Why do people IT get paid high salaries?

In My Humble Opinion
41

[QUOTE=msmith537]
Do IT people really get paid that high a salary? How do their salaries compare to other skilled professionals in the corporation?

[/QUOTE]

I don’t think they make a whole lot more. Around here a good DBA makes 45-60k, while a good Administrative Assistant makes close to that. I’ve seen jobs posted for as high as 80k in the area, and most of those jobs require 10+ years of experience and it deals with management. Now, the cost of living is not that high here, but if the trend is similar, I would imagine that those in the corporate world make significantly more than an IT guy.

I think what drives up the appearance of making a high salary is that the line between IT and management is often blurry. If you are the CIO of a company and pull in a healthy six figures, are you really IT or upper management?

42

In an office building for a big company, a building with 200 computer users in it, what is the IT guy making? That is, the guy who gets calls for jammed printers and who helps set up new PCs with user accounts and administers the network?

In a company with a few thousand users, what does the guy who administers the email system make? Or the one responsible for putting together the network backup and retrieval system? Or the one who takes the lead on major IT issues like how to go about linking all the plants or how to distribute custom apps or how to guarantee security, on a company wide basis?

And how would this change between Manhattan and West Virginia and Bangalore?

43

I’m a mid-level *nix admin at a Fortune 100 company in the Midwest. I also deal with a bit of networking - mostly writing scripts to do stuff like wangle DHCP servers and mung wireless security on embedded devices. I talk to vendors about new hardware and software platforms, read whitepapers, and write technical evaluations for the guys who sign the checks. I fight with hardware suppliers about stupid shit like hard disk microcode.

On the support side, I’m considered a level three guy - I don’t work helpdesk, but I am occasionally woken up at 3AM when the helpdesk can’t fix something. If I don’t take the call, it goes to a manager. If the manager doesn’t take the call, it goes to a C-level exec. I’ve got a BA, half of a BS in IT, and four years formal experience in the industry.

I’m not making a killing, but it’s pretty reasonable for my level of education and experience. Including bonus, I make about as much as a mid-to-late-career librarian or public school teacher with a Master’s.

I’ve had offers for a somewhat similar position at a local branch of the quintissential Dot-Com company that paid about the same.

With a couple of promotions on my current track over the next couple of years, I’ll be responsible for technical architecture on projects in the $20-50m range, with maybe a 40% bump in salary+bonus. That’s not entirely unreasonable for somebody with close to ten years experience and a reasonable aptitude for the business side of the shop. Many IT folks in my company stop right there - they’re not terribly interested in leaving a relatively comfortable position for either the super-advanced enterprise architecture jobs or management, both of which are far riskier occupations.

There are purely technical people in my company who are making six figures, but they tend to be extremely specialized, and we generally don’t need them to stick around for long. If your system is so complicated that you need a couple of CCIE-types on staff to make sure all the lights are green, you’re probably better off putting one of them on contract to design a simpler system and firing the other one.

44

[QUOTE=Napier]
In an office building for a big company, a building with 200 computer users in it, what is the IT guy making? That is, the guy who gets calls for jammed printers and who helps set up new PCs with user accounts and administers the network?

[/quote]

The Midwestern jammed printer and dead hard disk guy probably makes $30k. The network admin probably makes in the $45-55 range, depending on experience.

About the same as me. :slight_smile:

From what I hear: Manhattan: Double it. WV: 75%. Bangalore: 10%.

45

A buddy of mine has no degree related to computers and got an entry level job at a company called Grainger a few years ago. His official job is doing PMs and various other small tasks, sort of the do it all tech guy. He makes something like 21 or 22 bucks an hour (not salary however). Keep in mind that this is in the Midwest, so 20 dollars an hour is a pretty high end job. He is wanting to apply for a job that has more responsibility and more technical (data recovery or something) and he thinks it will pay around 60k.

46

[QUOTE=Napier]
In an office building for a big company, a building with 200 computer users in it, what is the IT guy making? That is, the guy who gets calls for jammed printers and who helps set up new PCs with user accounts and administers the network?
[/quote]

What do you mean, THE IT guy? For a 200 node network, it’s usually a department.

