This is the 8th year now that we’ve been running our annual Data Professional Salary Survey, and I was really curious to see what the results would hold this year. How would inflation and layoffs impact the database world? Download the raw data here and slice & dice it to see what’s important to you. Here’s what I found.
First, without filtering the data at all, salaries are up, but response counts continue to drop:
If we filter for just United States folks whose primary database is SQL Server or Azure SQL DB, the salary numbers are higher, and are still continuing to rise:
Because this blog’s primary readership is SQL Server folks, I wouldn’t use the survey to draw conclusions about any other platform. The number of responses for other platforms is really low:
So with that in mind, for the rest of this post, I’m going to focus on only SQL Server & Azure SQL DB folks. What are your career plans for 2024?
Most respondents intend to stay in the same employer, in the same role. Folks who are planning to make a change also happen to be getting paid less – and that’s probably not a coincidence, heh. If you’re thinking about changing roles, you’re probably interested in who’s bringing home the cheddar:
Normally I wouldn’t draw conclusions from just 4 respondents, but I think it’s safe to say that data scientists are in such high demand that they command higher pay. (However, it’s also harder to get a data scientist job than most of the rest of the jobs in this list.)
Another way to make more money is to go independent:
This marks the first year of the survey where female pay is actually higher than male! The response rate is pretty skewed, but it always has been:
Download the raw data here, and hope this data is useful to you when you have salary and career planning discussions with your manager. Here’s to you getting another raise in 2024!