sort of feel my skills slip a little bit more every day as I get more and more comfortable in this job.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
What's the difference when the cost of living is spiraling out of control where the majority of tech workers live? Also, how can I be sure you haven't included in that figure gaslighting asshole managers who contribute nothing but stress, confusion, bullshit, a profusion of buzzwords, and the sexual harassment and discrimination that's chasing women out of the field in spite of the best efforts of people who come here and to the red site?
Sorry, Dice. You're not fooling anybody here. Getting into tech now is a fool's errand. You're better off flipping burgers. Nobody's ever called me a sexist for making a good burger.
Just get it over with and sell the damned site already.
50% more in SF? You must live cheap. When I go and visit my family in Berkeley, I look around and see that I'd need over 100% increase. In the paper there (San Fransisco Chronicle), a reporter said that to be able to have an apartment, eat, have a life, go out and so forth, you'd need to make at least $150,000 and looking at payscale, the average out there is about $120K - they're screwing you guys. All the free pizza and video games at work doesn't compensate for shit pay. But they count on geeks spending all their free time at work and being grateful for shitty Californian pizza.
Then one day, you wake up in your late 30s - alone - and wonder where your life went. You go and pay through the nose for a dating service, go out on dates with obese headcases and maybe find someone you like.
For the first time in eight years I got a Christmas bonus: a $25 gift card. Woo-hoo!
...then they wouldn't be managers. Even if you have a great one, managers are there to get you to do some stuff that you don't want to do that's good for the company anyway.
The increases seem to be on the low end. Companies try to hire college grads, to replace senior IT folks.
It seems the report is only available after registration and I'm not going to bother but there's a question on my mind.
This was based on response entries on a website devoted to linking job seekers with employment. So the majority of users, who will be the job seekers rather than the employers, will want employers to have the expectation that greater salaries are required to attract, motivate and retain staff...
...so how likely is it that a proportion of the responses were wishful thinking rather then accurate?
Only ind there is seems. When there is something reasonable dont worry in a short time they will outsource you and if they move you elsewhere it will be more than brutal. They seen what happened to everyone else.
I saw this back in the late 90s. People I knew with very shaky skills were getting paid 6 figures to design website back-ends, simply because the demand was so astronomical. Come 2001, a lot of those people were unemployed or were being paid a lot less. The point is that the bubble is coming to an end:
- CS enrollments are at an all time high (just in time for grads to get out into the nonexistent job market...)
- Companies are paying insane salaries due to the bubble and hype around apps, social media, etc.
- More and more semi-skilled people are jumping on the bandwagon, getting into the "exciting world of development"
As a counterpoint, look at the story about Disney's H-1B replacement workers still on the front page. That seems to be what's coming for the low end of the market. The high end is cyclical -- BS artist consultants on the latest fad come and go, really good consultants and employees can still command a good salary if they know how to market themselves correctly.
Find a job, and do whatever it takes to keep it. When you lose it, you'll never find another one [..]
That's funny. I was laid off my IT contract job because the Fortune 500 company wanted twice the performance for half the cost. I was out of work for two years (2009-2010), underemployed for six months (working 20 hours per month) and filed for Chapter Seven bankruptcy. For two years recruiters told me I was unemployable and hiring managers told me I was overqualified for minimum wage jobs. The day after my bankruptcy got finalized, I got a new full time job and been working steadily since then.
Imagine where we'd be if the H1-Bs were sent home.
Weren't the h1b stealing all the jerbs and making salaries go down?
I remember when Web Master was the hottest job on the market with six figure salaries and bountiful job prospects. Then we realized that part of their job was better handled by sys admins (setting up and maintaining the web server infrastructure) and the other part has better handled by a combination of software developers and designers (with some HTML chops).
