IT salaries heading north

Finally, some good news! after three years of shrinking IT salaries, disconcerting budget forecasts, and mounting employment insecurity, the InfoWorld 2005 Compensation Survey shows the makings of a turnaround. As this week’s cover story — a comprehensive research undertaking based on feedback from 1,510 IT pros — attests, we found plenty of positives to report (see “Liftoff at Last?” page 38). Even so, warning signs persist. To wit:

We’re making more but enjoying it less. Morale is down, and beleaguered workers are looking for new jobs in record numbers. Four years of cutbacks, shrinking staffs, increased workloads, and a perceived lack of respect from the corner office have taken their toll — and a little added cash isn’t enough to sugarcoat the situation.

Middle management is taking charge. Suddenly midlevel managers have much more decision-making responsibility and a vastly increased slate of reports. That translates into a beefed-up workload, but for many, without enough extra scratch to compensate for the added labor.

It’s good to be king. All told, top management saw the biggest gains, especially on the intangibles front. Not only are they less worried about being outsourced, but they manage substantially fewer direct reports than last year. In addition, their bonuses have skyrocketed, reaching nearly 20 percent of base pay. In general, the gap is widening between employees at the top of the food chain and those at the bottom. Which leads to conclusion No. 4:

It’s bad to be a serf. Salary was up about 8 percent for IT staffers, but bonuses plummeted. To add insult to injury, this group reports a high level of job insecurity, with nearly 28 percent fearful that their positions will be shipped offshore.

IT and management continue to merge. More and more, IT managers’ bonuses are being tied to business performance — a compensation scheme that will have a significant impact on aligning business and IT.

None of these conclusions would have emerged without the efforts of Senior Copy Editor Jason Snyder, who wrote this year’s survey. In addition to having a B.S. in physics, Snyder is currently working on his M.F.A. degree in fiction writing. But don’t worry; his analysis drew more on the discipline of science than fiction. “Making sense of survey data is a lot like getting your head around a physics experiment,” he says. “Everything you have to go on is abstract. And you’re left applying theories to numbers, trying to explain practically what’s going on.”

We were fortunate to have someone on staff with the rare combination of math and language skills needed to slice and dice 750 pages of data and then report on the conclusions. Now we just have to hope Snyder doesn’t take his analytical skills elsewhere and try to get a job in IT.