Compensation and other benefits are on the rise for Pittsburgh-area tech workers who are seeking employment as hiring demands continue to climb across the industry and the overall labor market more broadly.
These findings and others come from a new 160-page report released by the Pittsburgh Technology Council, a regional trade organization, which benchmarked more than 110 key tech-related jobs across the 35 technology companies that participated in the survey. PTC partnered with Compensation Consulting Consortium LLC (3C) to produce the survey and its subsequent report.
It's the first time in 10 years that PTC has released its Western Pennsylvania Annual Compensation and Benefits Survey, which includes metrics like those relating to base salary and incentive packages as well as general pay administration policies and benefit program design features, among others.
In fact, volatility in compensation rates proved so immense that during the survey's information-gathering period, pay for regional senior software engineers increased by 10.5% alone.
And while the survey only analyzed these findings as they related to companies with local operations, Brian Kennedy, senior vice president of operations and government affairs at PTC, said remote work offerings from companies that are based on the West and East Coasts — which in turn are also offering respective coastal-based salaries — is just one of several reasons that local job seekers are seeing such gains as it relates to compensation and benefits.
"The report will attest to that because that's what's happening," Kennedy said. "You have West Coast companies offering West Coast wages to Pittsburgh employees and while Pittsburgh's technology wages have been growing at some of the fastest paces in the country over the past 10 years, they haven't kept up with coastal wages that you earn in say New York or California, but now they're increasingly having to because you have people who can work for those companies and not have to leave Pittsburgh. It's really wonderful for job seekers."
Of course, other factors are also at play, Kennedy said. While the "flattening" of the global landscape as a result of remote work is driving up wages because people can accept offers in other parts of the country, long-term this could result in more workers coming to Pittsburgh for a more affordable lifestyle, he said. But in the more short-term, Kennedy said these gains will likely continue to result in the pushing of inflationary trends and wages as they relate to the tech workforce.
"It's a huge challenge," Kennedy said. "The compensation survey is just like understanding the battleground, it's giving you data, it's giving you market intelligence so that you can understand the field in which you're competing. But it's changing so quickly right now."
Per a summary of the survey's findings, PTC found that development operations engineers, typically those who rank between Level 3 and Senior Level pay structures, have the highest local nonmanagement median salary at $140,400 annually. Rounding out the top five highest local median salaries are those that range from $120,000 to $133,000 and include the following roles, sorted alphabetically as PTC did not disclose specific amounts in its survey summary: research scientist, senior technical product manager, software architect and systems/electronics engineer III (senior level).
The report also found that hiring trends are not slowing down either as 47% of respondents reported increases in their full-time employee headcount last year while only 12% reported a decrease over the same time period. Looking ahead, 44% claimed they plan to continue adding to their total workforce count in 2022 while just 3% said they plan to reduce staffing levels.
As for where that work occurred, 82% of respondents said they used a hybrid approach of remote and office work settings in 2021. For 2022, about 12% of respondents said they would decrease their use of remote work arrangements whereas 35% said they would increase their remote work offerings.
Other tidbits of the report shared by Kennedy include the figure that 62% of respondents said they are offering tuition reimbursement or assistance to some employees, with 24% reporting that they offer the same perks to their entire workforce.
The survey also asked about signing bonuses, which found that 38% of participants reported offering these perks with a median of $5,000 for exempt staff and a median $6,250 for managerial roles.
"I've never heard of that actually before," Kennedy said about the signing bonus figures for Pittsburgh-based tech jobs. "Certainly, we're hearing people talk about that."
PTC will host an event titled "Winning Talent Together: Compensation Strategies" on March 17 to explore the report and share additional insights from it in more detail.
