What are the highest paying IT jobs now?

N2IT · November 2013

I remember back in the day a buddy of mine was billing right at 300 dollars an hour doing architecture and database develop on Peoplesoft projects. That isn't the case anymore. What's hot now what's paying a ton? Management and executive leadership obviously always leads the pack but from a technology standpoint what pays? In my current position the high end in my location is 85 - 95 annual, I know there are others that pay better. I'm content where I am at for now, but it's always nice to know the trends.

paul78 · November 2013

I would imagine that architects would still command the highest salaries. That's really not going to change. But I'm guessing you are referring to the trend. I do think that from a pure-value to business perspective, certain types of architects will continue to be in demand.

I did come across this dice.com article that you may find interesting - Tech Salary Trends Reveal Surprising Winners, Losers

I'm in a technology leadership role so my own annual gross income is highly variable based on company performance.

beads · November 2013

If your willing and able to travel 100% and work in any of the "jobs" categories you can expect anywhere from a 25-40% kick in pay. Not uncommon to see these salaries from top consulting firms to reach $120-160k. The catch being living out of a suitcase. These are of course senior level positions with all the hassles of a senior level position. Once in you can expect to have a very fast paced schedule and plop on top some daily/weekly paperwork, status write-ups etc. Think 60-70 hour work and commute times weekly but bigger bucks.

Check the careers sites for IBM, BDO, Accenture, et. al. Even the second tier consulting firms like Baker-Tilly, et. al. will all have positions that require constant travel and high salaries. Also seeing more and more of these positions going virtual for the downtime portion (bench) of time. Reason being is that office space is expensive and the lack of commuting is now being seen more and more a plus to HR types.

- B Eads

networker050184 · November 2013

It's not uncommon to see salaries that high for non consultants and people that do not travel as well. Especially in the higher COL areas.

paul78 · November 2013

I interpreted N2IT's topic more about the prediction on which IT fields we think salaries will increase year-over-year due to demand.

I don't really see that salaries for specific roles would increase because of high COL. In fact, it's more likely that in those areas - the trend may be relocate those jobs and labor arbitrage to virtual or different areas.

Also - while consultants that travel may be paid handsomely, I think that with more virtual support unless it's for specific types of engagements like IT management or IT sales consulting, I can't really imagine those salaries increasing.

The reason why I think architect salaries will continue to rise is because as more organizations start to become virtual and globally distributed (presumably due to labor arbitrage), having good architects will be more valuable to those organizations since stitching all those diverse distributed teams will be more important.

gbdavidx · November 2013

Here, apply for this

IT Security - PCI, Information Security Assessments, PERM-Corp, to $133k+, 60% Trvl - J&S Professional Recruiters - Sacramento, CA | dice.com - 11-1-2013

dave330i · November 2013

Hybrid Cloud architects.

Jackace · November 2013

dave330i wrote: »

Hybrid Cloud architects.

What exactly does this mean? Like what technologies and such are you talking about?

instant000 · November 2013

Try this article: Hybrid Cloud Architecture 101: Dream It, Build It - The Official Rackspace Blog

innovative customers are moving beyond thinking about it purely from a network connectivity perspective between named devices, and thinking big picture in terms of pools of resources across public, private and dedicated infrastructure to get the right blend of performance for their business

Building modern hybrid applications requires being able to “talk” to all of the resources you have available to you using some kind of automation or orchestration tool(s). These resources could be bare metal machines, virtualized machines, OpenStack-powered public or private clouds, load balancers or even a next generation platform like MongoDB as a Service.

Modern applications built for cloud architect security at all layers in the stack, especially at the application layer – because this is where the hybrid collection of resources comes together to become something. The days of one application on one server on one network are long gone. If you’ve adopted a hybrid mindset, you need to think about what combination of resources will best serve your application needs.

Does this make sense to you?

If you've done some virtualization, you know that your resources can be available in "pools". Whereby you have pools of compute, pools of storage, pools of network, etc. The hybrid cloud architect can tie together these pools of resources even in disparate locations. The good architect would be able to know how best to get the application to perform, with consideration to the customer's business requirements. Because the role requires deep knowledge in several areas, as well as a bird's eye view of an enterprise, a hybrid cloud architect merits premium pay.

Of course, Dave might be slightly biased, but he's still making a very good point.

Back on the topic: For some enterprises, it may just be more cost effective to call in the experts for the migrations, but they can't afford to pay an expert everyday. Some enterprises have missions that require having experts on staff.

