Several recent articles have discussed surveys comparing Boston’s technology industry and Silicon Valley’s technology industry. Naturally, these articles tend to highlight the positives of the hometown of the author’s demographic, while downplaying the negatives. It is very rare, though, for any survey to actually be entirely one-sided. (Image courtesy: http://bit.ly/9U5fqN)A recent survey of 1,600 workers conducted by Glassdoor Inc. has shown that there is a $17,000 pay gap between first-year, information technology (IT) workers in Boston as compared to their counterparts in Silicon Valley. Dice Holdings Inc. supported Glassdoor’s claims, releasing that the average salary of first-year, tech-industry workers in Boston was $85,121 last year, or fifth in the nation, behind Seattle, New York, Washington D.C., and the national average. Silicon Valley first-year, tech-workers were the highest paid, receiving an average salary of $96,299 last year.
“Specifically, what we’re seeing in Baltimore/Washington is the
impact of government conditions,” Tom Silver, Dice’s senior vice president for North America, said. “The IT workers that do work for the government--particularly those that may have some security clearance--the demand for those positions has just not stopped.” (Image courtesy: http://www.dice.com)Silicon Valley’s outlook may not be as promising, though. Rebecca Loveland, a research manager at the UMass Donahue Institute, believes the area has exhausted its local talent pool as well as physical space for companies to grow. For these reasons, Silicon Valley companies are currently “looking to other regions of the country to expand,” Donahue explained.
In their surveys,
Glassdoor and Dice do not consider the cost of living. Portland, Oregon’s “Sperling’s BestPlaces” named Boston one of the cheapest “top-tech towns” to live in. When taking this fact into consideration, it begins to make more sense that the city pays its first-year, IT workers less than other locations. (Image courtesy: http://bit.ly/acuuS1)Moreover, studies of MIT graduates have revealed that the main factors former students used to find their first jobs were “subject matter,” “creativity,” and “challenge,” not salary. MIT’s surveys also showed that the majority of the school’s graduates ultimately filled local job openings.
It seems that Silicon Valley does pay more for first-year, IT workers than Boston, but it’s also more expensive to live there and the ability to expand in the region is decreasing. So, again, there are two sides to every survey. Either way, if future workers are not choosing jobs based on salaries anyways, perhaps a more relevant survey would examine how jobs in various regions rank in regards to desired subject matter, level of creativity, and challenge.
[Sources: http://bit.ly/dvnzpw, http://bit.ly/aNZfMY]
