Every year, I run a Data Professional Salary Survey here. Thousands of y’all have answered – here are the past results in Excel – and it helps everybody get a better idea of how overpaid they are. (Did I word that right?)
Here are the questions I’m planning to ask this year:
- What’s your total salary in US dollars, annual before taxes?
- Your country
- (Optional) Postal/zip code
- Primary database you work with
- Years that you’ve worked with this database
- Other databases you worked with in 2021
- Job type: (FTE, FTE of consulting/contracting company, independent, part time)
- Job title
- Do you manage other staff
- Years of doing this job
- At how many companies have you held this job?
- How many other people on your team do the same job as you?
- How many database servers does your team work with?
- What is the population of the largest city within 20 miles of where you work?
- Employer sector (private, government, non-profit, etc.)
- What are your career plans for the year 2022?
- To which gender do you most identify?
If there are any changes you want to make, leave a comment and we’ll talk through it. A few things to keep in mind:
- If you want to add a question, tell me what actions you would take based on the findings. This survey is about salary, not things like what percentage of the audience uses what tools.
- The less questions, the better the response rate – I’mma make you fight for new questions, and other readers will need to chime in.
- The response types are fairly limited: either short text boxes or multiple-choice answers.
Update: we’re not going to add work-from-home related questions. The problem is that the work-from-home situation at a lot of companies is wildly in flux, and it’s often dictated by government rules or vaccine policies or availability. Companies are constantly changing their work-from-home policies, and any answers that folks might give could be outdated within 30 days. I don’t think you can really draw conclusions from that kind of thing right now.
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Two suggestions:
1. Take an answer to the first question in dollars or euro. Readers will likely care about only one or the other and there’s no reason to convert euro to dollars. It’s more work on your end but report them separately to be the most useful.
2. Lose the gender question. Even asking about it is potentially divisive, a sign of the poison of identity politics.
1. Unfortunately due to the number of subscribers I have around the world, it’s not really feasible to cover every currency. I need to keep this one simple.
2. I understand that some folks are uncomfortable with the gender pay gap. I’ll happily remove that question when the data indicates that gender is no longer a clear factor in pay. Sadly, I don’t think that’ll be this year either. We still have work to do, and the work doesn’t start with complicit silence.
As addition:
-Do you work from 9 -5 or most of the days you have overtime.
-Did you get an raise in the past 6/12 months
Rolf – that’s a little tricky because many folks in the world do shift work or on call coverage. We’ve asked that question in the past but it didn’t have a clear influence on salary. You can check the past data for that.
About the raise – rather than looking one person at a time, review the industry data as a whole to see if it’s trending upwards.
Does it make sense to distinguish whether a Data Professional does none/some/all work in the cloud? Would be be curious to see if this affects salary.
John – I hear you, but the problem is you can’t really get a clear answer with a short question there. For example, if your SQL Servers are VMs in Amazon EC2, that doesn’t mean you’re actually *working* in the cloud. Your servers just happen to live there.
The first question is a bit vague to me. “Salary” is one aspect, often “bonus” another. In some situations your bonus can double your salary or more, so it’s important to properly quantify. It’s not clear based on the wording whether or not they should be combined in the survey, whether you just mean base salary, etc.
Of course there can be options, grants, and other stuff too, and I understand not wanting to capture all possible forms of comp, as that can get very confusing.
In the interest of clarity and consistency, how about changing it to “Total monetary earnings (including base salary and cash bonuses)” or something along those lines?
Great point! I added that to the description right under the question.
are you on-call regularly?
Alex – we did ask that in the past, and we ran into problems because it also affected pay in some cases. For example, people would say that they got paid more for being on call, and should they include that, since it’s optional, etc.
Maybe something about extra pay for extra work that might cover overtime/on-call. This isn’t always available, but capturing this as an item like a bonus might help us understand how different companies view compensation. I’d certainly be interested in how many companies expect this with $0 extra compensation
Would love to see how WFH status asked (Since Pandemic outbreak, Permanent, etc.)
It’s tough to draw conclusions behind that, though, because some companies are working from home because they’re required by law, and they intend to change their employees to in-office as soon as possible. You’d have to ask a lot of followup questions to get a really clear picture.
Perhaps a few more choices in the dropdown could solve that issue..
