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Fewer Jobs, Less Pay In The IT Industry
dipfan writes "At last an explanation why you can't find a job: a report in the Washington Post says there were more than 500,000 tech jobs shed in the US during the last year, and (for the first time in several years) average IT workers pay is down by 11 percent - down from $71,000 to $63,000. There is some good news on the horizon - the survey of employers by the Information Technology Association of America says that more than a million IT jobs are going to be created in the coming year, taking employment back to pre-2001 levels."
concerning the Post report:
I'll believe it when I see it.
You just keep telling yourself that, and eventually it will happen :)
Free Mac Mini
The job market suddenly became very tight here in Columbus, OH. When my last contract ran out five weeks ago, I didn't realize that it would be so hard to find another position, but here I am, still sending out resumes.
Oh, and I am a decent coder with 18+ years of experience. I can imagine how hard it is going to be for the lackeys to find something...
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
I dont want to troll, but I feel the IT job cuts for the most part were a good way of cleaning out the underbrush so to speak. Good IT people are still finding jobs and getting work, the people who arent are for the most part not cut out for it. Now there are some examples, but look at me, I have no degree, 5 years of admin experience, 3 as a Unix admin, I went looking for a job, and it took a little while (I wasnt looking full time since I was still working) and I found 3 offers that I got to pick from...
I dont think it has been that hard for those who belong in the positions, just for those who held positions they had no right, education, experience or mindset for.
#include sig.h
While the article sees an upswing in the nearish future, I see a shift of a lot of technology jobs being farmed out to overseas operations. What this means for IT professionals in the US I don't know. But when you have US employees earning $63K yearly and foreign IT workers earning 10$ an hour to do the same work... things don't look so good.
I really wish I could run into a good NT guy, just to change my perception.
The last guy would reboot the NT server, because the mmc was crashing (He was installing a new Server App), and he didn't know how to kill it or something... "Umm that's the MMC crashing, why don't we just kill it instead of rebooting the server in the middle of the day?"
The 2nd to last guy I worked with spent who-knows-how-long screwing with 3Com diags on an NT box, before I plugged the network cable in for him.
Really fucking pitiful... And I don't even like NT. (I'm fucking cheap, but NT makes me want to run out and buy Netware)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I'd say the IT world is shedding the cruft. I hope I'm not cruft.
Software Wars
"Tech-workers" is such a broad category, according to this JavaPro article, Java programmers are earning more than ever and working less to get it.
However, I'm a Java programmer and I don't have a job so you can't rely on everything you read.
-Russ
Me
Where I'm at, theres no job opportunity in IT, but then, I didn't see the help wanted section of the Sunday paper recently. I do have a contact in the staffing industry and she informed me that even people with MCSE certification, Novell certification, and CS degrees are still unable to find gainful employment. While I was looking for my current job (which only pays about a third of the national average for IT), I was given the suggestion of relocating. That was not an option for me at the time because I didn't have money or the resources available to do a relocation. Once I get my year or two where I'm at right now, I'll be ready to move on.
I'll believe it when I can afford to buy a copy of the newspaper.
The dot-bomb caused the wage numbers for It to be inflated though. Over-paid employees working for a upstart that is spending it's venture-capitol like water had wages that made no sense and were purely for bragging rights.
we can expect to see IT wages to further drop on average to the $60- $62K with the bottom being around $38K and the top at $80K with some bizzare exceptions to the rule... (public Schol IT way underpaid with a few overpaid employees in the valley)
I highly doubt the "explosion" in IT jobs though.. I see a higher demand for really-good and expierienced It people and much less for MCSE's or other certs. time in the field is starting to have much more weight, as you are expected to run a department and be a tech at the same time. (3 offices, 200 workstations and 8 servers... I am the ONLY IT person/manager. God help the poor soul that tries to fill my shoes if I leave.... as management will say, "what do you mean you need help? the last guy did it by himself for 5 years!")
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Personally I agree with you. During the boom as little as two years ago, I read a lot of programmers protesting that they simply weren't prepared to take a five digit salary and that employers should bite the bullet and pay what the programmers thought they were worth.
The problem is that it's all crap. There's still a skills shortage, but now it's less pronounced salaries are beginning to get closer to decent levels, as a smaller choice means technical people are willing to take on jobs they weren't before.
With the exception of certain areas of the country where the dot-com boom and bust hit hard leaving a localised clump of highly skilled people, it's not difficult to get a job in programming, and you'll still earn a tremendous amount of money. Compare these "dreadful" $63,000 salaries to those of your non technical friends and family - unless you're living amongst lawyers and executives you're not likely to meet that many people on that kind of money.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
You guys do realize that $63k is still quite a bit of money, right? Think how much higher that is than, say, a teacher. I know I work awefully hard, but I can't be working as hard as some of my teachers seemed to, with as few benifts.
Mod point free since 2001
I'm an IT professional with 6.5 years of experience, who lost his job in the great downsizing. It's been a pain, but I've also learned a lot, especially by talking to companies, recruiters, and my fellow downsizees. This is what I've found - though your millage may vary.
.NET. I've also seen companies lose people because HR moves to slow - losing people in THIS economy.
First, even with the job cuts, IT is a huge and unavoidable part of the economy. It will inevitably recover because IT is too important. It will expand because IT has definitely not met the limits of what it can do.
Second, some of the cuts done were extremely unwise and are backfiring on companies already. I hear stories of patches not being released, remaining staff members working on maintenance instead of improvement or expansion, etc.
