Techies in search of a job need look no further than Texas.
Tech salaries in that city jumped a whopping 12.7 percent last year for an average annual salary of $89,419, according to the tech jobs website Dice Holdings.
That compares to a 2.6 percent jump in Raleigh where the average annual wage was $79,830 for techies last year.
Today, we added to our public pay databases the salaries of UNC Hospitals officials and employees. We've been collecting pay for most state employees and UNC system employees for years, but discovered recently that the hospitals were not part of those databases.
It's important to collect this data at least annually, because North Carolina's personnel law prevents the release of much beyond current pay and position. As a result, it's very difficult to track pay and position changes over time for the public employees in state and local government.
Our recent three-part series, Keeping Secrets, focuses on some of the troublesome consequences of the state's personnel law, which we found to be among the most secretive in the nation. Gov. Beverly Perdue and Senate leaders are talking about reforms this session to make personnel information such as salary and employment histories public.
You can find the UNC hospital data, which includes roughly 8,650 employees from the CEO to housekeepers, here.
County Commissioner Joe Bowser (below right) is critical of the Durham Public Schools board for proposing to 
cut 121 teaching and teaching assistant positions as a money-saving measure, rather than looking in other places.
Like the home office — where, he said, assistant superintendent positions have increased from two to six in recent years.
According to figures handed out at this morning's meeting between the school board and the county commissioners, in addition to Supernintendent Carl Harris, DPS has six assistant superintendents, a chief operating officer and a chief academic officer on the central administrative staff.
Those eight salaries range from $111,988.44 to $158,850.96.
There are 12 "executive directors," salaries ranging from $93,571.92 to $127,855.80.
There are 23 full-time "directors" whose pay runs from $63,213.12 to $97,321.56, and one half-time director at $53,514. Two directors have county-provided vehicles.
DPS pays civic club dues for the superindentent, the chief operating officer and the chief academic officer. Durham County has been paying civic club dues for about 11 executives, County Manager Mike Ruffin said this week, but is eliminating that perk.
"We've got to scale back," Bowser told the school board. "Look at your details as to what's going on. ...
"Don't just harp on teachers, because you've got employees throughout your organization that you can work with. ... You have not mentioned one single department to cut from other than the classroom, and that's not fair."
Generally speaking, college presidents make good money.
But on a lot of private university campuses, their salaries are dwarfed by the pay earned by high-profile athletics coaches and medical school researchers.
So says the Chronicle of Higher Education, which just crunched a ton of numbers drawn from tax forms to find what private college employees make.
Tops among private college employees? Pete Carroll, the head football coach at the University of Southern California. Carroll, whose Trojan football team is routinely a national title contender, makes $4.4 million, according to the Chronicle report.
Number 2 on the list is not quite so much a household word: David N. Silvers, a dermatologist who studies skin diseases at Columbia University. He makes $4.3 million.
Here's the Chronicle's story, and here's the Wall Street Journal's take.
