Employers who struggle to hire IT staff tend to blame salary expectations and respond with a higher offer. The people already in those jobs suggest that misses the point. Dutch IT workers earn well above the median and have more say over their work than almost any other group, yet in 2025 they are exactly as satisfied with their work as the average employee, and report burn-out complaints more often. Our conclusion from the CBS and TNO working conditions survey, read through the model of labour economist Peter van der Meer: pay and autonomy are already maxed out in IT. What wins and keeps people now is development, colleagues and meaningful work.
Plenty of freedom, average satisfaction
Most IT workers regularly decide how to do their work, far more often than employees in general. Only managers score higher. IT staff also choose their hours and workplace more often than almost anyone. Their workload is below average and has been falling for years. Their median hourly wage is well above that of the average employee, behind only managers.
Satisfaction tells a different story. In 2018 IT workers were clearly more satisfied with their work than other employees. Since then the lead has disappeared: IT satisfaction slipped while the national figure rose, and since 2022 the lines have run together. Burn-out complaints, meanwhile, have long been higher in IT than on average and still are.
Why money and freedom are not enough
In a book gathering years of research on work and wellbeing, published by the University of Groningen Press, Van der Meer splits the return on work into pay and a set of non-financial rewards: autonomy, using and developing competence, belonging with colleagues, and the sense that the work matters to others. These weigh at least as much as pay and do not simply replace one another.
IT workers collect pay and autonomy in abundance. That buys average satisfaction. The rest has to come from competence, colleagues and meaning, and IT occupations rank only middling on perceived meaning in European surveys. Van der Meer also notes that technology and home working tend to stretch hours. That fits a group whose pace is falling while burn-out complaints stay high: the strain sits in the boundaries, not the speed.
What this does not show
IT is not one group. Specialists such as developers and system administrators have more freedom, pay and satisfaction than user support staff, who look more like the average employee. CBS changed parts of the survey from 2022, exactly when the lines met, so part of the convergence may be method. The meaning ranking is European and from 2015. The rise in burn-out complaints is not specific to IT. And satisfaction is a judgement, not a turnover rate. If satisfied IT staff turned out to leave as often as dissatisfied ones, our advice would carry less weight.
What you can do
- Stop treating the offer as the main lever for specialists. They already earn well; another raise buys little.
- Do not sell autonomy or remote work as a distinction. Most IT workers already have both.
- Say in the vacancy and the interview whose work the role changes, and what the person will learn in the coming year.
- Ask leavers and candidates who decline about hours and reachability, not only about workload.
- Treat support roles separately. There, a clearly better offer still makes a difference.