Benefits and Job Perks
What Benefits Are Important to Tech Professionals?
The benefits that tech professionals value most haven’t changed significantly year over year, but unfortunately, neither have the gaps between what you want and what you’re getting from your organizations. In addition to a level of dissatisfaction with salaries and merit increases, this could be another factor causing tech professionals like you to look at other organizations; our Tech Sentiment Report showed that 52% of tech professionals are likely to change employers within the next year.
The most important thing you can do when it comes to reviewing specific benefits is to weigh the importance of the benefit against the larger picture of what an organization offers you. It’s incredibly hard to find the perfect situation with the right culture, right kind of work, great coworkers and all of the benefits you want (sounds wonderful, though!). A more likely scenario is that you end up with some of the good and some of the not-so-good. Depending on how you weigh the benefits you have vs. what you want and need, you may choose to push your current organization on offering different things vs. shifting to an entirely new situation.
Benefits That Are Important to Tech Professionals
The Benefit Gap
The Benefits Employees Have vs. Those They Find Important
The three key benefits showing the largest gaps between importance to technology professionals and what you’re currently receiving are work-from-home stipends, training and education, and stock programs. You identified all of these as the top gaps last year, and in each case, the gap widened between 2021 and 2022: WFH stipend (from 24% to 35%), training and education (from 24% to 26%) and stock programs (from 22% to 28%).
Other areas where the expectation gap widened included gym/fitness center reimbursement (42% consider it important vs. 21% who receive it) and commuter reimbursement (37% find it important vs. only 14% who receive it). While progress has been made, gaps still exist in paid sick days (75% find it important vs. 66% who receive it), remote schedule options (76% find important vs. 70% who receive it) and flexible schedule (74% find important vs. 60% who receive it).
Another data-supported trend is tech professionals’ continued gravitation toward actions and choices that support healthy work-life balance. This year, respondents increased the level of importance they place on wellness programs (including behavioral and mental health) to 58% (from 49% in 2021). This focus on wellbeing is not new, but the importance placed on it in the context of employers creating a healthy environment and a culture supportive of optimized work-life balance is gaining traction. In the next section, you’ll see that data on the amount of vacation days tech professionals plan to use also supports this shift in professionals’ minds about how employers can help them make choices — in a work context and in their personal lives.
In good news for tech professionals overall, organizations were able to close gaps in critical areas in 2022. Most notably, the gap between importance and receipt for paid vacation days fell from 7% to 3%, and the gap for maternity/paternity leave dropped from 8% to 4% (now, 46% who consider it important, and 42% are receiving the benefit).
Vacation
The number of paid vacation days available to tech professionals didn’t change very much between 2021 and 2022. While “unlimited vacation time” has attracted quite a bit of buzz as a perk, only 10% of tech professionals currently have that option. Far more have anywhere between one to five weeks they can take off. Meanwhile, 14% have no vacation days, which could reflect respondents’ status as contractors or gig workers.
No matter how much time they’re allotted, some 45% of tech professionals said they took it all (up significantly from 39% who responded this way in 2021), while 27% took more than half, but not quite all. Only 16% took less than half, and 12% were unsure. It’s clear that tech professionals see their vacation time as an integral part of their work-life balance, and that after the trials and tribulations of the past few years, they’re more than happy to use every hour their employers give them.
How much vacation is available to you?
How much vacation do you plan to take this year?
Bonuses
Fewer technology professionals received a bonus in 2022 (38%) compared to 2021 (41%). However, those bonuses were larger on average, rising year over year from $12,665 to $13,794. That aligns with the broader macroeconomic trends we’ve seen throughout 2022: while organizations may have tightened budgets in the face of economic uncertainty, leading many to curtail bonuses, others are paying larger bonuses in order to attract and retain top talent.
For organizations that depend on highly specialized tech talent to grow and survive, the pressure to continue paying bonuses is enormous. Those tech professionals with skills in “hot” arenas such as cloud architecture and machine learning can use that simple fact when negotiating over the size of that bonus (or for a bonus at all, if a company is trying to cut back).
It’s also important to note that, for 55% of tech professionals, bonuses make up the majority of their yearly income above their base pay; overtime (16%), stock options (13%), commissions (7%) tend to drive far less. It’s little wonder bonuses are a key factor in where many tech professionals choose to work.