While IT salaries continue to rise and many are still well above the national median income, new research from compensation and salary data solutions company Paysa shows that many tech workers are still underpaid when you compare their current pay to their market value.
Paysa examined more than 5 million resumes of tech and engineering professionals from their salary database and compared their education, experience, skills, work history and current salary to their market value for identical available roles, says Chris Bolte, CEO of Paysa. The findings reveal that more than one-third of tech professionals (nearly two million people) are underpaid by 10 percent or more.
It’s not that companies underpay their talent deliberately, especially not mission-critical IT and engineering talent, Bolte says. “What happens is companies bring people on at competitive rate… But once they’re on board, companies don’t tend to do much more than the standard yearly increase. After a couple years, new talent is being brought on at much higher rates than existing talent, and companies don’t pay attention to this fact until their employees take drastic measures, like threatening to leave for a higher-paying opportunity,” Bolte says. That’s more likely to happen in areas where tech companies are highly concentrated and in major metro areas where competition for talent is fierce, he adds.
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