$97,895: the average salary of tech professionals in the Baltimore/D.C. region

The average salary of tech professionals in Silicon Valley is just north of $100,000 a year, but the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. region isn’t far behind, as the Baltimore Sun reports.
According to Dice.com, an online hub for tech professionals, tech workers in this region make $97,895 each year.
View the list of the top 10 metropolitan areas based on average tech salaries.

Assuredly, it’s not the startup scene pushing tech salaries in Baltimore and D.C. to those heights. Other tech jobs — for instance, the 19,000-job strong cybersecurity industry in Maryland — probably make up the bulk of the reason why the average salary for tech professionals in the area is as high as it is.
It’s a trend Dice.com observed on a national scale, as it notes on its blog:

Salaries for those regularly using Hadoop, NoSQL, and Mongo DB are all over $100,000. Those whose work is closely associated with the cloud and virtualization are earning, on average, just under $90,000. Average mobile salaries are closer to $80,000. [more]

Admittedly, it’s a small sample size Dice is drawing from: a little more than 15,000 tech professionals participated in its online survey, compared with more than 2 million IT professionals working today.
Still, startups in Baltimore should note that 97K. It’s a benchmark for what serious tech talent is looking for in a paying gig.
For this city to increase in stature as a tech startup hub, which it is yet to become, it’ll need to lure skilled developers and programmers away from virtually guaranteed tech jobs with the federal government or contractors working for the federal government.
And to do that? Well, that will take time. Culture is a slow-moving beast. Save the bottles of champagne for when tech professionals with five or more years of experience are willing to relocate to Baltimore city for an equity stake and a salary that’s half of what they could be making.