For the third month in a row, application programmer/analyst was the most popular job title posted last month on IT job board Dice.com. There were 5,389 application programmer/analyst jobs listed as of May 31, according to Dice Inc.s monthly Dice Report.
Top technical skills listed in ads were: C++, at 5,876 listings; Oracle, at 4,354; SQL software, at 4,171; Java, at 3,518; and Windows NT, at 3,188.
Offsetting the good news for programmer/analysts was bad news for hardware engineers, as job postings dipped 9 percent below the April level for this position.
The top metropolitan areas in which to search for technical positions were Silicon Valley, with 6,403 listings; New York, with 4,724; Los Angeles, with 2,668; Washington, with 2,001; and Philadelphia, with 1,308. Washingtons May number reflects an 18 percent increase over that areas number of listings for the month of April.
Dice listed a total of 31,245 technical jobs. The average salary listed was $65,700, with con-tractor worker positions listing an average salary of $95,300 and permanent positions listing sala-ries that averaged $61,800. There were 21,528 permanent positions listed and 12,969 contract posi-tions.
The gender gap in salaries reported by respondents to a Dice survey was $8,600, with men reporting an average salary of $67,300 and women reporting an average salary of $58,700.
Finally, the award for the sleeper position of the month goes to technical jobs in the phar-maceutical industry, which accounted for 1,210 job listings in May.