In-Office (required)
WFH (required)
Hybrid (required)
Hybrid (optional)
Always been WFH (regardless of Pandemic)
Gerald – I hear that you want this option, and I need you to hear that the answer is no. Please reread what I’ve posted repeatedly in the comments here. Thanks for understanding.
OK, Brent… Your survey…
Understand that $$$ isn’t everything… Benefits, Lifestyle count….
Some of us would like to know the financial ramifications of WFH as that status generally confers the ability to live in lower cost housing markets…
Gerald, I need you to read my response really slowly and carefully.
It’s tough to draw conclusions behind that, though, because some companies are working from home because they’re required by law, and they intend to change their employees to in-office as soon as possible.
You would have to ask a lot of followup questions to get a really clear picture, like when their work from home is going to expire, and the reality is that a lot of us just don’t have the answers to those questions right now.
I’m a great example. For years, some of my clients have absolutely insisted that I show up at their offices, in person, for consulting engagements. Some of those clients changed that requirement altogether, permanently – but some of them have said that as soon as they can, they’re going to require me to be back in the office. They just don’t have a date on when that will be right now.
Gerald, I get that you want clarity and certainty in these times. I do too. I feel you. We just don’t have that clarity and certainty on work-from-home policies right now.
I appreciate your understanding. Further replies will not be productive.
How about a question related to the percentage of time you spend on SQL specific work. Not all of your subscribers are 100% Database people.
Well, the survey is specifically titled data professionals, and we already ask their job title. I’m not really aiming the survey at people who don’t work with databases.
Do you have to grace the office with your appearance or remote.
We’ve had 4 people leave in the last two months, leaving for work from home positions
It’s tough to draw conclusions behind that, though, because some companies are working from home because they’re required by law, and they intend to change their employees to in-office as soon as possible. You’d have to ask a lot of followup questions to get a really clear picture.
(I’ve copy/pasted this a few times since folks are asking essentially the same question.)
too funny, I even refreshed before I posted to make sure nobody asked that one.
I would like to know something like “How much of your time is remote work?” … I would like to know if there is a pay difference between the 100% remote, mixed remote and on-premise, or fully on-premise DBAs. Especially considering that recent surveys have indicated that a great number of people are considering changing jobs or quitting if they can’t continue to work remotely.
https://www.businessinsider.com/quit-job-flexible-remote-working-from-home-return-to-office-2021-6
It’s tough to draw conclusions behind that, though, because some companies are working from home because they’re required by law, and they intend to change their employees to in-office as soon as possible. You’d have to ask a lot of followup questions to get a really clear picture.
To my thinking, that makes this even more valuable to know. For example, I currently work in the public sector and they are considering going fully remote for IT work after the agency opens up to the public again. I’ve looked at working in the private sector, but if I wanted to keep working remotely will that mean I’m going to be looking at making less? Enough so that it’s not worth leaving the public sector? Right now there are lots of questions surrounding this and few answers. And it would be even more interesting to know how many are working remotely because they have to and the companies are embracing it, or planning on returning to on-premise work. In the future when the pandemic no longer applies, this question is going to be significantly less interesting.
I hear you. I sure wish I had those answers too! Wouldn’t that be awesome?
Unfortunately, most companies don’t have those answers yet either, and a salary survey won’t magically provide them either.
I had the same concern…
Brent disagrees but I think asking if you have ALWAYS been WFH (one of the answers in my list) IS a valid question as it generally separates a whole class of workers from the rest of us who are WFH on a temporary basis (or like you and possibly me – my cube has been taken away from me) or perhaps permanent.
Sorry to be a pain, Brent…
Brent isn’t wrong – it really is up in the air right now. I completely understand where he’s coming from. He would like to stick with hard data that doesn’t really change from year-to-year as it makes it significantly easier to follow trends over time.
But this year and next year are going to be an opportunity to study the remote work phenomena. Prior to now my agency was very unlikely to let you work more than a few days a week from home. Pandemic hits… and BAM now they are talking about fully remote, closing buildings as unneeded, and even hiring remote workers. That’s great for me, but if I was wanting to try to make more salary by working in the private sector the question I have is whether this is happening out there. You have companies like Salesforce paying workers to leave NY, other companies offering 10% pay cuts to work remotely full time, and then you have the classic Yahoo “now we are remote” and “now we aren’t” that happened a few years ago. Will that happen again? On what scale?
