Overall, 2021 is a good year for tech professionals in the U.S., with average salaries rising 6.9 percent to $104566, according to Dice, a well-known online recruiting firm. Dice published the figures last month in its annual Technical Payroll Report.
Hired, another online job search firm, released its 2021 U.S. tech job salary data, which is higher than Dice's, averaging $152,000, but claims that salaries are still down 1.1 percent overall compared to 2020, a change attributable to a change in hiring: Employers are turning to hiring professionals who are early in their careers.
Average wages for U.S. tech jobs are growing
However, according to Dice, the momentum of employers competing for machine learning experts, natural language processing experts and AI experts has weakened in 2021, with average wages falling by 2.1%, 7.8% and 8.9%, respectively. In recent years, the wages of these positions have been in an upward channel, sometimes rising sharply. In the U.S., for example, the average salary of a software engineer with machine learning expertise rose 22 percent in 2019 from 2018, and then by another 3.1 percent in 2020.
Michelle Marian, Dice's chief marketing officer, told IEEE Spectrum: "There are a number of factors that can lead to lower wages [this phenomenon], and an important consideration is that more technologists are learning and mastering these skill sets." Given that skill sets are easier to find, the growing talent pool could slowly lead to employers paying a lower salary to recruit people. We've seen this happen from a range of certifications and other highly specialized technical skills. ”
Meanwhile, the scarcity of experts on open source enterprise search platform Solr puts the position at the top of the list for the average salary.
AI, machine learning, and natural language processing wages are falling
Highest paid programming skills
As in 2020, in 2021 the major tech companies are bragging about plans to move their companies from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas. However, silicon valley tech job salaries are already above the Texas average, with a slightly larger lead, up 5 percent to $133204, while Austin is up 4.6 percent to $109176. (These figures do not take into account the cost of living, which often gives Austin a significant advantage, especially if an employee wants to buy a home.) But according to Dice's analysis, the biggest wage increases came from outside the two tech hubs, with double-digit wage increases in Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Chicago.
The highest salary for a tech job in a U.S. metropolitan area
Dice also analyzed wage changes based on occupational categories. After a decline in 2020, salaries for management positions rose by an average of 6 percent in 2021 to $151983. The second-highest-paid technical occupation: System architects also saw a sharp rise: up 5.1 percent to $147991.
But Dice found that web developers were the technology occupation with the biggest salary increases, with an average salary increase of 21.3 percent to $98,912. Technical professionals such as database administrators, data analysts, UX/UI designers, and technical support engineers also saw double-digit gains.
However, employer demand for cybersecurity analysts and data engineers appears to be slowing. The average salary for cybersecurity analysts is up 16.3 percent in 2020 from 2019 and down 0.8 percent to $102253 in 2021, and the average salary for data engineers is down $1.1 percent to $117295 after growing 4.7 percent in 2020.
Dice's report speculates that the change may be "related to a surge in the number of highly specialized functions designed to perform some of these roles."