Tech Wages During The Pandemic: What You Have To Know
The year 2020 has been one of the most challenging ones since the 21st century began. The economy underwent many changes. You have probably suffered some of the consequences of Covid-19 on your health, emotional stability, salary, or job. The virus hit almost every company in the world, including the tech industry.
The pandemic momentarily stopped the growth of this industry. Also, it caused many changes in companies, institutes, production, and wages. If you work in the tech industry, this article is for you. Learn how the virus affected workers’ salaries and how this changed life in the leading technology hubs.
The New Normal of Global Enterprises
The World Health Organization said that workplaces were highly contagious settings for people. The virus can quickly spread indoors, so companies have to take extraordinary measures to protect their employees. Some companies began to do remote work to maintain their economic activity and the health of workers.
These were the most optimistic cases, yet many other companies had to lay off their employees. According to Bloomberg, at least 40,000 tech industry employees were laid off during the first quarter of the virus in the United States, a disappointing and unusual number.
How Covid-19 Affected Some Tech Salaries
The situation with technology jobs has been fascinating. In 2019, for example, the growth of these companies was incredible. Countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States increased their profits in technology up to 8 percent in 2019. According to Hired, the companies with the highest growth during the coronavirus pandemic were Amazon and Netflix. Other companies, such as Facebook, have had to change employees’ salaries to promote remote work.
Both Netflix and Amazon had stability in their salaries. The coronavirus also allowed the growth of other companies specializing in video calls and messaging, such as Slack and Zoom, which went from 8 million to 200 million users in just two months. All large companies must take care of their employees. For that reason, they decided to adapt to the “new normal”. However, this was not good news for traditional technology companies, which need to have staff in offices performing physical tasks.
What Happened to Tech Cities?
In the United States, there are several tech hubs: San Francisco Bay, Silicon Valley, New York, Atlanta, Seattle, and Austin are some of the cities of science and innovation in this century. However, Covid-19 considerably altered the lifestyle in these big cities, mostly when
it comes to wages. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the median annual salary in 2019 was $155,000, but the current one remains a mystery.
The year 2020 brought thousands and thousands of employees out of these cities. The big moves left these cities abandoned. They all returned to their villages to work remotely.
Tech Talent During the Pandemic
Even though the general economy has suffered much this year, the tech industry continues to recruit new talent and pay exciting salaries. 2020 has also been the year of education and training of new employees, and the main credit for this feat goes to bootcamps.
Before the pandemic, 86 percent of bootcamp graduates were getting jobs, but what kind of company hires a bootcamp graduate? Take the example of Fullstack Academy, one of the most important institutes in the United States: this school has sent its students to large technology companies such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
Perhaps face-to-face work has decreased, but this has not been an obstacle for tech talent during the pandemic. On freelance sites like Upwork and Fiverr, these professionals boast some of the Internet’s best salaries. According to Glassdoor, a freelance software developer can earn up to $214,000 per year. For that reason, more and more students decide to study in bootcamps to cover the demand for workers that this industry currently has. Due to the pandemic, it continues to highlight its usefulness.
Conclusion
During the pandemic, we have seen two crucial aspects of the tech industry and their salaries. First, companies worldwide need technology to continue their economic activity, which generates more income for developers. On the other hand, it was shown that the demand for workers is still huge, and wages are improving and stabilizing even though the world is experiencing a terrible crisis.