To be clear, I’m not saying that you (Brent) should include this in the survey but you did say that you were going to make us “work” at arguing why the information is valuable. But I totally understand why you don’t want it in -this- survey.
Maybe it’s worth a different survey later this year? Just thinking out loud I suppose…
Right, this simply, flat out, full stop, is NOT GOING IN THIS SURVEY. If folks want to do other surveys, they’re welcome to do it.
I would also suggest that you look at any other pandemic-related survey out there. There’s nothing unique to data professionals about this problem – the entire world is struggling with this right now.
• How many database servers does your team work with?
I would break this out into 2 questions, or if you only want Prod, then state that (We are almost 3-1 ratio of Dev to Prod, and I expect most others have a ratio as well):
How many Production database servers does your team work with?
How many Non-Production database servers does your team work with?
Jac – in my experience, development servers aren’t significantly less work, though. They tend to generate a lot of support requests and questions just like production servers do.
I’d like to second this. Development servers are sometimes a bigger pain because the developers don’t feel the need to treat them nicely. Sometimes they straight up do things that break them.
Not that I’m complaining. The years before I became a DBA, I did work in database development. There were times that I did things I didn’t know how to do or wasn’t sure would work in the development environment because it was the only way to figure it out. I know that I caused a little bit of extra work for our DBAs back then… but the point is, that’s why we have development environments.
Should you be asking about the number of servers or the number of instances? Also, what about the number of Databases? As our industry struggles with money, there is a significant increased consolidation on to servers, this increases the management requirements.
Something related to remote work arrangements in the wake of the pandemic. My current position has been reclassified as permanently remote and the recruiter emails that I have been getting in the past 6 months have notably shifted to the positions being 100% remote rather than needing to relocate. I would be interesting to see if over the coming years there is a split in salary demands for companies requiring in person vs remote employees. It would just take some time for that data to shake out. I would suspect that market forces will start to demand a higher salary if the company wants you in the office.
It’s tough to draw conclusions behind that, though, because some companies are working from home because they’re required by law, and they intend to change their employees to in-office as soon as possible. You’d have to ask a lot of followup questions to get a really clear picture.
(I’ve copy/pasted this a few times since folks are asking essentially the same question.)
cloud related question. Yes I know you commented earlier. BUT – Are you working with Amazon RDS? While RDS is supposed to be sql server, there are a lot of things that are not sql server. It’s Amazon’s version of SQL Server.
Yes, that’s in the list of databases folks have to choose from.
Hi Brent,
Re comments above, just to say that I am interested in the pay gap and I personally think that the gender question is valid (perhaps also consider ‘prefer not to say’ option).
I would also like to know if people believe that their current salary is:
Below Market Rate \
At Market Rate \
Above Market Rate.
Its all perception based but I think its useful to know what proportion of people are happy\not happy with their lot for where they are in their career and where they are located in the world.
PS thanks for the survey this is gold dust 🙂
Hmm, why measure their feelings when they can actually get the raw data? That’s the whole point of the salary survey, so that we’re working with data, not feelings.
I am kinda thinking that there are so many elements that make up any given data pro job and the salary offered for it.
It is tough to squeeze all of those elements, technologies, other relevant skillsets, into a single survey and do it justice in terms of salary – although I think the ones you have are great.
I do know when I compare myself/ my skillsets / my experience to the data-related vacancies in the job market around here, whether I think my salary is at or not at the rate it should be, given I know of the current factors driving or suppressing demand locally / nationally, and the jobs being advertised.
I am thinking it would be interesting to know whether people generally believe that they being properly compensated, or not, having taken all of those elements into account.
I can get why you want to go pure hard stats though.
OOps. I can see the Excel already has a Prefer Not To Say option = seems good to me!
I think it would be really interesting to include a column for Employment Sector. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a relatively short list of the major sectors that could be used here:
https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm#:~:text=Table%202.1%20Employment%20by%20major%20industry%20sector%28Employment%20in,%20%20-81.7%20%2011%20more%20rows%20
I’m a dope and completely missed the existing column. That said, having it a little more detail there would be interesting, like Healthcare vs Financial, etc…
Do you like your job?
