2021 Data/AI Salary Survey

Mike Loukides

Beijing Boston Farnham Sebastopol Tokyo

2021 Data/AI Salary Survey
by Mike Loukides
Copyright © 2021 O’Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA
95472.
O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use.
Online editions are also available for most titles (http://oreilly.com). For more infor‐
mation, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or
corporate@oreilly.com.

Editor: Mike Loukides Interior Designer: David Futato

Production Editor: Kristen Brown Cover Designer: Randy Comer
Copyeditor: Peyton Joyce Illustrator: Susan Thompson

September 2021: First Edition

Revision History for the First Edition

2021-09-08: First Release

The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. 2021 Data/AI Sal‐
ary Survey, the cover image, and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly
Media, Inc.
The views expressed in this work are those of the authors, and do not represent the
publisher’s views. While the publisher and the authors have used good faith efforts
to ensure that the information and instructions contained in this work are accurate,
the publisher and the authors disclaim all responsibility for errors or omissions,
including without limitation responsibility for damages resulting from the use of or
reliance on this work. Use of the information and instructions contained in this
work is at your own risk. If any code samples or other technology this work contains
or describes is subject to open source licenses or the intellectual property rights of
others, it is your responsibility to ensure that your use thereof complies with such
licenses and/or rights.

978-1-098-11865-5
[LSI]
 Table of Contents

2021 Data/AI Salary Survey. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Executive Summary 1
Demographics 2
Compensation Basics 3
Salaries by Gender 4
Salaries by Programming Language 7
Salaries by Tool and Platform 9
Salaries by Industry 12
Salaries by State 13
Job Change by Salary 15
Salaries by Certification 16
Training 18
The Last Word 20

iii
 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey

In June 2021, we asked the recipients of our Data & AI Newsletter to

respond to a survey about compensation. The results gave us insight
into what our subscribers are paid, where they’re located, what
industries they work for, what their concerns are, and what sorts of
career development opportunities they’re pursuing.
While it’s sadly premature to say that the survey took place at the
end of the COVID-19 pandemic (though we can all hope), it took
place at a time when restrictions were loosening: we were starting to
go out in public, have parties, and in some cases even attend in-
person conferences. The results then provide a place to start think‐
ing about what effect the pandemic had on employment. There was
a lot of uncertainty about stability, particularly at smaller companies:
Would the company’s business model continue to be effective?
Would your job still be there in a year? At the same time, employees
were reluctant to look for new jobs, especially if they would require
relocating—at least according to the rumor mill. Were those con‐
cerns reflected in new patterns for employment?

Executive Summary
• The average salary for data and AI professionals who responded
to the survey was $146,000.
• The average change in compensation over the last three years
was $9,252. This corresponds to an annual increase of 2.25%.
However, 8% of the correspondents reported decreased com‐
pensation, and 18% reported no change.

1
 • We don’t see evidence of a “great resignation.” 22% of respond‐
ents said they intended to change jobs, roughly what we would
have expected. Respondents seemed concerned about job secu‐
rity, probably because of the pandemic’s effect on the economy.
• Average compensation was highest in California ($176,000), fol‐
lowed by Eastern Seaboard states like New York and
Massachusetts.
• Compensation for women was significantly lower than for men
(84%). Salaries were lower regardless of education or job title.
Women were more likely than men to have advanced degrees,
particularly PhDs.
• Many respondents acquired certifications. Cloud certifications,
specifically in AWS and Microsoft Azure, were most strongly
associated with salary increases.
• Most respondents participated in training of some form. Learn‐
ing new skills and improving old ones were the most common
reasons for training, though hireability and job security were
also factors. Company-provided training opportunities were
most strongly associated with pay increases.

