Disclaimer:This post is for amusement purposes only. No life changing decisions should be made based on it. There, you’ve been warned.
Every year dice.com puts together a salary survey for those of us working in tech. It’s a chance to look at what other developers say they are making and either snicker or sigh wishfully. This week they released “2010-11 Tech Salary Survey Results”. (Go ahead, click, scroll around a bit and then come back and I’ll tell you what I found)
To me, page 5 was the most interesting. Page 5 is a table of salaries by metro area. This is interesting and at first blush it makes me wish I lived in Silicon Valley where the salaries are the highest. However, having actually lived in San Jose, CA, I know that while salaries are high, so is the cost of living. So I got to wondering what the buying power of these salaries were and how they really compared to each other.
TO THE CLOUD!
Actually, to Sperling’s Best Places, they have the best cost of living calculator I’ve found. They give each city a number that compares it to the US average, the US average being 100. I poked around and while I couldn’t find a city that scored exactly 100, Charlotte, NC scored a 101 so I decided that for our purposes, that was close enough. Using Charlotte, NC as a baseline, I normalized each city’s average tech salary to give us some idea of how they actually compare. Here’s the normalized chart.
| City | Average Tech Salary |
Normalized Salary |
% change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silicon Valley | $99,028 | $61,984 | -37% |
| Washington D.C./Baltimore | $89,149 | $67,866 | -24% |
| New York | $87,298 | $53,070 | -39% |
| Boston | $86,782 | $54,454 | -37% |
| Seattle | $86,168 | $61,272 | -29% |
| San Diego | $85,617 | $65,422 | -24% |
| Los Angeles | $84,551 | $59,373 | -30% |
| Houston | $83,625 | $93,080 | 11% |
| Denver | $83,168 | $81,876 | -2% |
| Atlanta | $82,944 | $85,909 | 4% |
| Charlotte | $82,825 | $82,825 | 0% |
| Sacramento | $82,237 | $78,594 | -4% |
| Philadelphia | $81,986 | $79,478 | -3% |
| Dallas/Ft. Worth | $81,579 | $85,367 | 5% |
| Hartford | $81,172 | $84,506 | 4% |
| Chicago | $79,933 | $72,954 | -9% |
| Austin, TX | $79,375 | $75,787 | -5% |
| Raleigh | $77,825 | $74,659 | -4% |
| Phoenix | $77,141 | $86,052 | 12% |
| Columbus, OH | $74,615 | $88,594 | 19% |
| Portland, OR | $73,096 | $59,534 | -19% |
| St. Louis | $71,539 | $89,226 | 25% |
| Detroit | $71,445 | $94,453 | 32% |
I won’t draw any conclusions for you form this data. The times I’ve had to look for jobs or evaluate offers though, I’ve always found it useful to compare the offer to my current salary at my current location.
Ok, I’ll draw one conclusion, let’s all meet in Detroit and telecommute to Silicon Valley. 
February 11, 2011
Uncategorized