Thursday, May 21, 2009

Developer Salary Update

A few weeks ago, Datamation came out with an article that summarized salary levels for IT professionals over the last five years. Now, they have revealed the salary levels of developers over the last five years. The data can be found here .

What it shows is not a lot of overall movement in salary levels during this period of time. And, in the case of software engineers, it shows that the average salary of a developer in a large corporation actually went down a little over 10%. Minimum gain for those in mid-sized organizations.

I know their data spans a greater swath than that of ours, but our findings would be much different. While the few year span after stock market crash of '01 would show salary levels remaining level, we did see a jump in compensation in '05 -'07. Given the current economic climate, we have once again seen things level off. But, throughout that five year time frame, the average salary of Linux/open source professionals has increased 10+% in most cases. And, in some particular areas of open source, the increase is even a little bit greater. So, perhaps this is just happening in the areas that we have worked in. However, I ultimately believe it is just a simple supply/demand situation. We will be curious to see if the trend continues once the economy gets back on its feet.

No comments: