Tech salaries 'see biggest jump in a decade': survey

Dice, the online tech recruiting site, finds plenty to be upbeat about in the tech market, particularly for certain markets and skillsets. If you're a big data professional in New York or Silicon Valley, you can write your own ticket. But the opportunities extend far and wide.

Dice recently looked at the salary ranges being offered across more than 15,000 IT positions, observing that technology salaries in the U.S. "saw the biggest jump in more than a decade." Tech professionals earned a greater than five percent increase in average annual wages to $85,619, up from $81,327 in 2011. 

Big data projects are having the greatest impact on the numbers, Dice finds. "Salaries reported by those who regularly use Hadoop, NoSQL, and Mongo DB are all north of $100,000."

By comparison, average salaries for technologies closely associated with cloud and virtualization are just under $90,000 and mobile salaries are closer to $80,000.  (Data on other positions was not available.)

Dice also just released a list of top U.S. localities for tech hiring. New York City and the Balitomore-Washington corridor top the list of openings, but both areas saw a four percent decline in openings over the past month.

Growth areas include Los Angeles, Dallas and Philadelpha. In total, Dice had a total of 83, 627 tech job listings as of February 1st. 

Interestingly, Dice also looked at the career confidence levels of tech professionals in the 50 states, suggesting that those states with the highest levels of confidence are likely to be locales where it will be difficult to get professionals to move for a new job. Topping the list of Georgie, where 72% of tech professionals say they "could easily find a new job." Minnesota, Delaware, North Carolina and Maryland round out the list of the top five.

But the confidence is strong all around. The reported increase in wages found in Dice's salary survey comes at a time when the vast majority of tech professionals (64%) "are confident they could find a favorable new position in 2013," says Dice's Alice Hill.

While Silicon Valley is still the only market were tech professionals average six-figure salaries ($101,278), seven markets saw double-digit increases in average tech salaries year/year – the most ever registered by the Dice Salary Survey.

Leading the surge with an 18 percent year/year increase to $76,207 are Pittsburgh-based tech professionals, followed by San Diego ($97,328) and St. Louis ($81,245) each garnering 13 percent year/year increases.  Phoenix ($83,607) and Cleveland ($75,773) had strong gains, up 12 and 11 percent year/year, respectively.  Rounding out the double-digit debuts is Orlando ($81,583) and Milwaukee ($81,670), both up roughly 10 percent year/year. Boston was up seven percent to $94,742.  Atlanta saw average tech salaries of $87,556 and Los Angeles with a six percent gain to $92,498.