Survey: Dice.com Finds Salary, Bonus Jumps for Middleware, Integration Devs

Salaries are rising for a wide range of integration developers, according to a recent survey by Dice.com. The IT careers site found devs with skills in SOA, Red Hat’s JBoss, Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere are just a few of those who enjoyed healthy jumps in pay and bonuses in 2011. IDN talks with Dice.com’s Managing Director Alice Hill.

by Vance McCarthy

Tags: SOA, salary, survey, Dice.com,

Alice HillSalaries are rising for a wide range of integration developers, according to a recent survey by Dice.com. The IT careers site found devs with skills in SOA, Red Hat’s JBoss and IBM WebSphere are among those who enjoyed healthy jumps in pay and bonuses in 2011.

Increases in pay, bonuses and even the number of IT professionals getting bonuses follows two straight years of nearly flat wages, the Dice.com survey found. Dice also noted the industries most likely to pay bonuses included IT companies (hardware and software), as you might expect. Other sectors were banking, telecom and utilities/energy.

“We’ve seen a big push toward enterprise-level tech skills as well as the expanding role tech professionals play in the larger goals of the company,” Alice Hill, Dice.com’s managing director, told IDN.

This trend is particularly good news for IT professionals with integration and SOA skills, she added. “SOA professionals have a hand in this, by integrating different applications into one usable platform for multiple users, in turn saving the company time and money. Because SOA professionals deliver value to firms, companies today are paying up for this skilled talent.”

Drill down into the survey responses and there’s even more good news for integration developers. Integration and data skills topped the list of those enjoying salary raises in 2011:

 

SOA Service Oriented Architecture average salary $108,210 up 6%
ETL Extract Transform and Load average salary $106,521 up 6%
Oracle WebLogic average salary $103,702 up 5%
Red Hat JBoss average salary $102,184; up 5%
IBM WebSphere average salary $100,348 up 7%


 
“Those with expertise in enterprise Java, WebSphere, JBoss and WebLogic [showed] outsized gains,” she added.

Other IT professionals with skills often related to applications and data integration also received healthy increases, Dice’s survey found. Among them: ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) at $109,157, up 3%; ETL (Extract Transform and Load) at $106,521, up 6%; and JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) at $102,630, up 5%.
 
“Finally, compensation has mustered some momentum, as more and more top tech markets are notching increases in pay,” added Tom Silver, Dice.com’s senior vice president for North America. “Nationally, we’re seeing stiffer competition and higher salaries for tech pros with the right skill sets and the right experience level.”

"Demand has definitely been rising for tech professionals with [middleware] skills."


Alice Hill
Managing Director Dice.com

One key reason for salary jumps is an increase in companies looking for SOA and integration professionals. “Demand has definitely been rising for tech professionals with these skills,” Hill told IDN. In particular, the survey found SOA job postings are up 11% year over year. WebSphere postings are up 14% year over year and Jboss is up 25% year over year. “JBoss is growing at a faster pace on Dice than tech jobs overall,” she added. 

Dice.com also found that Java devs with web services expertise are also in high demand. “It appears Java is taking hold as the enterprise language for web services,” Hill told IDN. As this continues, tech professionals with these skills are increasingly in demand, and therefore companies may have to pay to attract or retain them.
 
“If tech professionals spark companies to win by harnessing their data, that’s when the tech department is no longer seen as a cost center, but a strategic partner in meeting companies’ goals,” Hill added.

This shift from being part of a cost center to an enabler for growing business efficiency, profits and customer satisfaction is another overall key to getting that long-overdue raise or bonus.

“Long gone is the notion that tech departments code away in some basement, seemingly inconspicuous to the company as a whole,” Hill told IDN. “We hear from our customers that tech talent with these skills not only need to lead, manage and scale large projects, but also must be able to clearly communicate technical concepts with various management levels.”

Despite all this positive news, Dice.com’s survey also hits one cautionary note: entry-level salaries continue to be pushed downward. Those getting the raises were experts in their chosen areas with at least 10 years experience.

The Dice Salary Survey was administered online last fall with 18,325 employed technology professionals responding.

 

 




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