 SAGE
Salary Survey Results
Rob Kolstad
The annual SAGE salary survey results for the calendar year 2003
have been tabulated. More than 4,000 participants provided a host
of information, including age, benefits, certifications, education,
experience, focus, geography, hours worked, hours of training, industry,
length of employment, recent pay increases, SAGE admin level, salary
and bonuses, travel, and a dozen other kinds of data.
The responses broke out into several different types of jobs:
Databases, Desktop, Generalist, Help Desk, Networking, People Management,
Project Management, Security, Server Management, Technical Lead,
and Other.
Figure 1 shows the breakdown of the respondents. More than 95%
of those participating were men -- up from 93% for 2002 and
88.4% for 2001. Some speculate that women may be more "private"
with their salary information.
The average reported salary for the 3,004 respondents using U.S.
dollars as their currency was $66,557 (slightly down from last year's
$67,675): $66,612 for men (down from 2002's $67,920) and $65,432
(up from 2002's $64,946) for women. The overall median was
$62,500 (down from 2002's $65,000) and coincided with the median
for all men. The median for women was slightly higher at $65,000,
up from 2002's $63,000. These numbers do not factor in experience
and therefore should not be used as a general comparison of anything.
The average salary change for those 3,184 full-time respondents
with salary changes from -30% to 30% (from all nations and currencies)
was 4.88%. 10.8% earned less in 2003 than in 2002; 15.4% received
a raise of 0-0.99%. Of those 74.6% who increased their salaries
30% or less, the average increase was 8.18%.
The chart of salary change (Figure 2) is interesting for its bell-curve
shape, with a large number of people at "no salary change".
The chart shows that the notion that computer administrators are
losing out in the salary race is probably not a valid one. While
the boom years of the dot-com era with huge increases just from
changing employers are gone, the profession appears to be on solid
footing, with raises as good as almost any other industry.
It has been said in the past that systems administration is a
young person's game. Figure 1 shows the concentration of admins
in various age groups. 13.5% of the respondents were 24 years of
age or younger; 29.6% were 35 or older. 56.9% were in the "golden
middle" that includes the ages 25-34. It's easy to observe
the concentration in that 25-34 age group. The smaller number of
"under 25" suggests that fewer admins are moving into
the field or that admins are staying in school. Of course, other
explanations abound, especially since the dot-com boom might have
inflated the 25-29 age group.
Managers often look to SAGE for a "universal constant"
that is the number of admins required per full-time-equivalent user.
This year's survey again collected data from which to estimate
this elusive value. The answer is, "it depends". A site
with resource-intensive users might require far more admins than,
for example, Ebay, which has a huge number of users but a smaller
admin ratio, since the users are generally exploiting a single application.
The breakdown shows a bell-shaped distribution when plotted against
a logarithmic scale for the number of users (see Figure 3).
Dozens of charts, graphs, and statistics like these are available
in the full SAGE Salary Survey document, which is available to SAGE
members at the SAGE Web site (http://www.sage.org). SAGE
is very economical to join, so the document is not sold separately.
Rob Kolstad is the Executive Director for SAGE. |
