It’s time for our annual salary survey to find out what data professionals make. You fill out the data, we open source the whole thing, and you can analyze the data to spot trends and do a better job of negotiating your own salary:
Take the Data Professional Salary Survey now. – the survey has closed.
The anonymous survey closes Friday, Jan 1, 2021. The results are completely open source, and shared with the community for your analysis. (You can analyze ’em now mid-flight, but I’d wait until the final results come in. I’ll combine them into a single spreadsheet with the past results.)
Thanks for your help in giving everybody in the community a better chance to talk honestly with their managers about salary.
Update: here are the 2020 Data Professional Salary Survey results.
19 Comments. Leave new
It would be nice to see a breakdown coupled with the salary so I could get a true comparison based on years worked, location, job, etc.
Yes, that’s why you get access to the raw data. You’re a data professional – you can build whatever breakdown you’d like to see. Enjoy!
To be honest I hold several positions as per the list in the survey
how about nervous breakdowns ?
Thanks for hosting again this year! I’m excited to see the results, currently trying to determine what kind of fun project I should build with the data set this year.
I look forward to these surveys and the results each year!
I think it is time to start asking about benefits, in addition to salary. Quite a few positions now have bonus targets, and get long-term incentives like stock options, on top of salary. That can be a pretty significant boost (in my case, +50% of my base salary). Company perks are a little less tangible, but maybe a checkbox list of things like health insurance, 401k match, paid vacation.
I look forward to seeing the results!
Thank you for doing this again
Hi Brent – Is there any reason why you didn’t include the hourly rate for contractors in this survey? The information disadvantage of the contractors is big. And yes, the rates are very “it depends”, but still…
Because contractors don’t just work one hour. Take your total compensation across the span of the entire year.
If “underpaid” is the aim, a grand revenue total is IMHO less applicable, because it also depends on how many hours you’ve worked for this amount. For example, if you decide to work for two month this year, and you earn the same amount as i do in a year, who of us two is underpaid?
Apart from that, the need for information about hourly rates in the market is important information is denied to many contractors, and these kind of surveys can give us valuable insights.
OK, cool – if you want to build a survey that measures that, I’ll leave it to you. Thanks though!
I think it’s also a matter of how you value you time/the rate you charge your client.
If they, as a contractor, are not being paid enough then they are accepting contracts that they should not. Or, should skill up and take your classes 🙂
To be honest. THIS year, I feel blessed to still have a job with so many loosing jobs and or hours. I may not have got a raise this year, but I am grateful to have my job. There is something to be said for stability.
Here’s an idea for the next iteration. You have a question about work location, so I answered with where I sit to perform my work, but I am wholly remote, so my actual work computer and servers I work on are in a different city and state. I am also considering a move to an even more remote location from my work, with the blessing of my company. if you added a question in the next iteration about company location you (we) might be able to figure out if more people are being allowed to work as Data Professionals in a remote work capacity. It might be an interesting data point.
Todd – I think it’s fair to say that most of us aren’t working in an office right now, and that this situation is rather fluid, and I wouldn’t make a lot of salary decisions around that. 😉
what leapt out at me from the responses as somewhat interesting is that we tend to have an obsession with 5 year increments – at least I’m assuming that there isn’t some market event that happens to spike the industry’s “years working on this database” at the 5, 10, and 15 year marks. It makes sense from a resume-building perspective as well as salary discussions since a lot of pay formulas still work off those kinds of formulas. If I’ve been working on a database platform for just over 9 years, I’m probably going to mark it down as 10 (for example).
It looks like the results link is broken, please fix it
It launches on Monday. Stay tuned.
The link is still broken