Slashdot reader SpaceForceCommander shared Dice’s new annual report on America’s tech industry salaries based on a survey of over 12,800 “technologists”:
Columbus and St. Louis enjoyed double-digit year-over-year growth in salaries (14.2 percent and 13.6 percent, respectively), and other cities such as Denver [7 percent] and Atlanta [10 percent] also experienced an ideal mix of growth and high salaries. These up-and-comers benefitted from the presence of key employers such as Amazon and IBM; in addition, a lower cost of living and plentiful amenities have made them increasingly attractive to technologists, even those coming from well-established tech hubs such as Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley remains a world of high salaries — but the cost of living in the Bay Area remains extraordinarily high, which chews into that higher-than-average paycheck. And that’s before we factor in issues such as grinding commutes. In Seattle, New York City (also known as “Silicon Alley”), and other well-established tech hubs, costs are similarly high, which only makes up-and-coming tech hubs more potentially attractive to technologists.
Silicon Valley is still #1 on Dice’s ranking of average annual salaries (at $123,826), followed by Seattle, San Diego, Boston, Baltimore, Portland, Denver, and then New York. (And while St. Louis ranks #9, Columbus is #17.)
But the average annual tech-industry salary rose just 1.3 percent last year, according to the survey, with Dice arguing that what made salaries vary was supply and demand. They then ranked the highest-paying skills, starting with Apache Kafka (with average reported salaries of $134,557), followed by HANA (High performance ANalytic Appliance), Cloudera, and MapReduce:
Newer skills don’t necessarily draw higher salaries; with many older skills, the number of proficient technologists is relatively low, which means employers are willing to pay more in order to secure their services. (That’s a key reason why the handful of technologists who still know their way around an ancient mainframe can score six-figure salaries from companies that haven’t given up decades-old hardware….)
In the case of programming languages such as Swift, which enjoyed significant year-over-year growth and high salaries, a large number of technologists might have mastered it — but the market is huge and white-hot, ensuring that compensation will only rise.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot