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What’s in your wallet?

It’s a good time to be an application programmer. Codejockeys saw the largest jump in salaries compared to other IT staff positions for the second year in a row. App programmers average about $56,500 per year, up 6.6 percent over last year. What’s more, their average base salaries have risen by almost 15 percent since the beginning of the decade.

Although their salaries are higher on average (about $67,150) than app programmers, systems programmers are having the toughest year financially. They’ve seen their salaries slip about 5 percent compared to last year. Salaries for this position have remained relatively stagnant since 2002.

How do we know? This issue, we’re reporting on the results of Enterprise Systems’ annual IT salary survey (ADT and ES are owned by 101communications). We aren’t able to print the entire survey in the magazine. There’s a tremendous amount of additional fascinating stuff at www.ADTmag.com and ESJ.com. Take a look when you have time.

Also in this issue, Stephen Swoyer, in his usual inimitable style, reports BI today is a more expensive proposition than it was just a few years ago, when enterprises built their own reporting and analysis solutions. For a number of reasons, enterprises are doing far less building and much more buying today, Swoyer writes. The consequences of this transition have helped cloud BI’s once clear ROI picture.

Alan Earls checks in with a piece on the software change and configuration management tools app dev managers are using to manage globally dispersed development teams. And John Waters wraps up the Java tools scene with a piece on how the new face of the Java IDE will bear a closer resemblance to a lean plug-in environment than the traditional feature-stuffed tool suite. The catalyst for this transformation is Eclipse and its commoditizing effect on the basic components of the Java IDE, Waters writes.

About the Author

Michael Alexander is editor-in-chief of Application Development Trends.

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