After riding out the storm, many are shifting into accomplishment mode. Thirty-eight percent more likely to have received a bonus for steering a major project past a milestone or getting a product out the door this year, more than a few are delivering results. Whether these projects or products are the business or fuel the business, companies are certainly the better for it. Sixty-six times as many companies issued standard salary increases this year than cut wages -- up from 25 times as many last year and 10 times as many in 2004.

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Despite such trends to suggest company prospects are improving, many tech execs are finding the added revenue heading elsewhere. Only 40 percent expect their companies to invest more in IT. In all, IT budgets are slated to grow by 5.1 percent, on par with last year and slightly less than in 2004.

In light of this, Ubicom has migrated to open source tools in an effort to keep costs down. Still, as many are finding, such cost-cutting measures aren’t saving enough to add to head count. For now at least, workload relief may be limited to personal rather than personnel gains. And with one in six senior IT managers expecting staff reductions in the next 12 months, tough times aren’t universally over.

Motion in the middle
For middle managers, taking on more responsibility proved less rewarding this year. Taxed with even more work, they were 28 percent less likely to cite added responsibilities as the impetus behind higher wages than the year before. More troubling perhaps is that the personal performance bonuses -- the bellwether for take-home growth in 2005 -- appear to be in decline, as the number of middle managers who cashed in on individual incentives dropped to 24 percent from 29 percent.

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That’s not to say managers aren’t hard at work driving performance.

“I can’t lose sleep over what I can’t control,” says Steve Bergeron, senior project manager at a 450-employee company. “So I focus on our execution.” In charge of more projects and people this year, and more accountable for customer satisfaction, Bergeron provides insight as to why so many managers remain fixed to the grindstone: “I fear how quickly a small company can be set back.”

And many middle managers’ commitment to company performance has not gone unrewarded. Profit sharing, project completion, milestone incentives, and professional certifications are up. In fact, more middle managers got in on the action, as 64 percent reported receiving an award -- the best mark in five years. Yet the decline in personal performance awards left overall bonuses for middle managers level with 2005.

The drop off in bonus pay may be attributed to a new trend in compensating employees for adding new skills, according to David Foote, president and chief research officer of Foote Partners, a consultancy and IT compensation research company.