marketing technology that doesn’t have a large professional pool get 30 to 40 percent premiums over what they might have been worth a few years ago,” he says.
The same may hold true, Kirven says, for IT professionals with deep experience working with SAP, Oracle, and other legacy enterprise resource planning systems. “People have invested in some cases up $500 million into these architectures and they’re not about to abandon them any time soon,” he says.
Demand, Kirven says, seems to exceed the supply of technology professionals in the United States. He says this IT talent gap may continue to grow across country even as universities race to produce computer science talent to address the rising number of tech job openings. “Every year we are getting ourselves deeper and deeper in this hole,” he says. Kirven does not see that trend changing unless massive reforms are adopted on H-1B immigration laws or there is a large-scale economic downturn that trims down job vacancies.
Hiring levels in certain tech hubs continue to hold steady, he says, while other cities are blooming with new activity. San Francisco remains a highly competitive place for technology talent. “New York is second to that because there’s so much industry here and you’re always competing for resources against Wall Street,” Kirven says.
When it comes to hiring tech talent though, he says, the deep pockets of the financial sector must also contend with the little guys who are backed by funding. Kirven says nowadays venture-backed startup equity is flowing into such cities as Philadelphia, Fort Lauderdale, and Austin. “We’re seeing some of biggest [placement] activity in our Denver office,” he says.
Companies are relocating large data centers to cities such as Denver, Kirven says, because of the lower costs there combined with a higher quality of life. Venture capitalists are also looking to invest in cities where they can vie for resources, he says, away from the fierce competition in San Francisco and New York.
“If you look at the Boulder-Denver tech center, it didn’t exist seven years ago,” he says. “Now it’s a market unto itself and probably the fifth in the country when you look at venture-backed startup money.” As technology gets less expensive and easier to deploy in new markets, Kirven says, it also lowers the barrier to entry for startups to surface in other cities.
While all that adds up to skyrocketing salaries for many IT worker, some did not did not see big jumps, Kirven says. The compensation for people working with older programming languages such as Java rose, he says, but not as rapidly in the past. “Many companies are not building large custom Java applications the way they were ten years ago,” he says.
As new generations of IT staff looks to other programming languages, though, he believes tech pros already versed in Java will continue to see demand. “If you’re Goldman Sachs and you have a large Java application within your IT department, that’s not going away for 20 years” he says.
Looking to the future, Mondo expects salaries for HTML5 developers to rise in 2014 from $97,000 to $135,000 because of ongoing needs from marketing departments. “A lot of them are building their own internal staffs to deliver creative [content] to the market,” he says. Kirven also believes talent versed in user experience development will be aggressively sought after as well. “You can’t find enough people who do user experience,” he says.