  1. An applications guy who knows the ins and outs of any proprietary software that may run – $50k
  2. A Network Administrator who does things like design the network, the active directory structure (or whatever the company uses), replaces switches, calls the ISP in the event of unavailability, backups and restores, fix bigger scale problems (affecting 3 or more users - usually), new network accounts (this is sometimes delegated to #3). – $60k
  3. A help desk guy who handles the PC deployments, printer jams, fixes individual PC problems, password resets, etc. – task oriented – $30-$40k
  4. A manager – $60k-$80k.

For a few thousand users? Again, it’s not ONE guy. There are a lot of moving parts in an e-mail system. It’s usually a sub-department of 2 or 3. DOE, they can make anywhere from $50k to $100k.

Depends on the scale here. In my group, this guy has 10 years of experience with tape backup systems and makes in the mid-$60k range. 510 servers with over 25TB to backup in 24 hours is no joke. He’s also our Storage Area Network guy. He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he’s good at his job and is a great guy. And he’s happy.

On the other hand in the above 200-node shop, that’s usually the lowest-rung, most-capable employee in IT who handles tapes. The Network Administrator will set up the system, but young Help Desk guy will be swapping tapes daily. $40k?

Again, it usually doesn’t work like this. In IT departments, there are specialists. If anything, this is the manager who determines availability, capabilities, and what “major” is in his context. Sometimes outside contractors are called in to fix a major problem that requires knowledge outside of the manager’s resource pool.

This is the one thing about my job that I find grueling, and it’s mostly because you have to wait around for telco and ISPs. In any case, it’s a network engineer – $80k - $130k.

You’d be surprised how easy this is these days. Network Administrator - $50k-$70k.

Yikes. How big of a scale are we talking about? For 200-nodes? This is usually the manager’s role. In the 3000-node company, this would likely fall in the lap of a Security Engineer (CISSP) – and they’ll make in the $100-$130k range.

No idea, but since you asked the question, I think you can figure it out.

47

Dudley Garret’s assessment is bang on. We have a slightly larger IT staff than a normal 1400 person shop would have and we’re still 5 or 6 people short for having enough people for everything that needs to happen here. We have 65 people supporting 1400 workers, but our primary duty is interfacing with the public…so our audience is more like the 3 million employed people in our state. Due to the better part of 10 years of mismanagement we should have closer to 75 people, but the retired positions haven’t been replaced, and several line-worker level positions have been swapped out for management.

We’ve got something like 35 application developers, 10 high level managers and 6 admin support folks, 7 help desk staff, and about 7 folks left over to do web, application server support, network architecture, email, sql, security, account maintenance, backup, etc.

We’ve gone from 18 servers to 200 in the last 8 years without an increase in staffing to maintain them. We’ve got new roles (I came on as a webmaster, then moved into network security) with no additional staff to support them. Three CIO’s ago, the guy was the fall-guy for a 28 million botched project, the next CIO was gonna be a ‘cleaner’ and instead had 2/3rds of the IT staff ‘unionize’ against him, the end result being: he left.

Meanwhile, while all the managerial BS is going on at the top end of the group, the rest of us at the bottom just keep the wheels turning.

That doesn’t have much to do with the OP, but it does underscore how administrative overhead (which IT can be classified as), can get cancerous and overblown.

48

As far as salaries go, I don’t consider $50,000 - $130,000 particularly “high” (at least for areas like NYC or Boston). They are what I consider “good” salaries. Fairly typical of someone with a good education working in a professional field.

I think what may make IT salaries seem higher is that many of the people I have met in IT support roles in corporations are not what I would consider “highly educated”. Many come from community colleges or technical schools and then obtained certifications in their particular area of interest.

49

[QUOTE=msmith537]
As far as salaries go, I don’t consider $50,000 - $130,000 particularly “high” (at least for areas like NYC or Boston). They are what I consider “good” salaries. Fairly typical of someone with a good education working in a professional field.