Oh that’s really interesting. What actions might you take based on the results in your own career? What results from the survey might prompt a change in your own behavior? (Just curious what you’re going to do with the data.)
I think it’s the second most important factor in changing jobs, after salary. Using your current job survey, people can look at the numbers and be confident they could make, for example, an extra $12,000 at their next job.
But what are their chances of liking their next job? I feel like that’s an important piece of the equation. For example, if there’s a 33% chance that I won’t like my next job, I may want to make an extra 16k to risk the move.
Interesting. So just to make it clear, you’re saying that because someone else is happy in a job, you would be happy in that same job?
And similarly, if someone is unhappy in a job, you’re saying you would be unhappy in that same job?
Probably? I think? It’s more about the chance of being happy in your new job affecting your decision to move. I suspect that the higher paid jobs are also more likely to be the jobs where people are happier, based on the theorey that companies that pay more for their data personel value their data more highly.
For example if I wanted 12k to move to another job with the same chance (or an unquantified chance) of being happy, I might only want 10k if there’s a higher chance of liking my job.
@James, there are 1000 questions that I would like to add but they are not related to salary. I think the survey is OK as it is.
@Brent, next time try to force users to stick with the fields and datatype so we can have better data. Many columns are unusable. Some salary only have 2 digits and some are paid over a million… is that you, Brent? 🙂
Good news! We do have data validation this time around! I do know a data professional who pulled down over a million this year, but they did have performance bonuses based on how their company was doing.
Sorry if I missed this in another comment, but for zip/postal code. Should this be work zip or home zip? I live in New Hampshire but my company is in California.
The place where you work.
If you’re working from New Hampshire, you would put in your New Hampshire zip code.
Thanks! NH it is.
Looking at the results, it reinforces my earlier career decision to focus on Contract work vs Full Time Employment.
Quite the pay disparity. I understand that there is a lot more to consider than just pay (benefits, training, etc) but going just on averages, there is a large gap. I fell into contract work years ago because the employer had me working 50-60 hours per week, and I can do basic math.
That’s the biggest abuse when being paid a salary vs. hourly pay. My biggest takeaway from contract work is that the pay per hour can be significantly higher. You just don’t have the guarantee of full-time employment that working a “regular job” provides, you have to find every job you work. However I know people that make 4-5x more dollars per hour while working significantly less hours over a whole year by bidding on work for big companies and government agencies.
Can you drink on the job? Do you need to wear pants?
Only asking the important questions.
Josh – you had my curiosity, but now you have my attention.
How about asking how many DBA jobs they have?
Ghino – I think you’re asking about past career history, and we cover that in a few questions.
Has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your salary? This only applies where the change is related to the pandemic. Not just because you got a raise like you always do.
1) My salary increased
2) My salary stayed the same
3) My salary decreased
I think this could be important as you look at the data year over year to see what happened during this timeframe. How did the pandemic impact Data professionals?
Hey Brent, how about a question about total comp?
I’m in govt, and, at least in my locale, we tend to get average salaries and fairly high retirement matches and HSA contributions. In my case those, direct contributions from my employer add up to a ~10% of my gross salary. Without info on total comp, I find it somewhat difficult to compare myself to others in private companies.
In the same vein, PTO days would also ready help me gauge where I stand among FTE folks. E.g. these days I get a bit over 3 weeks/sick + 6 weeks/vacation, at the lowest seniority-based PTO tier. It’s a fairly significant amount of time to me. In past jobs I compensated for paltry PTO with unpaid days, so a comparison along those lines would be very helpful to me.
Thanks for considering my thoughts!!
Greg – the thing is, most people just don’t know their total comp. They don’t have access to things like the true cost of their health insurance, for example.
has 2021 dollar inflation/prices increase been reflected in your salary
Additional question ideas:
1) Is your company hiring (overall, vs in the DBA role)?
2) Do you receive training allowance?
Michael – oh that’s interesting. The thing is, this is a data professional survey, so it’s beyond just DBAs, and I can pretty well guarantee most companies are hiring for data roles right now.
how about expanding the population of the largest city w/in 20 miles to be 45 or 50? Even in Seattle I could leave 30miles away, and still work there. What about adding something like are you the ONLY dba, or is there a team? I would think that might impact salary? It seems that I’ve been encountering a lot of offers where the ‘dev team’ has been the dba and now they feel they need a ‘real’ dba.
