California companies shoulder an extra salary burden with respect to IT staff. In September 2000, Gov. Gray Davis signed a law stipulating that only computer professionals making at least $41 per hour were exempt from the state's overtime pay law. That law says workers must be paid time-and-a-half after eight hours worked per day, whereas most other states mandate overtime pay only for workers who put in more than 40 hours per week.

Salary map: Choose a coast for higher pay Your Salary 2002: Back to reality

The $41-per-hour figure translates to an annual salary of $85,280 for a 40-hour week, which, of course, is rare. "People in our industry don't work eight-hour days," says Edmund Hung, network director for Guitar Center in Westlake Village, Calif. "We've had to bring people within our organization up to the $85,000 level to avoid paying them overtime."

That includes LAN administrators and PC technicians who previously earned anywhere from $68,000 to $75,000, he says. One Guitar Center LAN administrator whose base salary was too far from the $85,000 plateau to justify a pay increase to that level is now pulling in far more than that rate, at $130,000 per year, because of overtime. Now management wants to increase his base salary to $85,000, but the employee doesn't want to take the increase because he knows he'll lose out in the long run. "It becomes a tug of war between management and the employee as to what we should agree on," Hung says, noting the fight is not yet over. "It's going to be nasty."

The average base salary for all Pacific region respondents to the 2002 Network World Salary Survey is $76,720, and they work an average of more than 58 hours per week. For 2002, the figure the California law is based on will be $42.64 per hour, or $88,691 annually, because of an automatic cost-of-living increase. If California companies have to pay any IT professional making less than that an average of 18 hours per week at overtime rates, it's going to be nasty indeed.

- Paul Desmond

Photo subject: Edmund Hung, network director for Guitar Center.

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