I think what may make IT salaries seem higher is that many of the people I have met in IT support roles in corporations are not what I would consider “highly educated”. Many come from community colleges or technical schools and then obtained certifications in their particular area of interest.
[/QUOTE]

Then again, many have computer science degrees (or other degrees), both undergraduate and advanced, and I thought it was clear from earlier in this thread that your typical support person wasn’t the focus of the question.

There is a whole other level of IT work about which you seem to be clueless.

And $130k a year is pretty outstanding for work that doesn’t a) consist of company-changing decision-making, b) managing people, and c) sweating and/or injury.

50

Yeah. $130,000 a year is pretty outstanding, even for a techie.

51

http://content.mycareer.com.au/salary-centre/?s_cid=215991

I’ve heard that these are pretty inflated figures (and they certainly look inflated but my experience is skewed towards people in their early/mid 20s who are starting their careers) but they give an idea of how much people in IT can make compared to other industries. IT ($90,283 average) is roughly on par with:

Construction, Building & Architecture ($96,242)
Engineering ($97,246)

slightly higher than:

Accounting ($72,767)
Banking and Financial Services ($70,932)
Human Resources and Recruitment ($77,055)
Legal ($73,285)
Marketing ($76,799)
Sales ($76,984)
Scientific ($78,392)

and dwarfed by:

Mining, Oil and Gas ($120,018)

So IT people earn a decent salary but nothing out of the ordinary.

52

[QUOTE=DudleyGarrett]
And $130k a year is pretty outstanding for work that doesn’t a) consist of company-changing decision-making, b) managing people, and c) sweating and/or injury.
[/QUOTE]

On the coding side, $130K a year for a senior coder in a commercial software company is not at all out of the question. I know people who make that or more. My experience is primarily in Colorado, so we’re not talking just on the coasts. Salary.com backs me up if you go take a look under “software engineer.”

53

This seems appropriate to link to about now.

54

[QUOTE=DudleyGarrett]

Then again, many have computer science degrees (or other degrees), both undergraduate and advanced, and I thought it was clear from earlier in this thread that your typical support person wasn’t the focus of the question.

There is a whole other level of IT work about which you seem to be clueless.

[/QUOTE]

Oh I’m quite cluefull about IT work.

[QUOTE=DudleyGarrett]

And $130k a year is pretty outstanding for work that doesn’t a) consist of company-changing decision-making, b) managing people, and c) sweating and/or injury.
[/QUOTE]

It is, but doctors, lawyers, sales people and finance professionals also make high salaries without being in management positions. I’ll bet certain unionized jobs also make over 6 figures.

I did. For Salary Engineer V (the highest I could find that wasn’t management) put $130k in the 90%. So basically we are talking a small percent of very senior software engineers.

55

[QUOTE=msmith537]
I did. For Salary Engineer V (the highest I could find that wasn’t management) put $130k in the 90%. So basically we are talking a small percent of very senior software engineers.
[/QUOTE]

I didn’t say it was common, I said it was not unheard of. Granted my own experience is anecdotal, but off the top of my head I know at least 5 Senior Engineers who make $150K+. Some of them are on the West Coast, where salaries are higher, but some are not.

Most people I know in the code wrangling field don’t make that much. I’m just sayin’ it’s possible

56

[QUOTE=Athena]
I didn’t say it was common, I said it was not unheard of. Granted my own experience is anecdotal, but off the top of my head I know at least 5 Senior Engineers who make $150K+. Some of them are on the West Coast, where salaries are higher, but some are not.

Most people I know in the code wrangling field don’t make that much. I’m just sayin’ it’s possible
[/QUOTE]

I guess it depends on how you interpret the OP:

  1. Why are there people in IT who get paid very high salaries (let’s say over $120,000)?

  2. Why does IT in general pay very well?

I would say the answer to 1) is that there are certain highly specialized aspects of IT - developing new, innovative commerical applications; designing specialized, complex, high-performance mission-critical systems, etc that require a high degree of expertise, creativity and quality.

The answer to number 2) is that the salary ranges ON AVERAGE are in line with other technical disciplines and may be a bit higher, but not extraordinarily so, due to the rapid continual growth of the field.