2018 Data Professional Salary Survey: Early Results Thoughts

The 2018 Data Professional Salary Survey is open, and you can analyze the results as they’re coming in. As of this writing, we’ve just crossed 1,000 results (last year we ended up with around 3,000).

Based on your feedback, I made a few tweaks to the questions and answers. I’m going to focus on a quick check of how those tweaks are doing.

We split “DBA” into a few jobs.

Last year, 52% of the responders identified as DBAs, so this year we broke that up into 3 titles. Responses so far:

• DBA (Development Focus – tunes queries, indexes, does deployments) – 7%
• DBA (General – splits time evenly between writing & tuning queries AND building & troubleshooting servers) – 32%
• DBA (Production Focus – build & troubleshoot servers, HA/DR) – 21%

That lines up with my experience with clients: it’s really hard to find experienced development DBAs, let alone ones with devops or SRE experience.

Salaries reflect that, too. In the US, all 3 of these jobs average 7 years of experience, but the dev DBA average salary is higher (caveats about using average instead of median apply, but on the road I’m working with Excel at the moment):

• DBA Dev – avg $113k
• DBA General – avg $107k
• DBA Production – avg $104k

We added gender.

So far, 10% of the responses identify as female. Hopefully that means we’ll get a big enough final sample to make it meaningful for folks who want to analyze the data by gender.

In the early ~1000-response cut I’m working with, there are 579 US males, 83 US females, and 58 of those are DBAs. I only did a quick check of the numbers, and I’m by no means a data analyst, but I think there’s going to be some interesting community discussions around the data.

We added a career planning question.

The results are neat! In this early cut, all jobs worldwide:

• 7% plan to change both employers and roles
• 11% plan to stay with the same employer, but change roles
• 11% plan to stay with the same role, but change employers
• 65% plan to stay with the same employer, same role
• And the rest are playing it close to the vest

But focus it on just US DBAs, and 73% plan to stay with the same employer, same role. Only 14% (not 18%) plan to change roles. (Developers, on the other hand? Only 61% of them wanna stay in the same role, same employer.)

It’ll be fun to watch folks slice & dice that to figure out if there are meaningful trends here.

Head on over to take the survey, and set up your analysis on the raw data format. As with last year, after the final numbers are in, I’ll publish a roundup of the community analysis posts at BrentOzar.com. It’s a nice way to get a traffic boost and get the word out that you’re good with them there numbers.