Salary Survey Data from Payscale.com (June 23, 2010)

At the end of SSWG's 6/23/2010 meeting, Anthony Drown had identified some salary survey data from Payscale.com to compare .NET and Java at:

Different job titles were used in the two surveys, so the data is not entirely comparable, but here are the numbers:

	Java	.NET	% Diff from Java to .NET
Sr. Software Engineer / Developer / Programmer	$93,368	$87,782	-6%
Software Engineer	$67,968	$64,863	-5%
Software Engineer / Developer / Programmer	$64,709	$61,557	-5%
Programmer Analyst	$59,064	$57,395	-3%
Project Manager, IT	$68,263
Senior Software Architect	$118,425
Senior Programmer Analyst	$79,134
Software Developer		$60,130
.NET Software Developer / Programmer		$61,183
Software Development Manager		$99,568

For comparable job titles, the difference is 3%-6%.

What I find interesting is the nature of the job titles that are not compared. It would appear that .NET shops do not have as many senior personnel, architects, or project managers as Java (perhaps replacing their functions with "Software Development Managers?"). I believe Payscale's data is self-reported by people interested in how their salaries rank in the marketplace, so that may skew the results, but there were nearly 12,000 .NET respondents and over 25,000 Java respondents, so it must be reasonably representative.