Demographics
The survey was publicized through O’Reilly’s Data & AI Newsletter
and was limited to respondents in the United States and the United
Kingdom. There were 3,136 valid responses, 2,778 from the US and
284 from the UK. This report focuses on the respondents from the
US, with only limited attention paid to those from the UK. A small
number of respondents (74) identified as residents of the US or UK,
but their IP addresses indicated that they were located elsewhere.
We didn’t use the data from these respondents; in practice, discard‐
ing this data had no effect on the results.
Of the 2,778 US respondents, 2,225 (81%) identified as men, and
383 (14%) identified as women (as identified by their preferred pro‐
nouns). 113 (4%) identified as “other,” and 14 (0.5%) used “they.”
The results are biased by the survey’s recipients (subscribers to
O’Reilly’s Data & AI Newsletter). Our audience is particularly strong
in the software (20% of respondents), computer hardware (4%), and
computer security (2%) industries—over 25% of the total. Our
audience is also strong in the states where these industries are

2 | 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey

concentrated: 42% of the US respondents lived in California (20%),
New York (9%), Massachusetts (6%), and Texas (7%), though these
states only make up 27% of the US population.

Compensation Basics
The average annual salary for employees who worked in data or AI
was $146,000. Most salaries were between $100,000 and $150,000
yearly (34%); the next most common salary tier was from $150,000
to $200,000 (26%). Compensation depended strongly on location,
with average salaries highest in California ($176,000).
The average salary change over the past three years was $9,252,
which is 2.25% per year (assuming a final salary equal to the aver‐
age). A small number of respondents (8%) reported salary decreases,
and 18% reported no change. Economic uncertainty caused by the
pandemic may be responsible for the declines in compensation. 19%
reported increases of $5,000 to $10,000 over that period; 14%
reported increases of over $25,000. A study by the IEEE suggests
that the average salary for technical employees increased 3.6% per
year, higher than our respondents indicated.
39% of respondents reported promotions in the past three years,
and 37% reported changing employers during that period. 22%
reported that they were considering changing jobs because their sal‐
aries hadn’t increased during the past year. Is this a sign of what
some have called a “great resignation”? Common wisdom has it that
technical employees change jobs every three to four years. LinkedIn
and Indeed both recommend staying for at least three years, though
they observe that younger employees change jobs more often.
LinkedIn elsewhere states that the annual turnover rate for technol‐
ogy employees is 13.2%—which suggests that employees stay at their
jobs for roughly seven and a half years. If that’s correct, the 37% that
changed jobs over three years seems about right, and the 22% who
said they “intend to leave their job due to a lack of compensation
increase” doesn’t seem overly high. Keep in mind that intent to
change and actual change are not the same—and that there are
many reasons to change jobs aside from salary, including flexibility
around working hours and working from home.
64% of the respondents took part in training or obtained certifica‐
tions in the past year, and 31% reported spending over 100 hours in
training programs, ranging from formal graduate degrees to reading

Compensation Basics | 3
blog posts. As we’ll see later, cloud certifications (specifically in AWS
and Microsoft Azure) were the most popular and appeared to have
the largest effect on salaries.
The reasons respondents gave for participating in training were sur‐
prisingly consistent. The vast majority reported that they wanted to
learn new skills (91%) or improve existing skills (84%). Data and AI
professionals are clearly interested in learning—and that learning is
self-motivated, not imposed by management. Relatively few (22%)
said that training was required by their job, and even fewer partici‐
pated in training because they were concerned about losing their
job (9%).
However, there were other motives at work. 56% of our respondents
said that they wanted to increase their “job security,” which is at
odds with the low number who were concerned about losing their
job. And 73% reported that they engaged in training or obtained
certifications to increase their “hireability,” which may suggest more
concern about job stability than our respondents would admit. The
pandemic was a threat to many businesses, and employees were jus‐
tifiably concerned that their job could vanish after a bad pandemic-
influenced quarter. A desire for increased hireability may also
indicate that we’ll see more people looking to change jobs in the
near future.
Finally, 61% of the respondents said that they participated in train‐
ing or earned certifications because they wanted a salary increase or
a promotion (“increase in job title/responsibilities”). It isn’t surpris‐
ing that employees see training as a route to promotion—especially
as companies that want to hire in fields like data science, machine
learning, and AI contend with a shortage of qualified employees.
Given the difficulty of hiring expertise from outside, we expect an
increasing number of companies to grow their own ML and AI tal‐
ent internally using training programs.

