Salary Survey
14th Annual Redmond Salary Survey: Good News, with Strings Attached
Redmond’s annual survey of Microsoft IT compensation shows that, despite a global recession, respondents reported higher average salaries-but lost some ground with raises and bonuses.
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We're in the midst of a massive recession that's approaching the two-year mark. In 2008, when we reported that salaries in the Microsoft IT community went up, the recession had respondents wondering if IT salaries had finally hit a high mark. A year later, the recession has gone global, but amazingly it hasn't had the impact on base compensation that we expected. The overall base salary this year? $83,113. While 36.5 percent of survey participants said they saw no change in salary from last year, nearly half claimed their salary was higher in 2009 (see Chart 1).
It's good news so far, but it certainly caught us with our guard down. The same was the case for Brent Magenbauer, a survey respondent and server team leader at Centra Health in Lynchburg, Va. He expected a more modest increase, “considering our economy and the poor state that many companies are in.”
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| Chart 1. Overview of 2009 IT compensation |
Tony F., a technical architect in Austin, Texas, who got a peek at the numbers, believes the results are due to companies "attempting to retain more 'useful' employees," to build strength against the recession.
James Robbins, Jr., a member of the Computer IT's Adjunct Faculty at Community College of Beaver County in Pittsburgh, suspects salaries jumped because more companies off-shored lower-skilled talent over those five years, so specialized workers remaining within the United States are getting paid more.
Both guesses are good ones, but we honestly can't tell if this year's results bear them out. What we do know is this: Despite the recession and reports of decreased spending and job losses, those who remain employed and working with Microsoft technologies fared better than average IT workers.
We can't make a direct comparison to the results of our past surveys, but we can place our survey in context with others to give you an idea of why this year's base salary is good news.
Take the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures released in July. According to BLS data compiled in mid-2007, the median salary for computer systems specialists and systems administrators was $68,130. Redmond readers, whose median salary is $78,156, fared better by 14 percent. (Although the data was just released, it's compiled from numbers that were gathered in mid-2007.)
That Redmond readers saw salaries go higher in 2009 also jives with a 2009 Computer Economics Inc. projection. The Computer Economics reports show IT salaries rising by 2 percent. InformationWeek's 2009 results are similar, at 1.67 percent higher. Its survey shows median salaries at $80,000.
A Janco Associates Inc. survey doesn't show as much optimism as our results do. Janco reports salaries for middle managers at large enterprises rising 0.43 percent to $79,575 from 2008 to 2009, but for midsize enterprises, the numbers go down 0.24 percent to $72,272.
Michael Domingo is executive editor of MCPmag.com and hosts the Redmond Radio podcasts. Click here to e-mail the editors about "The 14th Annual Redmond Salary Survey: Good News, with Strings Attached"