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SMB vs. large corps: How IT salaries differ - How much do salaries differ for the top positions in IT if you work for a small or medium business versus a large corporation? The short answer is a lot.

Janco Associates has just released its mid-year IT compensation study. Part of the study focuses on six-figure IT salaries and how they differ depending on the size of the organization.

Janco divides the data into six categories:

  • IT Leaders - Large firms
  • Mid-management - Large firms
  • Staff positions - Large firms
  • IT management - SMBs
  • Mid-management - SMBs
  • IT staff - SMBs

(A business with 100 or fewer employees is generally considered small, while one with 101-999 employees is considered to be medium-sized. I asked Janco about its criteria for this distinction, and they said that large companies are companies whose gross revenues are equal to or greater than $500 MM. Mid-sized companies are companies whose gross revenues are less than $500 MM.)

Here’s how the six-figure salaries for IT staff in large corporations differed from their counterparts in SMBs:

Large corporations SMBs
Programmer/analyst $172,089 $129,641
Senior Network Specialist $165,013 $146,562
Disaster Recovery Coordinator $152,696 $102,598
Software Engineer $135,279 $171,374
Database Specialist $124,791 $125,631
Systems Support Specialist $103,848 $108,685

It’s interesting that the software engineer and system support specialists actually make more money in the smaller organizations.

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