Against a backdrop of job losses and economic turmoil in the tech sector, salaries for working system administrators rose by a solid margin last year, a newly released survey concluded.
According to the Sage/SANS/BigAdmin Annual Salary Survey, published Wednesday, the average IT worker surveyed earned $65,000 in 2002, an increase of about 8 percent from the year before.
System administrators in the United States earned, on average, nearly $68,000 a year, with mean salary increases ranging from 5 percent to 11 percent in the largest metropolitan areas.
"The solid growth exceeded my expectations, because my expectations were low," said Robert Kolstad, director of Sage, an organization for system administrators.
While it would be misguided to say all is well for the IT workforce, which is facing historically high levels of unemployment, Kolstad said the data indicates that "the people who are employed are doing just fine."
Wages differed widely by region. Workers in the San Francisco, New York and Boston metropolitan areas topped the list of high earners, with mean salaries of $87,000, $85,000 and $77,000, respectively. Canadian IT workers were the worst paid, with respondents in Vancouver and Montreal both reporting average annual wages around $44,000 (in U.S. dollars).
When asked what they liked about their jobs, system administrators most commonly cited a casual work environment, followed by a challenging workload and good co-workers.
The things IT workers disliked most about their jobs were management's propensity to make bad decisions, and the burden of corporate bureaucracy.
Respondents were also unusually nervous about job security, Kolstad said. Many mentioned outsourcing as a major cause of concern, particularly the movement of jobs to India and other countries with comparatively low IT salaries.
Tech workers were also worried about the possibility that advancements in software for automating network administration would make their jobs obsolete.
"Just as all technology, over time, becomes more end-user friendly, network computing will -- in the next 10 to 15 years -- cease to require a human element to keep it running," one respondent wrote.
Many humans were already feeling some of the pain last year. About 15 percent of respondents reported they were out of work at least one week in 2002.
The salary survey is based on responses from 9,651 IT workers and 683 consultants who submitted information during April and May. Ninety-three percent of respondents were men, with the average participant reporting eight years of experience in the field. Respondents were located throughout the world, though only the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia had more than 1 percent of the total.
The survey was administered by three industry groups: SAGE, the SANS Institute and BigAdmin, a system administrator site operated by Sun Microsystems.
