Companies are still searching for IT workers and are willing to pay top dollar as skills shortages and high labour demand continue to push salaries up.

Just over three-quarters (76 per cent) of Australian employers have offered higher salaries than planned in order to find and retain tech talent, according to the latest salary guide from recruitment company Hays.

Nick Deligiannis, managing director of Hays Australia, said workers were showing a high intention to move jobs in a market where the next big salary packet could be just over the horizon.

“[This] suggests that staff engagement, offering purposeful work and training managers to develop stronger relationships with their teams could help retain employees,” he said.

“Fuelled by a revision of what’s important to them, flexible work, a lack of movement during the uncertainty of COVID-19 and years of salary stability, employees are reconsidering what they want from work.”

Given a whopping 91 per cent of employers said they are facing a skills shortage – coupled with a soaring cost of living – it’s no surprise that Australian IT workers can easily find salaries in the mid six-figures.

A senior .NET/Java developer in Sydney, for example, can expect a salary between $120,000 and $170,000 a year before superannuation.

A network admin in Melbourne is looking at an average of around $130,000 per year, roughly the same as can be expected by a business analyst in one of Australia’s biggest cities.

The role of business analyst was identified by Hays as the country’s most needed within the technology category, just ahead of cloud engineers ($160,000 in Sydney), full stack developers ($160,000 in Canberra), and cyber security analysts ($145,000 in Melbourne).

Massive salaries in the US

Overseas, the raw salary numbers show just how much money US workers at big tech companies can rake in.

The Wall Street Journal collated the median salary of the S&P 500 companies from 2021 and, surprise, surprise – big tech is right at the top of the list.

Workers at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, had a median compensation of around $422,000 last year (US$295,884).

Facebook came in second with an annual median average of $418,000 ($292,785) for workers.

Figures from salary data aggregator site levels.fyi provide a breakdown of these salaries – which include generous stock offerings – and how they compare with Australian tech companies.

An entry level software engineer at Google, for example, is looking at an average of around $271,000 (US$190,000) a year, including bonus and stock offerings.

As Googlers climb up the ranks, according to levels.fyi data, the more they are compensated with company stock that pushes their pay packets up.

Principal engineers at Google are looking at a salary package of around $1.5 million ($US1.05 million) – but more than half of that total is provided by yearly stock vesting.

A principal engineer at Atlassian, for sake of comparison, can see a salary of around $545,000 (US$382,000) – only marginally higher than a senior software engineer at Google – because of less stock being offered.