Data science will go the same way. Half the job (gathering, transforming, processing data) will go back to traditional analysts (what data scientists used to be called), half the job will go back to software engineers (writing the tools that do the processing), and both will rely on statisticians to ensure they're actually doing their analysis correctly. (ok, just kidding on the last one, they'll keep doing sloppy analyses and no one will be the wiser - see: blindly applying p-values and t-tests, picking an arbitrary 'k' for k-means clustering, using discrete classifiers for continuous values (and vice versa), deep learning, and so on... )
-Chris
A wise man once told me, in the midst of the fallout from the 2000 tech bubble bursting, that it was a buyer's market because supply of skilled labor was bigger than demand, but not to worry, eventually it would be a seller's market. Be ready to take advantage of the market when you can. We where happy to be employed and getting a paycheck though those dark times, knowing it would change. Change is here...
Personally, I just switched jobs and got a nice 12% raise and a 5% signing bonus, I'm working 30 min closer to home with a better situation for advancement. It's a seller's market out there in a lot of places folks. Time to take advantage and ask for a better wage. For your direct benefit as well as the benefit of the rest of us, drive the price of labor up, please! I'm doing what I can here...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
"Contractors" are just a term of convenience; what about real independent contractors working directly for multiple clients?
In Los Angeles, I am dying to find a good consultant that can handle a couple projects (server and networking replacements) and ongoing support of say 4-8 hours per month; I assume a pay rate of $125-135/hour (even $150/hour if I can actually find someone that can implement Samba 4 rather than Windows).
But if you didn't want to increase your level of responsibility why would you assume your pay would increase much faster than inflation?
With inflation, $120K is $165K in today's dollars - that is the pay necessary to keep up with inflation. To have the same buying power in 2016 you need to make that much more - today.
Secondly, you missed the point entirely. The fact that pay is going down across the board shows that not only is there no shortage of workers but there is a surplus of workers. And couple that with the unnecessary H1-b program, pay is going to continue to decline.
you were either grossly overpaid or in a fairly senior role.
Hardly. Considering the ridiculous work schedules we have to deal with in this profession and having to be on call 24/7, we all should be making that as our starting pay. But since there are plenty of workers, there is downward pressure on pay.
So, this isn't good news. Pay should have increased by a double digit rate. But we are all getting screwed.
Is the raise in average salary matched by maintaining or raising the total number of jobs?
If a significant proportion of the low and middle salaried jobs have been outsourced to off-shore contractors, then that raises the average without helping the ones who still retain their higher-end jobs, and has badly hurt the ones who were laid of or who could have been hired to the lower end jobs.
2014 and 2015 appeared to be the years that most companies stopped giving Cost of Living pay adjustments.
No programmer or IT tech I know in Austin Texas has had a raise of any kind since about 2010. In fact, many of us have found out in the last 2 years (after working at the company for some time) that there will never be raises again.
You may get a small increase if you switch jobs, but that is about it.
Think about how maddening it is to get great performance reviews and then all you get for the effort is a smile from the boss.
If salaries did really indeed go up, then the amount of productivity expected by the employee has gone up disproportionately thereby negating the value of any salary increase. Looking at dollar figures alone tells only half of the story. You have to look at the average hours per week that an employee puts in. 95,000 a year sounds amazing until you realize you have to put in 80-90 hours a week to earn that money and maybe be on-call 24/7 too. Then it is out and out slavery. I left a Systems Engineer job that required punishing and brutal hours for 95,000 a year. I averaged 75 hours per week over 50 weeks. Now, that 95,000 dollars a year is really around 64,752.00 per year when you estimate taxes. Let's break that down further: it is about 17.33 dollars per hour that you actually net. That's a paltry sum of money considering I gave up my life. Now, I work as a bus driver for gross 17.00 per hour and I net about 15.00 per hour. Suddenly, that 95K a year salary looks like slavery.
Did anyone else notice that none of the links to the report in TFA from the headline link actually _go_ to the Dice_TechSalarySurvey_2016.pdf report at all?
It's good marketing for Dice, I mean I didn't have a Dice profile before, and I do now, but... man was that sneaky. I thought that once I had an account and logged in, I'd get the link, but no... fill out your profile! Then I assumed that if I had a filled-out profile, then I'd get the PDF, but noo! Finally took myself over to el Goog and found the actual salary report, which was behind another separate e-mail collecting form: www.dice.com/salary. For anyone who did actually want to read the whole report. All three of us...
