In the four largest tech industry job categories, workers with a master's degree reported an average salary of $64,200, those with bachelor's degrees averaged $54,000, and high school graduates averaged $49,000. The high school graduates who participated in the survey are doing much better than their peers overall. For all occupations nationwide, college graduates make 36 percent more than high school graduates.

Men are paid better in nearly all job categories in the survey. But how much better varies widely by job category. Men have a much larger wage advantage in traditional categories such as project engineer or programmer-analyst. In newer jobs such as network administrators the gap was small, and in some cases, such as multimedia specialists or network analysts, women were paid more than men.

"The gap should be smaller" in new kinds of tech careers where employers' needs are greatest "simply because of the laws of supply and demand," said Cliff Balkam, a compensation consultant with Intelsat.

A pattern of "salary compression" – in which young employees make nearly as much as their senior colleagues – exists throughout the tech community, the survey indicates.

The average salary of programmers ages 31 to 35 was $59,900, close to the $61,100 average pay of their counterparts ages 36 to 40 and the $65,000 average in the 41-to-45 age group.

Such salary compression is nothing new, said Jim Searing, managing director at Korn Ferry International's Tysons Corner office, where he oversees the firm's technology headhunting operations in the region. He said it started 20 years ago, when companies lined up to hire hotshot young MBAs, and happened again a decade ago when Wall Street discovered uses for mathematical whizzes. "Now it's programmers," Searing said. "What counts are the skills you bring to the job rather than how long you've been using them."

Northern Virginia has held a solid lead over the Maryland suburbs in attracting technology companies and creating technology jobs, but there is little difference between the two as far as wages for tech workers.

In most technology job categories, average salaries in the District, suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia were within 10 percent of the averages for the entire metro region.

Overall, government tech workers had a lower median salary – $49,392 – than information technology and telecommunications employees, whose median salaries were around $55,500. But in some categories, such as technical support, system operators and technical cost accountants, government employees had the edge.

Experts caution that in such open-ended surveys there is uncertainty about the accuracy of the answers.

"Any time you have people reporting their own salaries, you have bias or error or both built into the methodology," said Balkam, who chairs the Human Resources Association salary survey.

Consequently, it is impossible to say how closely the results of the washingtonpost.com survey reflect actual salary patterns in the region. But the results are generally in line with other published salary studies on technology workers that have been prepared for employers, washingtonpost.com database editor Hal Straus said. The survey is continuing, and there will be further analysis of the results, Straus said.

While there is no simple explanation for the ways that education, workplace skills and experience interact to create opportunities for good jobs and higher pay in the technology community, the survey suggests that at least for now, young workers have a competitive advantage in a world where companies are looking for up-to-date skills.

"The technology needs of companies are very specific," Balkam said. "There are very arcane computer systems out there, and companies don't have the patience to instruct people how to use them. They need someone who can be productive in a week or two.

"The 1995 to '98 graduates are the people who have studied the hot Web software in college. Companies need that, and they bid up the price," Balkam said. "With some exceptions, the person with 15 to 20 years of experience was trained in software and computer applications that are no longer of any use."

Korn Ferry's Searing said that in areas where technology skills are in shortest supply, many employers will hire newcomers who have those skills, regardless of their level of formal education.

Pinder, 26, is an example of how it's possible to bootstrap yourself into a good technology job.

He and his colleagues at Frontier Global Center in Herndon help operate Web sites for corporations and organizations, maintaining complex computer systems called servers, which provide access to Web pages.

When he was a student at Robinson High School in Fairfax, Pinder often explored the Internet, and he set up his own Web site with the help of an Internet services firm. The firm was "having problems handling things and I figured out their problem, so they hired me," Pinder said. The small company was bought by a larger one, which then was purchased by a major telecommunications firm, Frontier Communications of Rochester, N.Y.

"I was surprised when they hired me," Pinder said.

Pinder said his salary is comparable to what his peers make. And it's at the high end for technical workers, particularly those who are just starting out.

But he believes that there's a ceiling to what he and others in his field can make, and that he may be close to it. "There are definitely plateaus [in pay] unless you go into management," he said.

The technology field may look inviting to young people such as Pinder who have specific technology tools, but compensation and recruiting experts said that a solid educational foundation usually is required to make a career successful over the long run.

In the past few years, as the region's technology industry has matured, companies have looked increasingly for people with a college education, Pinder said. "There's more of a corporate mentality," he said. "It's harder for people to move in" as he did.

The value of a strong technical education will show up over the long haul, said Charles Fetzer, president of the District-based Fetzer-Kraus organization, which does the Human Resources Association survey.

"That degree prepares you to be in a continuous learning curve for the life of a career and not be left in a vulnerable position because your skills have become obsolete," he said. "Instead of living with one programming language for a career, as a Cobol programmer expected to do in the '60s, [tech employees] are looking at a lifetime where they may use 15 or 20 languages. They'll need an academic background and a mind-set so that a particular language isn't a life's work, it's just the tool of the moment."