Everyone loves a salary survey. We're endlessly curious about how much money other people make. We want to know whether they make more than we do, and we enjoy opining about whether they deserve their incomes or not. It's even better when the salary survey explores the field in which we work. If we're at or above the survey numbers, we're happy that we're fairly paid. If we find that we make less than our peers, we can justify our feelings of being underappreciated—and maybe we can even use the survey results to convince our managers that we deserve a pay raise! Here's a look at what the Windows IT Pro Industry Survey 2004 tells us about what IT professionals make. For information about how the survey was conducted, go to "Putting a Face on the IT Pro," page 15.
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Almost 59 percent of the IT professionals who responded to the Windows IT Pro Industry Survey will receive base salaries between $40,000 and $79,999 this year. The rest (41 percent) of the respondents are almost evenly divided between making less than $40,000 (nearly 22 percent) or $80,000 or more (19 percent). Nearly 11 percent make less than $30,000.
The survey asked respondents to specify a range (e.g., $30,000 to $39,999, $300,000 or more) for their base salary. To see a breakdown of how many people in each job category fall in each salary range, go to "The Widely Ranging Salaries of IT Pros" Web table (http://www.windowsitpro.com, InstantDoc ID 44435). To simplify this discussion and the accompanying tables and figures, we converted each base-salary range to one base-salary number representing that range. For an explanation of how we arrived at the base-salary number for each salary range, see the sidebar "Everything You Really Didn't Want to Know About the Salary Statistics (and Weren't About to Ask)," page 30.
You might be surprised to learn that just over 16 percent of people who put themselves in the survey's President/owner/CEO/CFO/other executive management category (hereafter referred to as the executive management category) are in the less-than-$30,000 salary bracket, and another 16 percent earn $40,000 to $49,999. We're guessing these folks run small companies—maybe their own companies—rather than Fortune 500 firms.
Other executive managers obviously make more, as evidenced by that category's position near the top of the "How Does Your Overall Income Compare?" chart. Nearly 26 percent of executive managers have salaries of $100,000 or more, and 4 percent of these earn $300,000 or more. Notice that the CIO/CTO category trumps the executive management category in terms of average base salary and average overall income. This phenomenon might be partially explained by the above-mentioned sizable number of executive management respondents who are in one of the lower salary brackets. Nearly 52 percent of the CIOs and CTOs earn from $70,000 to $79,999 or from $100,000 to $124,999.
In third and fourth place in both average base salary and average overall income are systems architects and storage administrators, respectively. Only two survey respondents classified themselves as storage administrators, so it's difficult to know whether their salaries accurately represent the salaries of most storage administrators.
The IT director/IT manager/purchasing manager (hereafter referred to as IT management) category ranks sixth in average base salary and seventh in average overall income. These IT managers fall solidly in the IT pro base-salary sweet spot of $40,000 to $79,999 that we mentioned earlier—61.4 percent are in this salary range.
Database administrators make slightly more ($1483) than security administrators in average base salary, but security administrators pull ahead by $3522 in extras to achieve an overall average income that's $2039 more than their database-focused counterparts. Whereas database and security administrators earn in the mid- to high-$60s on average, Web administrators, systems administrators, and network administrators make in the mid- to low-$50s. Application administrators are the lowest paid of the administrators, with an income of $43,769 on average.
The survey asked desktop deployment professionals of all types to lump themselves together into one job-title category. Half these folks make $40,000 to $59,999 in base salary; another 17.4 percent make $30,000 to $39,999. None make $90,000 or more. Similarly, Help desk professionals of all types were grouped together in the survey. Nearly 80 percent of these workers make a base salary of less than $50,000—57 percent make less than $40,000—but a few were in the ranges from $80,000 to $124,999. No doubt, some of these higher paid professionals are managers with large Help desk staffs to oversee and many end users to help.
A significant number (11.3 percent) of respondents specified Other as their job title and described a range of job duties. Their average overall income falls near the middle of the pack.
In addition to their base salaries, some lucky IT professionals will receive compensation in the form of bonuses, stocks, and stock options this year. The survey asked respondents to report on these and other sources of income. These items constitute the Average additional income in the "How Does Your Overall Income Compare?" chart. Not everyone receives these monetary benefits. When reporting on their compensation, 41.4 percent of respondents selected the Not applicable option for bonuses; another 20 percent will receive $1000 or less in 2004. Eighty-one percent said Not applicable for Stock/stock options, with 8.6 percent reporting $1000 or less. And 70.1 percent said Not applicable for Other sources of income, with 10.6 percent reporting $1000 or less.
Of the various job titles, security administrators are most likely to get bonuses, application administrators are most apt to receive stocks or stock options, and trainers are most inclined to have other sources of income, but CIO/CTOs enjoy the biggest bonuses, the most income from stocks and stock options, and the most income from other sources. Executive managers are second to CIO/CTOs in the dollar amount of bonuses received. Security administrators are runners up in stocks and stock options and other income and are fourth in bonuses.
Most IT professionals who will receive bonuses and other cash payments in addition to their salary this year will be compensated for personal performance (57.5 percent) or achievement of company revenue/profit goals (32.4 percent). Other popular listed reasons that respondents could choose from (they could select multiple reasons) were company profit sharing (which received a 19.5 percent response), paid overtime (16.4 percent), project milestone completion (16.3 percent), certification/training (14.0 percent), and holiday bonus (12.1 percent). Respondents could also specify their own reasons for extra cash—a few of the most common write-in reasons were cost of living increases, payment for being on call, a new job or promotion, and an extra project for their primary employer or consulting or other work for other employers. One creative IT pro makes extra money through "art." Another IT pro kept a clear head in an emergency and received a "crisis response bonus." And yet another just showed up for work and got paid extra for "attendance."
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