Infrastructure IT Salaries: Flat & Happy

If you're satisfied to have a stable job with benefits and a stable paycheck, then you're in the majority. Although we found salaries were essentially flat for both networking and datacenter professionals, employees in these fields share common positive attitudes about IT as a career path. 

We surveyed more than 11,000 IT pros this spring in InformationWeek's 2014 US IT Salary Survey. Of those respondents, 953 identified themselves as networking and datacenter management staff or managers. Scott M. Fulton III further analyzed the results in 2014 US IT Salary Survey: Networking.

Median total compensation for staff was $88,000 which was a $3,000 increase when compared to 2013. Management positions pulled in $104,000, just $1,000 more than the previous year.

IT professionals working in the datacenter made slightly more than their networking coworkers, at $90,000 to $87,000 for staff. When it came to managers the difference was greater, with total median compensation for datacenter management at $110,000, compared to $100,000 for networking.

Despite relatively little growth in salaries from year to year, 61% of staff members and 65% of management said they were either "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with all aspects of their jobs. And when asked what mattered most about their jobs, the most popular response, chosen by 48% of employees, was "job and company stability." The next most popular response was "benefits," followed by "base pay." Practical matters are clearly the priority here.

That's not to say that everyone is happy. In this year's survey, women in datacenter and networking management positions saw a drastic gender gap, earning $21,000 less per annum in base salary than their male counterparts. The news was not as bad for female staff members in our survey, for whom the pay gap for base salaries shrank to $4,000 per year, down from $10,000 last year. We'll delve into this more in a future story.

How do you feel about your salary and its potential for growth? Is it commensurate with our survey findings? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.