The overriding point is to have a strong skillset that can solve a business problem that your customers care to pay for.

shodown · November 2013

Its all depending on what you think you can bill the customer and prove that your rate is worth it. I see some CCIE's selling themselves short on guru.com and other sites as low as 75 an hour. Then I see other CCIE's charging 250+ a hour. I'm sure this happens across the board. Any emerging technology will command high billing rates, but also technologies that are mature and in wide usage will be able to command a high rate as long as the customer feels there is value in it.

The Technomancer · November 2013

For non-consulting in the SF bay area, DevOps engineers and principal systems architects are the top paying gigs without going into management. Networking jobs are having trouble keeping pace like they did before thanks to the ubiquity of public cloud services. There's also more Cisco Certified $CERTIFICATIONs out there than Linux gurus with a decade of experience under their belt (thanks, outsourcing!), so the labor shortage is driving prices for people like me up.

Jackace · November 2013

The Technomancer wrote: »

For non-consulting in the SF bay area, DevOps engineers and principal systems architects are the top paying gigs without going into management. Networking jobs are having trouble keeping pace like they did before thanks to the ubiquity of public cloud services. There's also more Cisco Certified $CERTIFICATIONs out there than Linux gurus with a decade of experience under their belt (thanks, outsourcing!), so the labor shortage is driving prices for people like me up.

I definitely see a lot of job postings for Linux/UNIX guys. Especially ones with Data Center type experience. I don't see that demand going away anytime soon either. That is one of the reasons why I (networking person) have started studying more Linux and programming. I figure it helps me do my current job better, but also helps me understand the other groups/customers I work with and provide those network services for.

GoodBishop · November 2013

I think I read a few articles that in the upcoming years, cloud will be one of the biggest areas that has a good increase in salary.

Made me look into the CCSK and VCA...

I would think folks with the top level certs - CCA, CCIE (multiple), MCA (though that is being discontinued), VCDX, that sort of stuff - they do quite well for themselves.

networker050184 · November 2013

The Technomancer wrote: »

For non-consulting in the SF bay area, DevOps engineers and principal systems architects are the top paying gigs without going into management. Networking jobs are having trouble keeping pace like they did before thanks to the ubiquity of public cloud services. There's also more Cisco Certified $CERTIFICATIONs out there than Linux gurus with a decade of experience under their belt (thanks, outsourcing!), so the labor shortage is driving prices for people like me up.

Any kind of evidence of this or is this just your guess?

The Technomancer · November 2013

networker050184 wrote: »

Any kind of evidence of this or is this just your guess?

Just going off of the salary guides and number of open positions. Both fields have increasing salaries year over year, with networking having slightly slower growth, indicating either less demand or a greater supply of qualified individuals. It's also an observation limited solely to the SV/SFB market. Nationwide, I can see increased data center hiring driving the market for your services -- after all, that cloud runs on physical hardware somewhere.

But when a startup or smaller company has the vast majority of their infrastructure in the cloud, there's not a lot a network admin/architect can do when the entire network's abstracted away from them. There's still a place for them in the office IT group and that'll always be there, but there's not an operations side need for them in a cloud environment until a company's ready to start building out a private cloud/hybrid cloud infrastructure in-house. There's plenty of work that pays well, don't get me wrong, the salaries just aren't skyrocketing for you all like they are with Linux engineers. I'm good, but I'm not "50% salary increase in 2 years" good like my pay shows.

UnixGuy · November 2013

The Technomancer wrote: »

...he salaries just aren't skyrocketing for you all like they are with Linux engineers. I'm good, but I'm not "50% salary increase in 2 years" good like my pay shows.

I'll add one point that has not been mentioned here yet. Linux has become more mature now that it's being adopted more and more in the financial services industry and other industries as well. In the past, it was UNIX (Solaris, IBM AIX, HP UX, ..etc) that used to run the show, and it wasn't easy to get UNIX experience. Now (I think starting from 2007 or more accurately 2011) Linux has been replacing UNIX in many places, so many highly paid UNIX jobs are now Linux jobs.

N2IT · November 2013

What about Project Management and Business Analyst? Do you think they will drop, increase or hold? The only role that I have seen increasing in the last year or so consistently is software project management and software business analysis.

paul78 · November 2013

If I had to guess, I would not expect project management salaries for IT to increase much. Purely anecdotal but I know that we are starting to not replace project managers that leave our organization. As for business analyst's, we do compete for good ones (I.e. we are willing to pay a premium) - but that's for analysts with strong domain knowledge in the industry that we service. These would be individuals that understand our particular industry. We will generally value domain expertise over IT skills for these roles.