Salaries by Gender
To nobody’s surprise, our survey showed that data science and AI
professionals are mostly male. The number of respondents tells the
story by itself: only 14% identified as women, which is lower than
we’d have guessed, though it’s roughly consistent with our confer‐
ence attendance (back when we had live conferences) and roughly
equivalent to other technical fields. A small number (5%) reported

4 | 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey

their preferred pronoun as “they” or Other, but this sample was too
small to draw any significant comparisons about compensation.
Women’s salaries were sharply lower than men’s salaries, averaging
$126,000 annually, or 84% of the average salary for men ($150,000).
That differential held regardless of education, as Figure 1 shows: the
average salary for a woman with a doctorate or master’s degree was
82% of the salary for a man with an equivalent degree. The differ‐
ence wasn’t quite as high for people with bachelor’s degrees or who
were still students, but it was still significant: women with bachelor’s
degrees or who were students earned 86% or 87% of the average sal‐
ary for men. The difference in salaries was greatest between people
who were self-taught: in that case, women’s salaries were 72% of
men’s. An associate’s degree was the only degree for which women’s
salaries were higher than men’s.

Figure 1. Women’s and men’s salaries by degree

Despite the salary differential, a higher percentage of women had

advanced degrees than men: 16% of women had a doctorate, as
opposed to 13% of men. And 47% of women had a master’s degree,
as opposed to 46% of men. (If those percentages seem high, keep in
mind that many professionals in data science and AI are escapees
from academia.)
Women’s salaries also lagged men’s salaries when we compared
women and men with similar job titles (see Figure 2). At the execu‐
tive level, the average salary for women was $163,000 versus
$205,000 for men (a 20% difference). At the director level, the differ‐
ence was much smaller—$180,000 for women versus $184,000 for
men—and women’s salaries were actually higher than those at the

Salaries by Gender | 5
executive level. It’s easy to hypothesize about this difference, but
we’re at a loss to explain it. For managers, women’s salaries were
$143,000 versus $154,000 for men (a 7% difference).
Career advancement is also an issue: 18% of the women who partici‐
pated in the survey were executives or directors, compared with 23%
of the men.

Figure 2. Women’s and men’s salaries by job title

Before moving on from our consideration of the effect of gender on

salary, let’s take a brief look at how salaries changed over the past
three years. As Figure 3 shows, the percentage of men and women
respondents who saw no change was virtually identical (18%). But
more women than men saw their salaries decrease (10% versus 7%).
Correspondingly, more men saw their salaries increase. Women
were also more likely to have a smaller increase: 24% of women had
an increase of under $5,000 versus 17% of men. At the high end of
the salary spectrum, the difference between men and women was
smaller, though still not zero: 19% of men saw their salaries increase
by over $20,000, but only 18% of women did. So the most significant
differences were in the midrange. One anomaly sticks out: a slightly
higher percentage of women than men received salary increases in
the $15,000 to $20,000 range (8% versus 6%).

6 | 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey

Figure 3. Change in salary for women and men over three years

Salaries by Programming Language

When we looked at the most popular programming languages for
data and AI practitioners, we didn’t see any surprises: Python was
dominant (61%), followed by SQL (54%), JavaScript (32%), HTML
(29%), Bash (29%), Java (24%), and R (20%). C++, C#, and C were
further back in the list (12%, 12%, and 11%, respectively).
Discussing the connection between programming languages and
salary is tricky because respondents were allowed to check multiple
languages, and most did. But when we looked at the languages asso‐
ciated with the highest salaries, we got a significantly different list.
The most widely used and popular languages, like Python
($150,000), SQL ($144,000), Java ($155,000), and JavaScript
($146,000), were solidly in the middle of the salary range. The outli‐
ers were Rust, which had the highest average salary (over $180,000),
Go ($179,000), and Scala ($178,000). Other less common languages
associated with high salaries were Erlang, Julia, Swift, and F#. Web
languages (HTML, PHP, and CSS) were at the bottom (all around
$135,000). See Figure 4 for the full list.

