Average Tech Pay in Silicon Valley Tops $100,000

Silicon Valley technology workers’ average salary rose to more than $100,000 for the first time since the Dice salary survey began 10 years ago, according to Dice Holdings Inc. Tech workers in the Silicon Valley reported their average annual wage rose to $104,195 in 2011, up five percent from the previous year, according to the survey

For the U.S. as a whole, technology workers reported their average annual wage rose to $81,327 in 2011 from $79,384 in 2010, according to the Dice survey. The average bonus rose to $8,769 in 2011, up 8 percent from the previous year. Thirty-two percent of tech workers reported receiving bonuses in 2011, up from 29 percent in 2010.

Austin, Texas, experienced the largest year-over-year jump in average tech wage, up 13 percent to $89,419. It was followed by Portland, Ore., with a 12 percent to $82,055 and Houston with a 7.0 percent increase to $89,307.

Most of the wage increases were by professionals with 11 or more years of experience, according to Dice. Skills that commanded average salaries of $100,000 or more per year included:

• ABAP — Advanced Business Application programming — $109,157
• SOA — Service Oriented Architecture — $108,210
• ETL — Extract Transform and Load — $106,521
• WebLogic — $103,702
• JDBC — Java Database Connectivity — $102,630
• UML — Unified Modeling Language — $102,579
• JBoss — $102,184
• WebSphere — $100,348
• The Dice salary survey was administered online with 18,325 employed technology professionals responding between Sept. 19 and Nov. 21, 2011.

Dice operates career websites for information technology, engineering, financial services and other professionals.