Salary Study Measures Cloud, Virtualization Impact

According to the 2012-2011 Annual Salary Survey by Dice.com, on average, if you are skilled in Azure, you can make the big bucks--$102,510 per annum, to be exact. Given Microsoft's claims that there are tens of thousands of Azure installations around the world, and in light of recent rumblings about the increasingly powerful position of PaaS, this doesn't come as a huge surprise. What does come as a bit of a surprise is the Dice.com finding that Azure's reportedly red-hot cousin Hyper-V is at the bottom of the barrel, paying a paltry $81,701 to its technical practitioners.

Following Azure in respective order are Amazon S-3 ($94,843), Cloud Computing ($92,830), VMware vCloud ($88,854), Virtualization (86,669), Xen ($85,591), and VMware (82,688), and Xen ($85,591).

Only three of the categories--Virtualization, VMware, and Xen--go back to Dice's 2009-2008 survey, and among them, only Xen pays less now ($85,591) than it did in the 2009-2008 survey ($87,195). Cloud Computing goes back to 2010-2009, when it paid a relatively robust $92,663 compared to its nearly unchanged current level of $92,830. Amazon S-3, Azure, and Hyper-V, VMare vCloud are all first-timers.

What's it all mean? From what we can see, salaries are largely holding their own. What we can't see is what percentage of respondents work full-time in the categories they checked off, i.e. do these people consider themselves to be dedicated virtualization admins or cloud architects, or are they spreading their skills across multiple categories? This is especially interesting considering the movement toward making IT pros jacks of all trades as their jobs are reshaped by technologies like cloud and virtualization.

You could make the argument that Hyper-V salaries are lower because the salaries of IT pros in Microsoft shops are lower, and Microsoft IT pros are administering Hyper-V, since it comes gratis with Windows Server 2008 R2.

The Dice Salary Survey was administered online with 18,325 employed technology professionals responding between September 19 and November 21, 2011. Respondents were invited to participate in the survey through a notification on the Dice home page, and registered technology professionals were sent an email invitation. A cookie methodology was used to ensure that there was no duplication of responses between or within the various sample groups, and duplicate responses from a single email address were removed.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 01/30/2012 at 12:48 PM