Teknogrl – you’re absolutely right? I think 50 makes sense, will change that.
Would this be something that could be gathered automatically? If people are providing a zip code, then we could look up the population of that zip code https://worldpopulationreview.com/zips and infer the size of the market from there?
A lot of folks don’t put in their zip code because they’re worried about being identified personally in the survey.
I think a key part of salary comparisons are the things you can’t necessarily assign a monetary value too. Maybe just a question or 2 regarding benefits and time commitment? This will cover all the responses asking for a remote work question…even if it’s in flux, I imagine companies with great benefits to begin with also offer flex schedules.
Some would gladly take a pay cut for more time with their family, better health and retirement plans, free beer 😉 etc
Can you elaborate on the specific questions you want to add, and the format of the answer? The more specific you can be, the better. Thanks!
It’s tough cause benefits can vary widely at companies and you don’t want to add in 2 dozen more questions – at the same time, like you said, this should be fact based not opinion based. That being said, I think a compromise for a few sentiment based questions would help with analysis:
-Rate career growth opportunity 1-5
-Rate time commitment 1-5
-Rate employee perks/benefits 1-5
-Rate happiness/job satisfaction 1-5
I think you’d be the expert on which would work, and what make sense in this area, but again it’d be nice to know: Does someone have a low salary because they they are satisfied with every other job aspect? Does someone have a high salary because they work twice as much as that other person and have no PTO?
Mike – I really like this a lot! I don’t want to add a bunch of questions, but how about this:
“How satisfied are you with your other benefits including training, health insurance, vacation time, and leave time?”
That sounds great to me!
I want to know how much their work style, skill set, team size ,etc changed from pre-Covid to post-Covid
Those are great questions, but they would be a grand, sweeping set of questions best done in another survey that targets all IT professionals, not a data professional salary survey.
That’s true, I’m just curious and wanted to know how data professionals are dealing with such sudden changes to both work style and amalgamation of different teams ( like I got merged to devops) out of blue. (Not that I’m complaining.)
Do you receive extra compensation for on-call time?
– If yes, what is the dollar amount per week?
– If you receive comp time in lieu of on-call pay, what is the formula (e.g., 1 to 1, 1.5 to 1)?
Daryl – ooo, that’s an interesting question. I have a hunch that the majority of data professionals just have to suck it up and be on call, that it’s built into their salary, but let’s find out. Rather than adding this to the salary survey, I started with a simple Twitter poll: https://twitter.com/BrentO/status/1443203549853147141
Are you happy with your work?
Average working hours per week?
Vacation days per year?
Similar to Mike’s comment, one thing that I consider compensation is the benefit value of things I might get, but the company won’t provide in dollars. For example, training/conference/classes. If my company provides me the opportunity to take one of Brent’s classes, that’s a $3k value. Or I get to go to SQL Bits, for $2000 a year. That’s compensation, though it’s not something paid. It’s also not only not guaranteed, it’s something that I might have to work to get, but it is value I get back from an employer.
As a question, perhaps: What is the dollar value of training, travel, classes, and conferences that your company paid for you to attend?
Steve – yeah, I thought about asking, “How satisfied are you with your other benefits including training, health insurance, vacation time, and leave time?” as a way to cover a lot of ground in just a few questions. That would also help cover if someone gets access to a ton of training even though they don’t have a budget. For example, I know a consulting company where the senior folks constantly do lunch & learns with the rest of the team, and everybody has access to training videos like Pluralsight.
Regarding salary – from a Danish perspective it is unclear if it includes thing such as employer paid pension (which could anywhere from 1-20% to the salary).
A question of how may hours of work per week this base salary cover, would also be interesting. Does a salary of 100X cover 20, 40 or 50 hours per week? It could be covered by changing the questions to “total salary paid last year” and “total number of hours worked”. This would make number comparable.
Jakob – if the job ad would include the amount, then you would probably include it in the survey.
If the job ad wouldn’t include the number, then you would not.
