Overall, 2021 was a strong year for U.S. technology professionals, with average salaries increasing 6.9% to $104,566, according to online recruiting firm Dice. Dice released these numbers last month as part of its annual Tech Pay Report.
HiRed, another online job search firm, saw larger payouts than Dice ($152,000 on average) in its 2021 U.S. tech salary data, but reported an overall decline of 1.1% from 2020, a change the company attributes to a hiring shift toward early-career professionals.
However, competition for machine learning, natural language processing and AI professionals weakened in 2021, with average salaries down 2.1%, 7.8% and 8.9%, respectively, according to figures from Dice. This follows repeated and sometimes dramatic increases in recent years. For example, the average U.S. salary for a software engineer with machine learning expertise increased by 22 percent in 2019 compared to 2018, and by an additional 3.1 percent in 2020.
“There can be various factors, but [these] ” said Michelle Marian, Dice’s chief marketing officer. IEEE spectrum“One important consideration is that more and more technicians are learning and mastering these skill sets. As the talent pool increases over time, the wages employers need to pay may decline, at least slightly, given that the skill sets become easier to find. We’ve seen this happen with a variety of certifications and other highly specialized technical skills.”
Meanwhile, average salaries have risen to the top of the charts due to a shortage of specialists in Solr, the open source enterprise search platform.
Similar to 2020, in 2021 major technology companies touted plans to relocate from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas. But Silicon Valley’s tech salaries, already higher than the Texas average, widened its lead slightly, increasing 5 percent to $133,204, compared to Austin’s 4.6 percent salary of $109,176. (These numbers don’t take into account the cost of living, which generally gives Austin a significant advantage, especially if you want to buy a home). But Dice’s analysis shows that the biggest increases in salaries occurred outside of these two tech hubs, with Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Chicago all posting double-digit increases.
Dice also looked at changes in salaries by occupation. Management salaries declined in 2020, but rose by an average of 6% in 2021 to $151,983. Systems architects, the second highest-paid technical job, also saw a huge increase, increasing 5.1% to $147,991.
But web developers are the fastest-growing technology occupation, with average salaries increasing 21.3% to $98,912, according to Dice research. Technical professionals who work as database administrators, data analysts, UX/UI designers, and technical support engineers also saw double-digit growth.
However, demand for cybersecurity analysts and data engineers appears to be slowing. While the average salary in 2020 increased by 16.3% from 2019, the average salary for a cybersecurity analyst decreased by 0.8% in 2021 to $102,253, and the average salary for a data engineer decreased by 1.1% to $117,295 from an increase of 4.7% in 2020.
Dice’s report speculates that this change may have “something to do with the proliferation of tools designed to perform some of the highly specialized functions of these roles.”
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