Six-figure Salary IT Jobs List Hits Smartplanet.com

Changes in average tech pay from 2003-2012 (Source: Dice.com)

Chewing through Google+ yesterday, I came across an interesting article on the CNET/CBS Interactive website, smartplanet.com. Entitled “Ten tech skills you must have for a $100k salary” (by Charlie Osborne, 3/12/2013) the story abstracts a recent report  (PDF, site registration required) from job posting and career advice site Dice.com. That report is worth a quick visit, BTW, because it puts the last decade of IT salaries and raises into very good perspective. What Ms. Osborne extracted from that report, however, is best represented as a table:

What I find most interesting about this information is that nearly all of the jobs are at least development oriented, if not focused on software development outright. I have to imagine that if Dice handled more architect and expert level jobs, that the pay scales would go up and many of these items would be relegated to the lower end of the top IT pay scales, rather than the pinnacle position they currently occupy. But most of these extremely high profile, responsibility, and pay positions go through headhunting firms, or get filled by word of mouth through small, tight networks of specialized professionals.

Even so, this is interesting information, not only because of the huge importance it places on big data and data analytics in the overall IT job market, but also because all of these thing speak at least indirectly to an improving economic situation. If business weren’t looking up, companies wouldn’t be seeking to hire such costly and specialized talent, all of which seeks to help organizations work more effectively and efficiently, and to make better use of the data resources and customer information they so diligently acquire.