Considering the times we live in – please add questions related to time off for health reasons – Do you get reasonable time off with pay if you are sick? The state of NC mandates every employer give 3 weeks sick time if diagnosed with covid, but that’s not the case everywhere. Also I personally would consider good health insurance a significant part of compensation, although not sure how you’d word it and may not apply globally.
Mala – yeah, this is also in flux so much right now with the pandemic, and with every state & country treating things a little differently. I don’t know how I’d even begin to craft a question about health insurance benefits, because to really understand someone’s health insurance benefits, you’d wanna ask things like deductibles and max out of pocket costs.
I thought about asking, “How satisfied are you with your other benefits including training, health insurance, vacation time, and leave time?” as a way to cover a lot of ground in just a few questions.
This is a great initiative, Brent. I look forward to seeing the outcome. How about a question on certification? I’d be interested in seeing if there is a co-relation between that and pay.
David – thanks! We did ask the certification question in the past: https://ozar.me/2017/01/early-thoughts-about-the-2017-data-professional-salary-survey-results/
I think if you are going to ask the Postal Code question (even if its optional), you need to know if the person works remote or not (or at least if it is the same area as the people who make salary decisions). I work for a remote company (they went 100% remote 6 months before the pandemic…they will remain remote after it…they are a remote company). My postal code is irrelevant/misleading because I live in the DFW area…the company I work for is in Atlanta.
Deb – this year, it’s fairly safe to assume that most of us worked remotely for most of the year.
If you are senior or experienced, I would ask whether there is mentorship requirement. In my experience senior DBAs can often be expected to devote significant time and effort into ‘coaching up’ junior members of the team, acting not only as a source of technical help regarding that company’s applications but also as a sounding board. It may not be a explicitly described as a job requirement, yet shows up during the annual review.
I would also ask if there is any communications with customers, as that is not something everybody can do well and there should a a compensation premium for that.
Terry – yeah, we don’t really get into soft skills in this survey. We do ask “Do you manage other staff,” but that’s as granular as we’ve gotten.
If you want to analyze the mentoring angle, I’d start by looking at the question about the number of other people on your team who do the same job. Based on a quick look, I think the sample size is going to drop so much that there won’t be much useful information in there about mentoring other staff.
About the communications with customers – that gets a little tricky because some shops treat their data professionals as internal consultants. For example, when I was a DBA, I basically saw my company’s developers, sysadmins, and stakeholders as my customers: it was my job to figure out how to make them happy, and they paid me with my salary. 😀
Thanks, Brent – point taken.
I’m mentioning the following not to argue my case further but strictly as an FYI, specifically for health insurance costs. Even if an employer does not list their portion of the health insurance premium in the employer paid benefits portion of one’s pay stub, this information will be available on COBRA documents. Granted, this only works if you have an easy way of reviewing the exact COBRA conditions, like on an internal site/wiki/etc.
Right, but that’s a fairly US-specific viewpoint, and this is a global survey.
I’d be curious to see something about largest database size. Really large databases come with different challenges, and I’m curious if there is a salary correlation. (There probably should be!)
Yeah, there are so many things that determine job complexity: database size, database quantity, server quantity, regulatory requirements, uptime goals, whether the databases are home-built versus third party apps, I could go on and on. Just trying to ask all of those would make the survey 30 questions long though. 😉
Hi Brent, I read all the comments and I am so impressed by your dedication to Data Professional community. You are not getting paid for this work and doing this voluntary work to give back to the community. I really appreciate your hard work in preparing and implementing this survey. I am sure community will hugely benefit from the result as it had in the past.
Aww, thanks ma’am! I appreciate the kind words!
What about the other elements, not just salary? Here in NZ, its common to get health care and death in service benefits [a multiple of your salary paid out on you passing], also not everyone works 40 hours weeks, so could that be included?
The thing is, most people just don’t know their total comp. They don’t have access to things like the true cost of their health or life insurance, for example.
If you don’t work full time, a salary survey isn’t really a good fit.
Hi Brent, thanx for your efforts!
I read not all comments, but searched for the number of databases, while the work differs for troubleshooting on engine or query behalfs.
By the way, thanx for 1st-Responder-Kit, it’s an important part of our analyzing routine!
You’re welcome. Yeah, check the comments, that’s been discussed.
will a question about extra freelancing as database person make sense?