2012 IT Salary Survey: 12 Career Insights

Let's kick this off by breaking one of our society's great taboos--discussing what you earn. Thanks to 13,880 IT pros who took InformationWeek's U.S. IT Salary Survey, we can say the median U.S. IT staffer makes $85,000 in base salary and $90,000 with cash bonuses, while an IT manager makes $108,000 base and $116,000 with bonuses.

But our 2012 Salary Survey offers more than that bottom line insight, and the charts that follow highlight some of the other critical career trends from our survey. For example, we put numbers on the impact that skills, location, and industry have on pay.

We learn that IT pros are feeling better about the health of the IT career path, but a narrow majority still see it as less promising than in the past.

While IT pros still see outsourcing as a big negative for IT jobs, they're less worried than a decade ago--slightly more than half of IT pros say there are fewer IT jobs due to outsourcing, whereas a decade ago, that figure hovered around 75%.

Yet few buy management's promise that outsourcing lower-level tech jobs will let the remaining U.S. pros focus on more innovative projects. Still, three out of five IT pros are satisfied with their pay and other aspects of their jobs, and most of the rest are in the neutral rather than dissatisfied category.

One of the undisputed truths of our age is that we're all going to have lots of employers in our lives and that stability is a thing of the past. And while it's certainly true that the mythical 30 years-and-a-gold-watch career path is a rarity, our data points to less job hopping than you might expect.

Most IT pros would prefer to stay put at their current employers if they can--the typical tenure at their current employer is more than eight years. Seven out of 10 IT pros have had only one or two employers the past decade.

Staffers and managers put a high premium on stability, rating job and company stability among the most important attributes of a job.

However, employers can't afford to take their employees for granted. Top talent will jump first and foremost for a bigger paycheck, but our survey points to several other key reasons, including a desire to find more interesting work, more personal fulfillment, or to avoid a bad manager or company culture. We explain this and other career insights in the data that follows.

The median raise in base salaries is 0.8% for an IT staffer and 1.6% for managers. For staffers, the biggest median raises came in the functions of collaboration at 2.1%, and Web infrastructure, BI/analytics, and HRIS at 1.8%. While raises are skimpy, the sad part is this year's results are actually a lift from the recent past. In 2010--a.k.a. the year of the pay freeze--the median raise was zero.

The median staff bonus is $5,000, making up 6% of total pay. At 6%, bonuses this year make up a larger chunk of total compensation than in any year except 2001, when the tech bubble blew the typical IT staff bonus to $11,000, or 18% of pay. IT managers rely slightly more on bonuses than IT staff, and this year is merely average for them--7.8% of pay came from bonuses.

San Francisco reigns as the highest-paying city, with median IT manager pay of $134,000 and staff pay of $111,000. Despite the high price, the city's talent pool still draws new employers--the likes of General Electric and Ford opened software development centers there in the past year. The nation's capital has proved money flows there in good times and bad. In 2010, Washington was the only city among 13 where IT pros received median raises. As the economy recovers, it's No. 2 in staff pay ($108,000) and tied with New York for No. 2 in manager pay ($130,000). In hard-hit Detroit, there are signs of growth. Its median IT manager pay of $113,000 puts it ninth on our list of cities, up from last in 2010, when pay was at $104,000. Detroit's median IT staff pay, which in 2010 was 7% lower than any in other city, is now at $85,000, on par with Minneapolis and close to Dallas and Chicago.

When you look at IT staff compensation by job functions, a few emerging categories top the list: wireless infrastructure, cloud computing, and Web security. (All those have low bases of respondents, so take the numbers with a grain of salt.) But notable are two stalwarts--ERP and enterprise app integration. These have been among the top functions for the decade-plus we've done our survey. While emerging skills around unstructured data analysis rise in importance, they aren't dimming the prospects for conventional software. ERP data is often the most reliable and trusted data companies have, so people who can help companies make sense of that data and share it, quickly, to make good decisions remain in high demand.