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Issac Asimov's prequel, Prelude to Foundation, is even more explicit than Foundation in putting this concept on display. People throughout the galaxy forget how to use advanced technology that had been invented in the past. Citizens on Trantor, the galactic empire's capital that's a planet covered with one giant city (think Coruscant in a planetary dome), can't even keep the systems all running right. Eventually even basic knowledge about nuclear power is lost and the galaxy becomes a splintered mess, powered by gas and coal.
In our general arrogance we see going backwards as impossible, but that kind of future could easily happen to us if our increasingly specialized fields aren't continually populated by at least one person willing to study it and keep the knowledge alive (and not just in dusty tomes or stacked SSDs.
There are many other great concepts covered in those books that make you think. They should be required reading for high school, IMO..
I've worked in I.T. for most of my adult life.... At this point, I really only still do it because I can't find anything else that interests me. (Well, I have other hobby interests like photography, but not interested in the uphill battle it takes to make such a thing a profitable career.)
I've never seen salaries like this claimed "average", although I make enough to get by. (I've always worked for smaller companies that just don't pay nearly as well for I.T. support as the big guys. And that does tend to box me in, because I don't have names of any big, well-known companies on my resume. The big guys like to see evidence you supported companies of a similar size in the past.) But with the smaller businesses, you get more control over things (less micro-management) and you're actually needed there -- not just a number in a payroll spreadsheet.
But it's amazing how similar a financial boat we're all in, if our earnings are anywhere from $35,000/yr. or so through $100K/yr. The more you make, the more you're taxed -- AND the more you wind up investing in things that sap more of your earnings to maintain them. So yeah ... busting your butt to get that "barely 6 figures" salary or close to it just means you buy a thousand more sq. feet for your home, or maybe you get to spend a little more on a more lavish vacation for 1-2 weeks out of a year. But all in all, you probably don't get THAT much further than someone earning a lot less.
It takes a LOT more money to really get "over the hump" to where your money makes enough money to "work for itself". That's what really helps a person get ahead....
There are tons of jobs available in Chicago's Financial District. I live in the Bridgeport neighborhood on the south-side, just off of Halsted St. It's a ten minute bus/car ride to the Orange Line and then three stops to the Board of Trade. It takes me 30 minutes in the morning and about 40 in the evening to make the commute. I pay $1,100 a month for a three-bedroom place (bedroom on 3rd floor addition) with high ceilings, skylights, a covered garage spot and small backyard. It's a quiet neighborhood with plenty of street parking and easy access to the expressways.
I was making about $95k doing technical trading support at one of the large investment banks. I left almost two years ago to work a $65/hour contract at an Internet startup. They completed Series A financing over a year ago and I was hired on as the DevOps Lead making over $130k with stock options.
Talk to some of the agencies downtown, they're looking for a lot of developers these days.
Google is your friend to get to the report and noscript is your friend to bypass the form.
1) Does it take into account lower tier developers who have lost their jobs recently, via mergers, layoffs, etc?
2) Does it take into account the fact that so many have seen their out-of-pocket healthcare costs go up $10K?
Considering how crappy healthcare is these days. The real difference is just the chunk of Social Security paid by one's employer.
A 100 people working in 2000. Now they should all be VPs. Ya, life just doesn't work that way bro.
Sorry, it's not. When companies can import and employ foreign workers to lower wagers, on tax funded government contracts. In which the government pays $140,000 and the worker sees less than half of that. Sorry, that's called "corruption".
Or more...
THEY WERE/ARE
Of course why did anyone mod down such a sane rational comment.
I just read that recently, Slashdot was sold and is no longer a part of the DICE family.
Could this mean that this will be Nerval's Lobster's last accepted Slashdot story submission?
We own a job portal www.HireTale.com and going by the job postings and recruitment done, salaries in IT sector are showing no sign to slow down.