I'm always interested in following salary data in the Information Technology market mostly because I depend on it for a living, so when the market is doing well, generally I'm doing well. However in this years ESJ salary survey I noticed a very interesting trend.
Oftentimes you see people in the community, mostly language zealots, slashdot kiddies, and sometimes my fellow bloggers lamenting something or other about Microsoft tools, development processes, and the state of the skills of IT workers in general. Many times you see people look down their noses at windows professionals, VB coders, etc claiming that the OSS/Linux/C++/Insert your flavor of the day here developers are "real coders" and all those windows monkeys are just posers.
So what did ESJ find that interested me so much?
A majority of respondents (75 percent) support Windows server environments, including Windows Server 2003, 2000, or NT systems within their companies, a number that has declined slightly from last year's survey (78 percent). About 21 percent have mainframes on site, down from 28 percent a year ago. Another 41 percent support at least one version of commercial Unix, while 31 percent run a midrange-class system, mainly IBM iSeries. About 31 percent run Linux, roughly the same as last year (30 percent)
So there is a movement away from mainframes, and Linux adoption is fairly stagnant. This also continues to support Windows programming as a present and future need in the enterprise. But that's not all folks!
PROGRAMMER ANALYST SALARIES
| Year-to-Year Change |
| 2006 |
2005 |
2004 |
2002 |
2001 |
1-year change |
4-year change |
| 67,400 |
$65,200 |
$63,800 |
$61,700 |
N/A |
+3.4% |
+9.2% |
Programmers are doing well again! This is a positive trend, but when you look out in the community, when the above mentioned people are spewing their disdain for windows developers, you would expect non windows programming to be more lucrative, after all it is a "niche" market and those people are more "l33t" than their windows counterparts right?
| By Operating System Environment |
| Mainframe |
Midrange |
AIX/Unix |
Windows |
Non-Mainframe
Linux |
Windows Only
(Non-mainframe) |
| $66,100 |
$67,800 |
$69,500 |
$66,000 |
$57,500 |
$56,800 |
Wrong. And the same trend shows in Applications Programmers:
APPLICATIONS PROGRAMMER SALARIES
| Year-to-Year Change |
| 2006 |
2005 |
2004 |
2002 |
2001 |
1-year change |
5-year change |
| $61,400 |
$56,500 |
$53,000 |
$49,400 |
$49,200 |
+8.7% |
+24.8% |
| By Operating System Environment |
| Mainframe |
Midrange |
AIX/Unix |
Windows |
Non-Mainframe
Linux |
Windows only
(Non-mainframe) |
| $58,000 |
$64,200 |
$60,700 |
$61,700 |
$56,700 |
$57,100 |
Now I did find in the survey a few programming environment entries that included Visual Studio .NET separate from the rest of the languages. Here's the one for Programmer Analyst:
| By Programming Environment |
| CICS |
C/C++ |
COBOL |
VB |
Java |
Visual Studio .NET |
| $67,000 |
$71,500 |
$63,800 |
$63,900 |
$68,400 |
$65,000 |
You'll note here that Java and C/C++ do beat out salaries for VS .NET, I would be interested to see the experience level cross ref on that though since java and c++ have been around longer than .NET, so they may be top heavy simply due to more experienced senior people demanding higher salaries.
Either way, maybe it's not the developers, maybe it's the network admins that are so much more "l33t" than their windows counterparts?
NETWORK ADMINISTRATOR SALARIES
| Year-to-Year Change |
| 2006 |
2005 |
2004 |
2002 |
2001 |
1-year change |
5-year change |
| $61,300 |
$59,300 |
$57,300 |
$53,800 |
$56,000 |
+3.4% |
+9.5% |
| By Network Environment |
| Ethernet |
Unix |
Linux |
Windows
2003 |
Windows
2000 |
Windows
NT |
Novell |
WinXP |
| $61,300 |
$62,700 |
$58,200 |
$60,400 |
$60,000 |
$60,400 |
$62,100 |
$60,100 |
Nope, the windows guys still make more than the Linux guys, but less than unix. Though on these results the salary difference is "trivial" in my opinion. (I consider anything under 5% trivial)
Anyways, something to think about, and discuss, have fun.