N2IT · November 2013

Paul with that said do you feel analyst who understand SQL and VBA etc are more valuable than your framework process driven BA's? I've heard conflicting reviews from very informed individuals so you will be the tie breaker

On the BA forms understanding scripting and SQL is minor however in the real world that couldn't be further from the truth in my roles. Thoughts my friend?

paul78 · November 2013

Our BA's typically do not understand scripting or SQL. It's pretty rare. We will more likely value a BA that knows our business processes and have the talent to illicit customer and product requirements and transform them into technical and functional requirements.

Based on your descriptions of your job, I am more likely to presume that your role is a bit more of a data analyst than as a BA. We have those types of roles as well. They generally support metrics generation activities. Personally. I do not find value in how we use that role (no offense) but that's my personal bias.

Where I do think that there would be a future with data analysts that have strong technical and specific domain expertise is with big data mining. And by domain expertise, I have a suspicion that it's a rare talent which some companies may be willing to pay a premium. For example - an individual that understand how to mine some retail industry for marketing efficiencies or some other esoteric use from big data. The other use would be large enterprise capacity management of IT resources - I bet that with the proliferation of cloud technologies - good data analysts are required to build data models to manage capacity. But to be honest, that's just my own un-informed utopian concept of something that I don't really know much about

.

N2IT · November 2013

No offense taken but I think that is crazy talk. Data drives all big business or most and if not your not in business for very long. Requirement gathers can be developed from admin assistance and other administrative positions. Requirement gathering can be added to a operational managers collateral duties. When budgets become lean and the SGA becomes attacked by the accountants you see those positions dry up. That's why this analyst and a self proclaim visionary always keeps one foot into technology. I've been down that road and it's very uneasy and unstable. A very wise man told me once always keep one foot into technology and the other in business. Those positions you described in the beginning of your post are luxury items who are at major risk during a down turn.

paul78 · November 2013

LOL - I can certainly understand your point of view. Personally, I could never be a BA. I have a passion for technology and I like to get my hands in the technology. I had to manage a department of BA's once and it was the most excruciating frustrating experience. Not because the department was poorly performing but because it wasn't something that I was interested in.

But like all things, I think it depends on the organization, our BA's generate revenue and most are billable. Our IT staff are a large expense to our organization.

N2IT · November 2013

Clearly it depends on your organization and how the resource strategy has been implemented. In a full blown projectized PMO operational managers are replaced by PM's and BA's, but in most top corporation you have a blended matrix where those roles can easily be absorbed buy other roles such as operational managers and directors. In fact in agile environments you don't have BA's or PM's (usually). Planning is nothing more than a boiler plate and execution is the new planning. Classic project management has grown old and weary and executives just don't have the patience to wait for the planning phase. Market movement and shares are volatile and moving at the speed of light and old broken down frameworks and methodologies are nothing more than silly rhetoric. PMP is to Waterfall as is SCRUM is to Agile. The "consolidation" movement with BA's and PM's has already started and eventually IMO you will see those roles further transformed. I believe the new analyst will be a super analyst one who can do it all and do it all well. Just like infrastructure positions, there has been a major shift with consolidation. Corporations would much rather spend 200,000 on one rock star rather than 40,000 on several resources. This shift has been well documented throughout the web and other publications.

***Side note the other day at lunch our data architect and a few of our developers went out for lunch. The PMBOK and the PMP was brought up, guess by who?

Our lead architect said " If you want to go to the moon it's fine, but for 99% of all projects it's silly". I agree

Based on your descriptions of your job, I am more likely to presume that your role is a bit more of a data analyst than as a BA. We have those types of roles as well. They generally support metrics generation activities. Personally. I do not find value in how we use that role (no offense) but that's my personal bias.

Paul and I might add that my opinion towards most executives is the same way. Most companies have a few that are the glue and the others that ride their coat tails. Look at companies such as Kodak, Smurfit Stone, Comcast Sports, well hell here's a list. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Companies_that_have_filed_for_Chapter_11_bankruptcy

Incompetency is driven down from the top and will always remain that way.

But like all things, I think it depends on the organization, our BA's generate revenue and most are billable. Our IT staff are a large expense to our organization.

In organizations that are not fully industrialized this is a 100% true and can be downright costly. However in a mature organization with sound leadership they will understand that while IT is not a profit center it's positioned to help the business through innovation and growth. Our company develops data mining interfaces such as heat maps, geo maps, slice and dice / pivoting tools etc for our industry. I have a hard time buying into the fact that a developer doesn't lead to a profit. (just saying)

What are the highest paying IT jobs now?

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