Salaries by Programming Language | 7

Figure 4. Salary vs. programming language

How do we explain this? It’s difficult to say that data and AI develop‐
ers who use Rust command a higher salary, since most respondents
checked several languages. But we believe that this data shows some‐
thing significant. The supply of talent for newer languages like Rust
and Go is relatively small. While there may not be a huge demand
for data scientists who use these languages (yet), there’s clearly some
demand—and with experienced Go and Rust programmers in short
supply, they command a higher salary. Perhaps it is even simpler:
regardless of the language someone will use at work, employers

8 | 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey

interpret knowledge of Rust and Go as a sign of competence and
willingness to learn, which increases candidates’ value. A similar
argument can be made for Scala, which is the native language for the
widely used Spark platform. Languages like Python and SQL are
table stakes: an applicant who can’t use them could easily be penal‐
ized, but competence doesn’t confer any special distinction.
One surprise is that 10% of the respondents said that they didn’t use
any programming languages. We’re not sure what that means. It’s
possible they worked entirely in Excel, which should be considered a
programming language but often isn’t. It’s also possible that they
were managers or executives who no longer did any programming.

Salaries by Tool and Platform

We also asked respondents what tools they used for statistics and
machine learning and what platforms they used for data analytics
and data management. We observed some of the same patterns that
we saw with programming languages. And the same caution applies:
respondents were allowed to select multiple answers to our ques‐
tions about the tools and platforms that they use. (However, multi‐
ple answers weren’t as frequent as for programming languages.) In
addition, if you’re familiar with tools and platforms for machine
learning and statistics, you know that the boundary between them is
fuzzy. Is Spark a tool or a platform? We considered it a platform,
though two Spark libraries are in the list of tools. What about Kafka?
A platform, clearly, but a platform for building data pipelines that’s
qualitatively different from a platform like Ray, Spark, or Hadoop.
Just as with programming languages, we found that the most widely
used tools and platforms were associated with midrange salaries;
older tools, even if they’re still widely used, were associated with
lower salaries; and some of the tools and platforms with the fewest
users corresponded to the highest salaries. (See Figure 5 for the full
list.)
The most common responses to the question about tools for
machine learning or statistics were “I don’t use any tools” (40%) or
Excel (31%). Ignoring the question of how one does machine learn‐
ing or statistics without tools, we’ll only note that those who didn’t
use tools had an average salary of $143,000, and Excel users had an
average salary of $138,000—both below average. Stata ($120,000)

Salaries by Tool and Platform | 9

was also at the bottom of the list; it’s an older package with relatively
few users and is clearly falling out of favor.
The popular machine learning packages PyTorch (19% of users,
$166,000 average salary), TensorFlow (20%, $164,000), and scikit-
learn (27%, $157,000) occupied the middle ground. Those salaries
were above the average for all respondents, which was pulled down
by the large numbers who didn’t use tools or only used Excel. The
highest salaries were associated with H2O (3%, $183,000), KNIME
(2%, $180,000), Spark NLP (5%, $179,000), and Spark MLlib (8%,
$175,000). It’s hard to trust conclusions based on 2% or 3% of the
respondents, but it appears that salaries are higher for people who
work with tools that have a lot of “buzz” but aren’t yet widely used.
Employers pay a premium for specialized expertise.

Figure 5. Average salary by tools for statistics or machine learning

We see almost exactly the same thing when we look at data frame‐
works (Figure 6). Again, the most common response was from peo‐
ple who didn’t use a framework; that group also received the lowest
salaries (30% of users, $133,000 average salary).

10 | 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey

In 2021, Hadoop often seems like legacy software, but 15% of the
respondents were working on the Hadoop platform, with an average
salary of $166,000. That was above the average salary for all users
and at the low end of the midrange for salaries sorted by platform.
The highest salaries were associated with Clicktale (now
ContentSquare), a cloud-based analytics system for researching cus‐
tomer experience: only 0.2% of respondents use it, but they have an
average salary of $225,000. Other frameworks associated with high
salaries were Tecton (the commercial version of Michelangelo, at
$218,000), Ray ($191,000), and Amundsen ($189,000). These frame‐
works had relatively few users—the most widely used in this group
was Amundsen with 0.8% of respondents (and again, we caution
against reading too much into results based on so few respondents).
All of these platforms are relatively new, frequently discussed in the
tech press and social media, and appear to be growing healthily.
Kafka, Spark, Google BigQuery, and Dask were in the middle, with a
lot of users (15%, 19%, 8%, and 5%) and above-average salaries
($179,000, $172,000, $170,000, and $170,000). Again, the most pop‐
ular platforms occupied the middle of the range; experience with
less frequently used and growing platforms commanded a premium.

