Down, Not Out

Computerworld - The first time Computerworld surveyed IT professionals about their salaries was in 1986, the year Chernobyl melted down, the space shuttle Challenger exploded and Prince Andrew and Fergie tied the royal knot. Lotus 1-2-3 was the No. 1 business software program, and Microsoft was in fifth place among the software market leaders (IBM, Lotus, Ashton-Tate and Apple). There were 5,000 Internet hosts, vs. about 172 million today.

Seventeen years ago, there were only a handful of IT job functions and titles -- computer programmer, systems analyst, information systems manager -- rather than the dozens of specialties in the field today. Who could have imagined chief security officers, earning six-figure salaries no less, or "strategic planning" experience becoming a major IT career boost?

The overall number of IT jobs tripled from 719,000 in 1983 to 2.5 million in 2000, says the Washington-based Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology. Yet today the IT labor force is down from that peak by at least 150,000 jobs, the CPST reports, and IT unemployment has reached an unprecedented high of 6% this year .

The somber mood among the nearly 15,000 IT pros and managers in this year's salary survey is hardly unexpected, given the flattened pay scales, heavier workloads, longer hours, outsourcing threats and economic pressures affecting nearly everyone.

What I admire most is the stoic, determined streak among our survey respondents, as though someone had posted a "No Whining" sign over the IT department's door. "Money isn't the most important thing about a job to me," said a Unix systems administrator who was laid off, consulted for a while and then found another job. "I'm happy to have found a job so quickly in this economy."

Other IT staffers feel deeply uneasy about the future, however. "I have such a profound sense of paranoia," said one database developer, "I don't think I'd feel secure if the owner came here and gave me the keys to the building."

When it comes to the jobs in highest demand, companies are still paying a premium for IT professionals with networking and security expertise, and for experience in Microsoft's .Net technologies. IT architects with strategic planning, resource utilization and business alignment experience remain strongly in demand, our survey found. Backgrounds in portfolio management, process improvement, data mining and business intelligence have also emerged as reasonably hot tickets in an otherwise tepid marketplace.

Some of the salary numbers we crunched are intriguing for what they say about company priorities. Like the parity achieved between chief security officers (average salary: about $111,000) and network directors or VPs (about $114,000). While CSO salaries were up by about 3.4% over 2002 levels, network chiefs warranted an average pay increase of 6.8%.