Spartan Daily

Silicon Valley's average income surpasses $100k; jobs available for those who specialize

Silicon Valley is the technology hub of not only of the country, but also the entire world, with tech experts coming from all over to live and work here, hoping to become the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or create the next Google or eBay.

On Feb. 9, Joint Venture held its annual State of the Valley conference, which is a kind of "town meeting" for the area, with representatives of all the major businesses in the area.

This year's event was hosted by Russel Hancock, president and Chief Executive Officer of Joint Venture

"The Median income is $86,000 with half of the people in the valley making more than $86,000 and half making less, so that's where the break is," Hancock said.

The per capita income is increasingly volatile in the valley, and averages to about $66,000, according to Joint Venture.

"Tech workers are the driving force of our economy — no question about it. But people in that sector in the economy are less than a third of the Silicon Valley workforce," Hancock said. "The rest are doing what you would find people doing in any American region. So yes, we're very tech heavy. There's no place in the world that has as much tech as us, but it's not the majority of our workforce.

Biology major Anthony Dukes is a freshman at SJSU and said he plans to go medical school after graduating.

"The competition in the area is pretty tough but there are quite a few bio-tech jobs and bioengineering jobs around, so I think my options are open," Dukes said. "With a graduate degree, I think I'll be pretty comparable to an engineering degree, (so) it will take more time and I'll make similar pay so I might be a little worse off."

According to a recent Dice Holdings annual salary survey, professionals in the tech and engineering industries have been seeing big boosts in their yearly incomes since 2008 and have recently crossed the $100,000 mark. Bonuses are bigger in the Valley as well with 38 percent of professionals receiving average bonuses of $12,450.

This is good news for engineering and tech students who have recently graduated or are about to graduate, said Linda Kane-Neufeld, owner of the temp agency Express Employment Professionals, who works with SJSU students in the career center.

"It's crazy, isn't it?" Kane-Neufeld asked. "Engineers today right out of college are making almost $93,000. If you have a master's degree you're making over $100,000. First year out of college, that's what they're getting."

Dice Holdings reports a steady decline in unemployment since 2007, but Kane-Neufeld said jobs are coming back to  Silicon Valley.

"The support staff is actually coming back," Kane-Neufeld said. "Engineers are driving the product which trickles down to the support staff."

Small businesses support the big companies while manufacturing seems to be leaving the valley as those jobs appear to be disappearing, though Kane-Neufeld said she doesn't believe those who make under the average income can live like the big earners.

"But we are coming back," she said.

Tim Quan, a senior software engineering major, has hope of getting a career through an internship after college.

"I could try to get hired by a big company and try to work my way up the chain of command," Quan said. "Another path is to do a start-up — start a business, become an entrepreneur." 

Quan went on to say there are a lot of risks involved because lots of start-ups fail, but it could be very rewarding.

Matt Labbie, a kinesiology major at SJSU, said he hopes to eventually go to physical therapy school but isn't worried about making enough money to live on.

"I'm trying to get into the health industry, (because they're) needed anywhere," Labbie said.

Dice has found the most popular skills by analyzing the frequency skills appear in job postings on Dice. A core set of skills emerges for technology professionals.

Currently, Oracle experience is requested in more than 15,000 job postings on any given day or nearly a quarter of all job postings on Dice.

Demand for that top requested skill is up 57 percent year-on-year. The national average salary for technology professionals with experience in Oracle Database is $90,914 and for Oracle Application Server is $88,063.

Civil engineering major Ryan Tartar said he wants to get a job working for the city somewhere in the Bay Area, if not in San Jose itself.

"I know there's big competition (in) engineering especially in this area, but for civil engineering cities are always developing and I'd really like to get into that," Tartar said. "Cities are always changing."

According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics 2008 report,  distribution of high-tech employment in Silicon Valley greatly favors San Jose and the rest of Santa Clara County with a tech employment rate of 54.8 percent, followed by Almeda with 16.4 percent and San Mateo with 13.6 percent.

"We have an income divide in Silicon Valley," Hancock said. "People who are making more than $100,00 a year per household, but we also have people who are making less than $40,000 a year and then that middle section is getting squeezed so there are fewer middle income earners in Silicon Valley then there have been historically."

Some people in those particular industries (engineering and tech) are commanding very impressive salaries, according to Hancock.

Engineers, coders, scientists, designers — these are people that command  huge salaries because they are very skilled and this area is in huge demand for those products and services, Hancock said.

However, Hancock said people pursuing education and equipping themselves with skills and training to do very specialized things are going to have an advantage in this valley.

"The economy's a complex animal," Hancock said. "We have big companies, we have medium size companies, we have small companies, they're all woven together in this dense fabric of supplier, subcontractor and supporting infrastructure, and we have all of them in Silicon Valley."

After two straight years of wages remaining nearly flat, tech professionals on average garnered salary increases of more than two percent, boosting their average annual wage to $81,327 from $79,384 in 2010, according to Dice.

"My advice for this rising generation to succeed in this brutal economy you need to have skills, a niche, a specialty, you need to be really good at something you can do especially well," Hancock said. "You need to offer yourself as a specialist."