Figure 6. Average salary by data framework or platform

Salaries by Tool and Platform | 11

Salaries by Industry
The greatest number of respondents worked in the software indus‐
try (20% of the total), followed by consulting (11%) and healthcare,
banking, and education (each at 8%). Relatively few respondents lis‐
ted themselves as consultants (also 2%), though consultancy tends
to be cyclic, depending on current thinking on outsourcing, tax law,
and other factors. The average income for consultants was $150,000,
which is only slightly higher than the average for all respondents
($146,000). That may indicate that we’re currently in some kind of
an equilibrium between consultants and in-house talent.
While data analysis has become essential to every kind of business
and AI is finding many applications outside of computing, salaries
were highest in the computer industry itself, as Figure 7 makes clear.
For our purposes, the “computer industry” was divided into four
segments: computer hardware, cloud services and hosting, security,
and software. Average salaries in these industries ranged from
$171,000 (for computer hardware) to $164,000 (for software). Salar‐
ies for the advertising industry (including social media) were sur‐
prisingly low, only $150,000.

Figure 7. Average salary by industry

12 | 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey

Education and nonprofit organizations (including trade associa‐
tions) were at the bottom end of the scale, with compensation just
above $100,000 ($106,000 and $103,000, respectively). Salaries for
technical workers in government were slightly higher ($124,000).

Salaries by State
When looking at data and AI practitioners geographically, there
weren’t any big surprises. The states with the most respondents were
California, New York, Texas, and Massachusetts. California accoun‐
ted for 19% of the total, with over double the number of respond‐
ents from New York (8%). To understand how these four states
dominate, remember that they make up 42% of our respondents but
only 27% of the United States’ population.
Salaries in California were the highest, averaging $176,000. The
Eastern Seaboard did well, with an average salary of $157,000 in
Massachusetts (second highest). New York, Delaware, New Jersey,
Maryland, and Washington, DC, all reported average salaries in the
neighborhood of $150,000 (as did North Dakota, with five respond‐
ents). The average salary reported for Texas was $148,000, which is
slightly above the national average but nevertheless seems on the
low side for a state with a significant technology industry.
Salaries in the Pacific Northwest were not as high as we expected.
Washington just barely made it into the top 10 in terms of the num‐
ber of respondents, and average salaries in Washington and Oregon
were $138,000 and $133,000, respectively. (See Figure 8 for the full
list.)
The highest-paying jobs, with salaries over $300,000, were concen‐
trated in California (5% of the state’s respondents) and Massachu‐
setts (4%). There were a few interesting outliers: North Dakota and
Nevada both had very few respondents, but each had one respond‐
ent making over $300,000. In Nevada, we’re guessing that’s someone
who works for the casino industry—after all, the origins of probabil‐
ity and statistics are tied to gambling. Most states had no respond‐
ents with compensation over $300,000.

Salaries by State | 13
Figure 8. Average salary by state

14 | 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey

The lowest salaries were, for the most part, from states with the few‐
est respondents. We’re reluctant to say more than that. These states
typically had under 10 respondents, which means that averaging sal‐
aries is extremely noisy. For example, Alaska only had two respond‐
ents and an average salary of $75,000; Mississippi and Louisiana
each only had five respondents, and Rhode Island only had three. In
any of these states, one or two additional respondents at the execu‐
tive level would have a huge effect on the states average. Further‐
more, the averages in those states are so low that all (or almost all)
respondents must be students, interns, or in entry-level positions. So
we don’t think we can make any statement stronger than “the high
paying jobs are where you’d expect them to be.”

Job Change by Salary

Despite the differences between states, we found that the desire to
change jobs based on lack of compensation didn’t depend signifi‐
cantly on geography. There were outliers at both extremes, but they
were all in states where the number of respondents was small and
one or two people looking to change jobs would make a significant
difference. It’s not terribly interesting to say that 24% of respondents
from California intend to change jobs (only 2% above the national
average); after all, you’d expect California to dominate. There may
be a small signal from states like New York, with 232 respondents, of
whom 27% intend to change jobs, or from a state like Virginia, with
137 respondents, of whom only 19% were thinking of changing. But
again, these numbers aren’t much different from the total percentage
of possible job changers.
If intent to change jobs due to compensation isn’t dependent on
location, then what does it depend on? Salary. It’s not at all surpris‐
ing that respondents with the lowest salaries (under $50,000/year)
are highly motivated to change jobs (29%); this group is composed
largely of students, interns, and others who are starting their careers.
The group that showed the second highest desire to change jobs,
however, had the highest salaries: over $400,000/year (27%). It’s an
interesting pairing: those with the highest and lowest salaries were
most intent on getting a salary increase.

