Dice Report Finds Tech Pros to Seek New Jobs for Higher Pay in 2018

While annual IT compensation levels average more than $90,000, salaries are leveling off.  As a result, many tech professionals will seek to change employers this year to boost their earning power, according to a recent survey by IT job search company Dice. The resulting “Dice 2018 Tech Salary Report” indicates that the pursuit of better working conditions and more responsibilities is also driving tech pros to launch job searches. It doesn’t help that a lack of department promotions is leading to a sense of career stagnation for many IT employees. In addition, the survey ranks the top-paying tech skills, with cloud platform-as-a-service coming out on top. More than 10,700 tech professionals took part in the research. The following presents key findings from the survey, with charts provided courtesy of Dice.

The average U.S. tech salary remained relatively flat in 2017, rising just .7 percent to $92,712. This pales in comparison to, for example, 2015, when salaries rose 5.5 percent, reaching $93,328.

Baby Boomer IT pros make $106,047 a year on average, while Millennials earn $70,139. Gen X tech workers make $96,474 on average.

Just 52 percent of tech workers are satisfied with their salary. This is slightly down from 2013, when 54 percent were satisfied with what they made.

If you want to work in a metro area where IT pros make the most, then you may want to consider Silicon Valley, where tech employees make $114,654 on average — the highest in the nation. Boston is second, at $105,329. Keep in mind, however, that any salary increase may be offset by a higher cost of living.

If you want to boost your earnings power, you might consider consulting. IT consultants make $114,725 a year on average, compared to $91,398 for full-time IT workers. However, as a freelancer, you won’t receive a steady paycheck and, typically, no company benefits.

Merit raises accounted for the most salary increases, as cited by 36 percent of tech professionals. Other top pay hike drivers included a change of employers (as cited by 23 percent of survey respondents), internal promotions (10 percent) and cost of living adjustments (8 percent).

More than two of five tech pros anticipate changing employers this year. Among those employees, 63 percent will do so to seek higher compensation and 45 percent would like to have better working conditions. Three of ten would like more responsibilities.

When asked whether their department saw more promotions in 2017, 42 percent of survey respondents said “No, promotions stayed about the same.” Only 13 percent said there were more promotions.

The top-paying tech skill is Platform as a Service, which pays $127,171 a year on average. MapReduce is second, paying $125,378, followed by Elasticsearch ($124,650), Amazon Redshift ($124,640) and Cloudera ($124,221).

Dice reports that 36 percent of tech pros said they’d consider a pay cut of up to 10 percent to telecommute at least one-half of the time. An additional 24 percent said they’d agree to a pay cut of no less than 11 percent and as much as 30 percent to telecommute this often.