If you’re an employer or recruiter, it’s helpful to know the salary baseline for your particular industry. The latest edition of the Dice Salary Survey suggests that the banking/financial/insurance industries pay their tech pros an average of $103,860—top of the list of top-paying industries. At second is the utilities/energy industry, which pays an average of $103,492. Other industries that paid their tech pros a similarly handsome amount included aerospace & defense ($99,992), professional services ($98,506), computer software ($98,455), and computer hardware ($97,569). (Aerospace & defense’s placement on this list is certainly no surprise, given the number of well-monetized companies in the space, not to mention the federal government.) Here’s a deeper breakdown of industries that pay average salaries in the $90,000-$99,000 range: 
According to the Salary Survey, the average tech salary in the U.S. stands at $92,081. Tech pros with highly specialized skillsets in “hot” sectors such as storage, networking, and mobile technology can expect to earn much more, especially in tech hubs such as San Francisco where the competition for top talent is fierce. The highest-paid skills and platforms included SAP HANA, MapReduce, Cloud Foundry, Hbase, Omnigraffle, and Cassandra. Whatever the city or state, though, there’s always a pressing need for analysts, developers, and other tech professionals who really know their stuff and can help build out next-generation systems. That creates added pressure on employers and recruiters to make the right decisions about job candidates, and hire the best ones before others do. Depending on the industry and the job, a skilled hire might end up costing quite a bit of money—and that’s before you add in perks such as stock options and the ability to work remotely. That demand for tech pros—coupled with the need to get hiring right—might even persuade some companies to elevate their candidate experience, or hunt for technical talent in overlooked places. Good luck!