Job Change by Salary | 15

26% of those with annual salaries between $50,000 and $100,000
indicated that they intend to change jobs because of compensation.
For the remainder of the respondents (those with salaries between
$100,000 and $400,000), the percentage who intend to change jobs
was 22% or lower.

Salaries by Certification
Over a third of the respondents (37%) replied that they hadn’t
obtained any certifications in the past year. The next biggest group
replied “other” (14%), meaning that they had obtained certifications
in the past year but not one of the certifications we listed. We
allowed them to write in their own responses, and they shared 352
unique answers, ranging from vendor-specific certifications (e.g.,
DataRobot) to university degrees (e.g., University of Texas) to well-
established certifications in any number of fields (e.g., Certified
Information Systems Security Professional a.k.a. CISSP). While
there were certainly cases where respondents used different words to
describe the same thing, the amount of unique write-in responses
reflects the great number of certifications available.
Cloud certifications were by far the most popular. The top certifica‐
tion was for AWS (3.9% obtained AWS Certified Solutions
Architect-Associate), followed by Microsoft Azure (3.8% had
AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals), then two more AWS cer‐
tifications and CompTIA’s Security+ certification (1% each). Keep in
mind that 1% only represents 27 respondents, and all the other cer‐
tifications had even fewer respondents.
As Figure 9 shows, the highest salaries were associated with AWS
certifications, the Microsoft AZ-104 (Azure Administrator Asso‐
ciate) certification, and the CISSP security certification. The average
salary for people listing these certifications was higher than the aver‐
age salary for US respondents as a whole. And the average salary for
respondents who wrote in a certification was slightly above the aver‐
age for those who didn’t earn any certifications ($149,000 versus
$143,000).

16 | 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey

Figure 9. Average salary by certification earned

Certifications were also associated with salary increases (Figure 10).

Again AWS and Microsoft Azure dominate, with Microsoft’s
AZ-104 leading the way, followed by three AWS certifications. And
on the whole, respondents with certifications appear to have
received larger salary increases than those who didn’t earn any tech‐
nical certifications.

Figure 10. Average salary change by certification

Google Cloud is an obvious omission from this story. While Google

is the third-most-important cloud provider, only 26 respondents
(roughly 1%) claimed any Google certification, all under the “Other”
category.

Salaries by Certification | 17
Among our respondents, security certifications were relatively
uncommon and didn’t appear to be associated with significantly
higher salaries or salary increases. Cisco’s CCNP was associated with
higher salary increases; respondents who earned the CompTIA
Security+ or CISSP certifications received smaller increases. Does
this reflect that management undervalues security training? If this
hypothesis is correct, undervaluing security is clearly a significant
mistake, given the ongoing importance of security and the possibil‐
ity of new attacks against AI and other data-driven systems.
Cloud certifications clearly had the greatest effect on salary increa‐
ses. With very few exceptions, any certification was better than no
certification: respondents who wrote in a certification under “Other”
averaged a $9,600 salary increase over the last few years, as opposed
to $8,900 for respondents who didn’t obtain a certification and
$9,300 for all respondents regardless of certification.

Training
Participating in training resulted in salary increases—but only for
those who spent more than 100 hours in a training program. As Fig‐
ure 11 shows, those respondents had an average salary increase of
$11,000. This was also the largest group of respondents (19%).
Respondents who only reported undertaking 1–19 hours of training
(8%) saw lower salary increases, with an average of $7,100. It’s inter‐
esting that those who participated in 1–19 hours of training saw
smaller increases than those who didn’t participate in training at all.
It doesn’t make sense to speculate about this difference, but the data
does make one thing clear: if you engage in training, be serious
about it.

