One of the more popular topics for my blog has been IT salaries -- more accurately, salaries for data professionals -- so every time I hear about some new survey or news related to salaries I fire up the blog and get to posting.
Today's news comes from the Dice 2008-09 Annual Salary Survey of technology professionals. This survey of more than 19,000 technology professionals was conducted late in 2008 (between August and November). The average increase was 4.6 percent. But broad averages are not really that interesting to me and probably not to you, either. If we dig a little deeper we will see some reasonably good news if we just pull out and examine the data-related items (especially given the current economic conditions, which are probably not fully reflected in this survey given the timeframe during which it was conducted).
At any rate, the two data-related job that were tracked both showed gains. The job of DBA rang in a 5.5 percent increase with an average salary of $89,742 in 2008, comapred to $85, 092 the year before. The news was not as rosy for Database Developers though, showing only a 1.2 percent increase over 2007 with an average salary of $84, 176 in 2008 versus $83,163 in 2007. So maybe this helps to explain why many DBAs used to be developers?
The survey also contained some additional information for specific technologies.Most readers are probably interested in how their specific DBMS skills fared, so let's start there.
- Sybase: increased 7.2 percent from $88,174 to $94,479
- Oracle DB: increased 5.3 percent from $86,624 to $91,252
- DB2: increased 5.8 percent from
$85,367 to $90,305
The survey did not have any salary information for Microsoft SQL Server, which is troubling given how pervasive it is in the market. It did, however, touch on some other database development and administration skills.Having PL/SQL skills helped to merit folks an average 5.2 percent increase (from $84,490 to $88,903). JDBC skills were even better though earning an average 7.9 percent bump from $89,645 to $96,710. And the survey even tracked TOAD skills, which earned its users an average 8.0 percent increase (from $88,111 to $95,120). TOAD sure has come a long way from its genesis as a free downloadable tool for managing Oracle databases!
The data warehousing specialties are still doing well, as highlighted here:
- ETL – Extract, Transform and Load: 6.0 percent increase from $96,559 to $102,364
- Business Intelligence: 7.7 percent increase from $94,317 to $101,585
- Data Warehouse: 6.6 percent increase from $93,200 to $99,323
- SAS: 4.2 percent increase from $84,653 to $88,225
The survey also tracked two new data warehousing categories this year: Cognos and Informatica. Since these specialties were new to the survey there was no data from previous years, but both scored relatively high on average salary with Cognos specialists averaging $95,736 and Informatica specialists bringing in six figures at $101,337.
If you have ERP skills, don't despair because this specialties pay very well. New to the survey this for ERP was ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) skills, which average a salary of $106,975. Other ERP-related average salaries include:
- ERP – Enterprise Resource Planning: 3.9 percent increase from $95,589 to $99,332
- SAP: 5.5 percent increase from $86,922 to $91,667
- Peoplesoft: 6.7 percent increase from $82,200 to $87,715
So, overall, working with data and database management systems is still a good way to spend your IT career... or at least, it was as of November 2008.