Computerworld has completed and compiled the results of their annual IT Salary Survey. There aren't any huge surprises in there, although it is interesting, if not sometimes depressing, to see what the typical salaries are for CIOs, IT Directors and System Administrators in various industries.

"The survey showed the top 5 industries for IT pay were defense/aerospace (overall compensation up 2.9%), biotechnology (up 2.2%), government (up 1.8%), education (up 1.4%) and health/medical services (up 1.4%)."

Notice that government and health/medical have both seen a modest increase. Who wants to bet that given the recent passage in Health Care Legislation in the US, that we won't be seeing further increases in both of these arenas?

Here's the link:

Which Industries Pay Their Java Developers and IT Staff the Most?


And before you get all jealous or depressed about the average CIO at an Insurance Company making over $180,000USD a year, just remember that they're probably sitting in their office, working all night long, wishing they were living a much simpler life and only making the wage of a Help Desk operator or a Support Specialist.

"Legal & insurance

CIO/vice president of IT*: $180,137
Director of IT*: $119,800
Systems architect*: $112,422
IT manager: $101,757
Programmer/analyst*: $79,052
Systems administrator*: $72,996
Help desk/tech support specialist*: $45,719"

IT managerial roles are cushy jobs. I've worked for a lot of first line IT managers and all I see them do are talk on the phone, attend meetings, do powerpoint presentations and use Outlook and Word. Surely, their jobs can be done by highschool dropout secretaries.  My CIO gets in at 9:45am and leaves at 4:45pm.

I was once promoted to a first line IT manager. I did it for 13 months and it was a total bore. I didn't find it intellectually stimulating. At the end of each day, I find it very discouraging for not having produced anything tangeable or anything useful for that matter, so I went back to hard core java programming (but my payscale was kept the same).

In my team, the java programmers in the trenches are the ones that get to stay behind until 11pm, because the requirements were delivered late and lack details, yet they still expect us to deliver on the date promised to the customer with all the functionalities promised to the customer. God daym.

IT managerial roles are cushy jobs. I've worked for a lot of first line IT managers and all I see them do are talk on the phone, attend meetings, do powerpoint presentations and use Outlook and Word. Surely, their jobs can be done by highschool dropout secretaries.  My CIO gets in at 9:45am and leaves at 4:45pm.

I was once promoted to a first line IT manager. I did it for 13 months and it was a total bore. I didn't find it intellectually stimulating. At the end of each day, I find it very discouraging for not having produced anything tangeable or anything useful for that matter, so I went back to hard core java programming (but my payscale was kept the same).

In my team, the java programmers in the trenches are the ones that get to stay behind until 11pm, because the requirements were delivered late and lack details, yet they still expect us to deliver on the date promised to the customer with all the functionalities promised to the customer. God daym.

I'd love to know where you work b/c I work as a software development director, and I consistently work > 60 hour weeks.  The meetings are grueling - trying to navigate through political landmines to actually get work done, and I still have work to do despite the 30+ hours a week of meeting....

Your generalization is both untrue and unfair....

Good IT Manager - Tech Lead - CIO can make tremendous difference in company and projects.

However, the sad reality is that majority of them, not all, but majority, are just slackers.

I agree with you Gary. The problem is you have a handful of crappy folks that spoil it for the rest. Then you have a boat load of folks who are simply jealous and hateful that seek to devalue that title.

Are you a chinese software engineer?

What you (and TFA) are not taking into account is that the CIO/VPs get big bonuses when things go well, and the lower level employees get exactly the same.

On the contrary, when things go not so well, the CIO/VPs still get good bonuses and regular employees get their bonuses cut-off or lowered.

I absolutely agree with the poster: zqudlyba zqudlyba

Fully agree to what was said. And to add the non-manager are also fired sighting recession. â??Recessionâ?? really difficult to understand. Where did all the world money go suddenly, swiped away in tail of a tini-mini comet that just will never return?

Fully agree to what was said. And to add the non-manager are also fired sighting recession. â??Recessionâ?? really difficult to understand. Where did all the world money go suddenly, swiped away in tail of a tini-mini comet that just will never return?

First you must realize that money is imaginary.  There is no fixed pool of dollars (or pesos, whatever.)  When a company has a bunch of mortgages worth a billion dollars on Monday, they can issue loans worth more than that value to people.  That's how the money supply expands.  When those mortgages are suddenly worth 500 million on Friday, they need more capital to back the outstanding loans and the money supply shrinks.

Money and wealth are indeed interesting ideas. The wealth of the world today is a fixed number. Money simply represents that wealth. We can double the amount of dollars in supply, but the amount of wealth remains the same, until that is, more wealth is created, or alternatively, existing wealth is destroyed.

Creating money is easy. But creating wealth? What actually creates wealth. It's a question many people have struggled with, from Adam Smith, to Karl Mark, to Milton Freidman.

Boy, have I hijacked this thread enough?

If you compare the rate from employee of DoD vs contractor of DoD is like comparing with intern salary with normal salary.  So to get rich as Java Professional is to become very good at specific skillset then monotized it by becoming a private consultant.  I've seen many talented programmer going through this round and banking about $200~300000 a year.

Kevin, you couldn't be more correct about a contractor vs. an employee. Even if the pay was the same, which it isn't, the tax benefits would still put the contractor way ahead. The fact that the hourly rate a consultant with a specific skill can charge are sky high just emphasized the fact even more.