CompTIA: US employers posted 1.1M tech jobs in Q1, up 43% YoY; Mondo: average salaries rose 25% for cloud architects and 11% for engineers from 2020 to 2022
Many technology workers are commanding compensation increases of 20% or more, corporate tech chiefs say Tweets: @cornoisseur Tweets: Michael / @cornoisseur : If you're an engineer that only got an 11% raise over the past two years you are doing something wrong https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
In Q1 2022 the tech labor market was at a fever pitch: CompTIA counted 1.1M US job postings, up 43% year over year, and Mondo's placement data showed cloud architect salaries up 25% since 2020 while engineer pay lagged at 11% — the gap Michael's widely shared tweet turned into a rallying cry for candidates. Recruiters described hiring that was still firming, with Indeed counting developer postings up 120% over the pre-pandemic baseline (developer postings up 120%).
The subsequent coverage reframes this quarter as the peak before a split: by November 2022 tech-occupation employment hit a record 6.39M even amid layoffs, as displaced workers were absorbed into banking, retail, health care, and manufacturing (record 6.39M tech employment). By 2026, ZipRecruiter showed postings recovering but skewed heavily senior, with entry-level share shrinking (senior roles growing to 43.1% of postings) — making the Q1 2022 wage surge the moment employers' cost structures reset.
First-order effects
- Engineers with cloud and infrastructure skills can command 20%-plus raises immediately, and Mondo's own data confirms the premium is real for cloud architects — employers competing for the same 1.1M open roles must match those numbers or lose staff.
- Corporate tech chiefs, not just startups, are now on the paying side: compensation committees across the economy face mid-year budget pressure because the raise expectations were set by this market.
Second-order effects
- Non-tech employers become aggressive bidders: the later absorption of tech workers into banking, retail, health care, and manufacturing shows those industries building permanent in-house engineering teams, sustaining demand even when tech companies cut.
- Specialized roles pull further ahead of generalist ones — the same pattern later visible in data center technician pay rising 43% in three years (technician pay up 43%) — forcing staffing firms like Mondo to reprice entire role categories rather than individual placements.
Third-order effects
- The market bifurcates by seniority: once employers learned to fill senior seats at 2022-inflated salaries, the entry-level rung thinned — the dynamic ZipRecruiter's 2026 data captures with entry-level postings down to 7.4% of IT and CS openings — raising the question of how the next cohort of architects gets trained at all.
- Tech compensation becomes a structural cost line across every industry rather than a tech-sector expense, meaning layoff cycles no longer restore pre-2022 salary baselines.
The trend: The US tech labor market is settling into a permanently senior-skewed, cross-industry competition for scarce specialists, where 2022's wage resets became the floor rather than the peak.