2005 Sage Salary Survey is out!

I’ve participated in a yearly salary survey sponsored by Usenix, a UNIX-advocacy group every year since it first came out. Usenix runs another group called SAGE, which is dedicated to covering issues related to systems administration.

I’m a sysadmin for a career, so I have a vested interest in participating. Although I’m not a member of SAGE (too expensive!), I like doing the survey and getting the results. This year, they had over 3000 people participate, which is large enough to be statistically significant in various parts of the US.

Here are the results that most interested me from the 2004-2005 salary survey. I’ve mixed in my comments with their statistics, so don’t take it as gospel.

• 96.2% of respondents were male. The rest were female. This jibes with my long-time observation of the industry: about 1 in 20 sysadmins are women.
• 11% of sysadmins had been unemployed at some point during the year. It’s an unfortunate fact: sysadmins get the hatchet early. They are an expense which companies think they can do without, until they can’t.
• The average increase in pay for 2004-2005 vs 2003-2004 was over 6%. This beats inflation!
• National sysadmin average pay: $68,195 for males, $64,016 for females. This average number, of course, does not reflect experience in the industry. Those with more experience may make significantly more, those with less make much less.
• Systems administration is still a young person’s game. Most respondents were in the 25-34 category. Only 15% of respondents were over 40. This, also, jibes with my observations: there are very few sysadmins over 40. On the plus side, those who are and have been playing a while tend to be very good.
• 2/3 of respondents have some kind of informal supervisory duties (like “team lead”), while about a quarter have official management duties.
• SAGE classifies admins as level 1 through 4. Very few respondents called themselves a level “1” (entry-level). IMHO, this means one of the following:
  1. Sysadmins overstate their work experience and/or responsibilities.
  2. Few entry-level admins participate in salary surveys.
  3. There are fewer sysadmins entering the field.
• The mean experience of admins in the survey: 7.91 years.
• What’s weird is, the bell-curve distribution of “amount of time in the field” has stayed at five years since the inception of the survey. You’d expect that to go up! Since it doesn’t, it strongly suggests that there are as many people getting out of the field as getting into it at any given time. Interestingly,the statistic for women is longer than men, suggesting that system administration jobs may represent a “glass ceiling” position for females.
• 53% of sysadmins have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
• Younger admins tend to have college degrees in the field, while older admins don’t. This jibes with my experience: when I was in college, there was no such thing as a degree in systems administration.
• Sysadmins spend about 25% of their time keeping up-to-date on their education and technology developments. This is a HUGE training expense, but IMHO absolutely essential for the good admin. If you are a sysadmin, you live and die by how well you keep up on new technology in your field.
• Sysadmins generally don’t travel much.
• Full-time admins average 45-hour work weeks, with 10% reporting longer than 60-hour work weeks.
• Over a third of admins telecommute at least one day a week.
• Median time at any given job: 3 years.
• Most admins get 15 days off a year.
• The heart of the survey: the salaries!
  • Newbie: $32K
  • 1-2 years: $44K
  • 3-4 years: $48K
  • 5-6 years: $57K
  • 7-8 years: $72K
  • 9-10 years: $78K
  • 11-15 years: $87K
  • 16-19 years: $93K
  • 20+ years: $93K
• Unsurprisingly, major metropolitan areas and technology hubs pay much more than positions out in the boonies. It’s kind of a “duh!” moment, but a position in a large city might pay $94K, while the same position in the country might pay $40K.
• Washington, D.C., New York City, and Silicon Valley positions pay the best out of the major cities in the US. My little town of Salt Lake City wasn’t even listed 🙂
• The sysadmin jobs, in order of pay by best to worst, are:
  1. Management
  2. Security
  3. Tech lead
  4. Database
  5. General
  6. Project Management
  7. Server Management
  8. Networking
  9. Help Desk
  10. Desktop Support
• Sysadmins at big companies get paid much more than sysadmins for small companies. Large companies also employ more admins per user than small ones. It’s kind of a “duh”, but good to know!
• The worst-paying industry with statistically-valid results? Education. Bottom of the barrel, pay-wise. You get more money being a government contractor.
• The top things syadmins like about their jobs:
  1. Casual dress
  2. Challenge
  3. Co-workers
  4. Learning on the job
  5. Flexibility, freedom
  6. Job security (in the sense of everyone needs sysadmins, not the “I’ll have a job with this company tomorrow”, I think!)
  7. Flexible hours
  8. Salary/compensation
  9. Fast internet, nifty high-tech gadgets, cool computers, etc.
  10. Fun
• The top things sysadmins hate about their jobs?
  1. Beaurocracy, paperwork
  2. Poor compensation
  3. Incompetent management
  4. Understaffing
  5. Politics
  6. Poor leadership and communication
  7. Infrequent salary increases
  8. Ceiling on advancement, or low advancement speed
  9. Budget, funding
  10. Salary, benefit issues
  11. Boredom
  12. Conflicting demands
  13. Poor respect or low value placed on job; little visibility
• IT and software development companies far and away lead the pack on creating unemployment in the industry.

Well, I hope that was interesting for you! It was interesting reading for me, for sure. I’m pretty certain this won’t appeal to the average barnson.org reader, but I bet there will be plenty of folks looking for salary info on Google that will find this page helpful 🙂

— Matt B.