Rising Wages

According to Dice, the average salary for a tech professional increased from $79,384 in 2010 to $81,327 in 2011.

About 32 percent of tech professionals in 2011 received some sort of bonus, up from 29 percent in 2010 and 24 percent in 2009.

The industry verticals most likely to pay out bonuses to their workers included telecom, hardware, banking, software and utilities/energy.

Silicon Valley topped Dices list of top tech salaries, with an average annual wage of $104,195. In addition, some 38 percent of tech professionals there received an average bonus of $12,450.

Tech professionals in some other cities enjoyed exemplary salary growth. Top of the list was Austin, Texas, where pay jumped to an average of $89,419.

Other towns with significant wage increases for tech professionals included Portland, Ore., with 12 percent, Houston with 7 percent, and Washington, D.C., with 6 percent.

Further down the list, Chicago and Seattle saw a 5 percent rise in tech salaries, followed by Denver and Dallas/Ft. Worth with 4 percent, and-at 3 percent-New York, Los Angeles and Raleigh, N.C.

The survey found that those tech professionals with 11 or more years of experience saw their salaries increase, even as pay for entry-level positions trended downward.

Those working with WebSphere saw an average year-over-year salary growth of 7 percent, to $100,348. Jobs using UML (Unified Modeling Language), SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) and ETL (Extract Transform and Load) enjoyed 6 percent gains, for average annual salaries of more than $100,000.

In addition to WebSphere, JBoss and WebLogic skills also translated into significant wage gains and big salaries (also over the $100,000 mark, on average).