We ask IT managers what skills are critical to their jobs, so we thought it would be fascinating to look back five years and see how that's changed. Fascinating, yes--because there has been almost zero change. The order and percentages are nearly identical. Have we really not gotten any better at automating reports, thus driving down the importance of that? Is finding new business opportunities still dead last, despite the opportunities to tap mobile tech for new relationships? Managers need to make sure their skills keep up with the times.

There must be some reason people spend their lives in hotels and airplanes, right? Money's the most-cited reason people choose contracting or consulting, by 45% of staff and 56% of managers. Staff-level consultants and contractors report median salaries 19% higher than IT staffers overall, and for managers the premium is 12%. But 32% of staff and 18% of managers say they do it because they couldn't find full-time work, and 30% of staff and 41% of managers say it's to have flexible hours.

You know a Wall Street tech job pays more than working for a local school district, but did you know it typically pays twice as much? The median IT manager pay in securities and investments is $175,000, compared with $83,000 for education. A big chunk comes from bonuses--the typical bonus in securities and investments is $35,000, while managers in education and government typically get only about $2,000 in bonuses. In government work, you're far better off working for the federal government in the U.S.: The median federal government IT staffer makes 33% more than a state staffer, with fed staffers ranking 10th out of 29 industries.

A bigger paycheck is far and away the biggest reason people take a new job. So if you want to keep your best people, make sure you're competitive. But the next three most common reasons center around the work environment--having interesting and fulfilling work, and good bosses. These factors haven't changed much over time. Back in 2004, when IT employment was again coming out of a recession, these factors also made up the top four, with higher pay no. 1.

The response to this question has ridden a roller coaster as U.S. IT pros lived through two major recessions, the tech bubble bursting, and the emergence of offshore outsourcing. Back in 2004, just 15% of staffers thought the IT career path was as promising as five years ago, and 78% thought it was worse. In 2010, just 28% of IT staff considered it as promising. Today, that's up 10 points to 38%. Today's teenagers are tomorrow's would-be IT pros, and if they ask their parents, aunts, and uncles working in the profession what they think about studying technology, it's notable that half aren't likely to rave about the IT career path.

U.S. IT pros continue to see outsourcing hurting the IT profession, but the pain isn't as acute as back in 2004, a time when many companies shifted swathes of development and app support work to India and other lower-cost countries. Today in the U.S., 60% of staff and 53% of managers believe there are fewer IT jobs available because of outsourcing. In 2004, it was 75% of all IT pros. Sixty-one percent said it created lower morale back then, compared with around half today. U.S. IT pros remain highly skeptical that outsourcing lets the remaining IT pros work on more innovative projects--an idea that's often cited by IT execs who initiate outsourcing. Just 13% believed that in 2004, and only 17% of staff and 23% of managers believe it today.

For all we hear about how people won't have long-time employers like our parents did, how you need to focus on Me Inc. and embrace the freelance economy, most IT pros stay put if they can. More than 70% of IT pros have had only one or two employers the past 10 years--and that's a decade that includes two bone-jarring recessions. The median tenure at their current employer is eight years for staff and nine for managers. And asked to rank what's most important in their jobs, job and company stability is the second most often cited factor by staff (46%) and tied for third with managers (44%).

It's not that every IT pro is whistling Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah on the way into work. But IT pros are reasonably satisfied with their jobs. There's room for improvement--only 16% of staff are very satisfied with pay, benefits, and other aspects of their jobs, but another 46% are satisfied. Just 14% are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. Back in 2004, 24% fell in one of those dissatisfied categories, and just 47% were in one of the satisfied categories.

It's not that every IT pro is whistling Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah on the way into work. But IT pros are reasonably satisfied with their jobs. There's room for improvement--only 16% of staff are very satisfied with pay, benefits, and other aspects of their jobs, but another 46% are satisfied. Just 14% are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. Back in 2004, 24% fell in one of those dissatisfied categories, and just 47% were in one of the satisfied categories.