Since the Covid-19 pandemic, employers everywhere had to reorient their workforce and redesign the office for the new era of “hybrid” work. Demand for all types of goods and services has increased, so many organizations are hiring more staff. This includes technologists who build new apps and protect technology against cyber-attacks. There has been a huge demand for talent, which has led the average salary of a technologist to increase 6.9% between 2020 and 2021, reaching $104,566, according to the Dice Salary Report. This increase is a positive sign for technologists in terms of the current and future value of their skills and experience.
Average salaries in top tech cities in the US
Salary rises in top tech hubs in the US
Salaries of technologists increased significantly in Seattle by 11.2% and Silicon Valley by 5.0% between 2020-21. Salaries grew slightly in New York City by 1.1% and Boston by 3.5%. The salary growth in these cities suggests continued demand in these established hubs. Large tech companies like Google have committed to buying billions of dollars in office space in some of these locations, according to researchers, and are looking for talent to fill it.
Salary rises in upcoming US tech hubs
Among up-and-coming tech hubs, technologists in Atlanta, Miami, Philadelphia, and Detroit enjoyed significant salary increases of 13.9%, 11.4%, 10.6%, and 10.3% year-over-year. California (6.3%), New York (1.3%), Washington (12.2%), Georgia (12.1%), and Texas (5.1%) continued to see salary increases, indicating strong local demand.
There is demand for technology and the high salaries for technologists in the industry because of the business and academic communities established in these smaller hubs. Organizations are willing to pay more for people with the right skills and experience.
Top skills and occupations in demand in the US
To grow a business, there must be an equivalent investment in internal processes, including the tech stack. This has increased the demand for technical support engineers whose salaries grew by 12.4% year-over-year, to $77,169. The salaries of systems administrators (6.2%) and systems architects (5.1%) also increased significantly year over year with organizations looking for technologists who can structure, maintain and scale tech stacks in a variety of environments. As cloud migration increases, the complexity of the tech stack will only grow. This will increase the demand for technologists who have more specialized knowledge to do their jobs.
In tech, some skills pay more than other skills. These skills are very specialized and only a few people know them. They are often very complicated, and it can take years to learn them. This is why a few technologists who specialize in an enterprise-search platform like Solr ($142,464, up by 15.8% year-over-year) or Service-Oriented Architecture ($139,961, up by 5.1% year-over-year) can demand huge salaries based on their background and experience.
The list of the top-paying skills indicates that the organizations are more than happy to pay a premium for skills related to enterprise-level infrastructure related to data storage and discovery, and the cloud. For this reason, skills like Hadoop, HANA, and PAAS can demand high salaries.
The average salary for programming skills like Ruby ($128,689, up by 12% from 2019 and 2021), JavaScript ($109,833, up 8.9% from 2019 to 2021), and Python ($116,498, up 3.9%) might not demand the same salary numbers as a certain cloud- and data-related platforms and tools. However, they’re equally important to the operations of large and small businesses. Learning these programming languages can enable a stream of steady and varied work. However, technologists must take care to keep up their knowledge of these individual languages as current as possible to stay up to date with the latest tech developments and improve their employability.
Image and source credits: Dice Tech Salary Trends
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