18 | 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey

Figure 11. Average salary change vs. hours of training

We also asked what types of training respondents engaged in:

whether it was company provided (for which there were three alter‐
natives), a certification program, a conference, or some other kind
of training (detailed in Figure 12). Respondents who took advantage
of company-provided opportunities had the highest average salaries
($156,000, $150,000, and $149,000). Those who obtained certifica‐
tions were next ($148,000). The results are similar if we look at sal‐
ary increases over the past three years: Those who participated in
various forms of company-offered training received increases
between $11,000 and $10,000. Salary increases for respondents who
obtained a certification were in the same range ($11,000).

Figure 12. Average salary change vs. type of training

Training | 19
The Last Word
Data and AI professionals—a rubric under which we include data
scientists, data engineers, and specialists in AI and ML—are well-
paid, reporting an average salary just under $150,000. However,
there were sharp state-by-state differences: salaries were signifi‐
cantly higher in California, though the Northeast (with some excep‐
tions) did well.
There were also significant differences between salaries for men and
women. Men’s salaries were higher regardless of job title, regardless
of training and regardless of academic degrees—even though
women were more likely to have an advanced academic degree
(PhD or master’s degree) than were men.
We don’t see evidence of a “great resignation.” Job turnover through
the pandemic was roughly what we’d expect (perhaps slightly below
normal). Respondents did appear to be concerned about job secu‐
rity, though they didn’t want to admit it explicitly. But with the
exception of the least- and most-highly compensated respondents,
the intent to change jobs because of salary was surprisingly consis‐
tent and nothing to be alarmed at.
Training was important, in part because it was associated with hirea‐
bility and job security but more because respondents were genuinely
interested in learning new skills and improving current ones. Cloud
training, particularly in AWS and Microsoft Azure, was the most
strongly associated with higher salary increases.
But perhaps we should leave the last word to our respondents. The
final question in our survey asked what areas of technology would
have the biggest effect on salary and promotions in the coming year.
It wasn’t a surprise that most of the respondents said machine learn‐
ing (63%)—these days, ML is the hottest topic in the data world. It
was more of a surprise that “programming languages” was noted by
just 34% of respondents. (Only “Other” received fewer responses—
see Figure 13 for full details.) Our respondents clearly aren’t
impressed by programming languages, even though the data sug‐
gests that employers are willing to pay a premium for Rust, Go, and
Scala.
There’s another signal worth paying attention to if we look beyond
the extremes. Data tools, cloud and containers, and automation
were nearly tied (46, 47, and 44%). The cloud and containers

20 | 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey

category includes tools like Docker and Kubernetes, cloud providers
like AWS and Microsoft Azure, and disciplines like MLOps. The
tools category includes tools for building and maintaining data
pipelines, like Kafka. “Automation” can mean a lot of things but in
this context probably means automated training and deployment.

Figure 13. What technologies will have the biggest effect on compensa‐
tion in the coming year?

We’ve argued for some time that operations—successfully deploying

and managing applications in production—is the biggest issue fac‐
ing ML practitioners in the coming years. If you want to stay on top
of what’s happening in data, and if you want to maximize your job
security, hireability, and salary, don’t just learn how to build AI
models; learn how to deploy applications that live in the cloud.
In the classic movie The Graduate, one character famously says,
“There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it.” In 2021, and
without being anywhere near as repulsive, we’d say, “There’s a great
future in the cloud. Think about it.”

The Last Word | 21

About the Author
Mike Loukides is Vice President of Content Strategy for O’Reilly
Media, Inc. He’s edited many highly regarded books on technical
subjects that don’t involve Windows programming. He’s particularly
interested in programming languages, Unix and what passes for
Unix these days, and system and network administration. Mike is
the author of System Performance Tuning and a coauthor of Unix
Power Tools. Most recently, he’s been fooling around with data and
data analysis, languages like R, Mathematica, and Octave, and think‐
ing about how to make books social. Mike can be reached on Twit‐
ter @mikeloukides and on LinkedIn.
There’s much more
where this came from.
Experience books, videos, live online
training courses, and more from O’Reilly
and our 200+ partners—all in one place.

Learn more at oreilly.com/online-learning

©2019 O’Reilly Media, Inc. O’Reilly is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. | 175