It’s a good time to be a techie in the U.S. That’s the takeaway of a report from job search firm Dice, which released its 2015 Salary Survey this morning. According to the Dice data, the average salary of a technology professional in the United States climbed 7.7 percent from 2014 to $96,370 a year. Average salary increases were the highest for entry-level jobs; however, the more experienced tech professionals were more likely to receive bonuses, with the average bonus hitting $10,194, up seven percent from 2014.
According to the survey, 53 percent of tech professionals are now satisfied with their pay, that’s slightly higher than 52 percent last year. And 67 percent are confident that they could find a favorable new job if they so desired.
Silicon Valley, no surprise, topped the list of high-paying metro areas, with an average 2015 salary of $118,243, up 5 percent from 2014. But New York is coming on strong, with an 11 percent bump to $106,263, as is Los Angeles, up 10 percent to 105,091, followed by Boston, Seattle, Baltimore/Washington D.C., Minneapolis, and Portland, Ore. Dice reported that this is the first time average tech salaries in seven metro areas broke into six figures.
In terms of tech specialty, those with big data or cloud expertise were the big winners in 2015, with the top ten skills in terms of average salary stacking up like this:
- HANA (database): $154,749
- Cassandra (database): $147,811
- Cloudera (cloud): $142,835
- PAAS (cloud): $140,894
- Openstack (cloud): $138,579
- CloudStack (cloud): $138,095
- Chef (programming language): $136,850
- Pig (big data): $132,850
- MapReduce (big data): $131,563
- Puppet (programming language): $131,121
Tech contract workers also received a bump in pay, to an average of $70.26 per hour, five percent higher than 2014, according to the Dice survey
The Dice survey invited technology professionals to participate via email; a small subset of sample groups received notifications via popups; 16,301 responded.
Tekla S. Perry is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., she's been covering the people, companies, and technology that make Silicon Valley a special place for more than 40 years. An IEEE member, she holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Michigan State University.