Third, one of the biggest barriers to hiring now is the HR department. Consulting companies, recruiters, and potential employees are confronted with slow processes, poor interviews, and HR departments that do not know what they're talking about technology-wise. Nothing like having someone ask you if you have two years of Windows 2000 or
Fourth, as the article notes, many companies have largely screwed themselves in their approach to IT. IT, in my experience, has a high turnover rate, and these recent activities only encourage people to leave IT and avoid IT. Without training, their employees won't have skills (while some of us hardcores will practice our code while we flip burgers or cash our unemployment checks). They'll have to break down and hire knowledgeable people.
In my experience, the market has already started opening up, especially for people with 3+ years of experience. Give it another year and IT will be back to where it was and then some - because, even if people don't like it, they need us.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
There is some good news on the horizon - the survey of employers by the Information Technology Association of America says that more than a million IT jobs are going to be created in the coming year...
:D
And, why, exactly, should we trust an entity with an acronym like ITAA?
I think it's just a ploy by the RIAA and MPAA to get geeks to stop downloading music and movies and go back to looking for jobs, using the Internet for what it was designed for, like spamming resumes...
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
they're not saying that pre-2001 *hype* will return, just the employment levels... i.e. number of jobs. That doesn't sound unreasonable. Companies will continue invest in IT projects, as there is real return on careful and reasoned investment.
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
- down from $71,000 to $63,000.
I hope those in this situation have enough decency to shut up. 63K US is kind of just a dream to me, I'm making 42K CAN and I think I am making good money. Hey, I'm making more then both my parents together! I have a little car, a digicam, my good ol' computer, what can I ask more?!? Yeah, I used to dream of making 1K US a week, driving an Audi TT and living in a big house. And I was mad that I was not earning enough, fast enough. Then, recently, things went bad around the world, I kept reading about unemployement. One of my cousin lost it's job last year and he is still searching a new one. He got nothing more then a few little contract of 2-3 weeks. It change my mind, that is the only good thing about all this (for me). Now I'm placing some money, I enjoy what I actually have because tomorrow it could all change. Honestly, I would accept 63K US any day, but I really don't need it...
I'd rather be sailing...
Well, for one thing I'd consider the source. The ITAA has a vested interest in hyping industry growth. While most of us smell unfettered bias in studies underwritten by certain other notorious associations (RIAA) we shouldn't be blinded by our desire for this projection to be true.
If the results were different (say a 10% market reduction) would the study be getting this much attention?
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
The average pay of an IT worker is $63,000?
Bl$$dy hell, I'm the best paid programmer in the company and I'm only on 2/3rds of that.
I'd love to know where these 'average' jobs are available...
Factories are designed to make their workers into interchangeable parts.
Having worked on many, many software projects, I don't think programmers are going to become fungable anytime soon. There is too much variation in talent.
I can't say about other parts of IT.
...with no experience and a MCSE. They say that there are over 45 million unfilled IT jobs in my town of 250,000 alone, and for the measly price of $45,000, I can get an A+ and an MCSE and be the CIO of a Fortune 500 company tommorow. Golly gee willikers!
That's a real problem -- too many unskilled entry-level folks are flooding the job pool. And most certifications are as useless as used Kleenex.
I've been jumping from one sinking ship to another the last couple of years. I've managed to spend less than 2 weeks total unemployed between jobs, but the pay has been unsatisfactory and I'm constantly aware of the fact wherever I am is not a very solid position. I finally found a pretty solid company, but I got in under a situation which will be resolved in a few months and therefore my services are no longer required, so I've started circulating my resume again... If what they said is true, maybe I'll have an easier time of it. Of course, we keep hearing this again and again, but maybe for once they will be right. I have noticed an increase in open positions and a couple of companies lifting hiring freezes.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Wow. Just down in the road in Dayton, OH, those of us on the air force base can't find enough qualified IT people. Have you considered working in civil service for a while? The pay's pretty good at the IT level.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Developers seem to be much worse off. It's a lot easier to cancel new development, so new development has been cut down to the bone.
Maintenance programming is still going on, but if you're a developer in new software and you're out of work, things are very very tough right now. There are still some jobs of course, but the competition is very intense.
While the market is certainly not as hot as a year and a half ago, when we were making $120K offers to some star candidates, the number of resumes we get for open position is still on the low side and quite often not one of them is qualified for the position.
This in contrast with eight years ago, when you had your choice of which expert to hire at a very affordable $50-60K per head...
I understand getting Java certified or MSCE to get through the door but at the end of the day you have to deliver, you have to stay current and from the software side of things, this industry is about solving problems.
I can't blame anyone for taking advantage of the last few years, more power to them but there are a lot of people who are going to make a lot less money in their new, non-IT, jobs and that's a bitter pill to swallow.
Moore's law is a bitch. You think you can get a certificate, get a high paying job doing nothing and keep it? I'm a developer with a real degree and I feel like I need to put a huge effort into staying on top of everything and do my job. I enjoy it and that's why I do it but don't think it's just a cake walk or something. It's definitely more than 40hours a week.
Because the going rate for new hires increased faster than the raise structure of most companies, older workers got screwed (as a former colleague put it, "Last In, Wins"). Doesn't give much incentive for someone to be 'the loyal employee' any more.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
One thing that is often forgotten in IT jobs is that your non-IT skills actually make a difference on a job. You can be the greatest coder, but coding is not everything. You need planning and organizational skills, you need people skills, you need business skills in order to work within a company.
they're not saying that pre-2001 *hype* will return, just the employment levels... i.e. number of jobs. That doesn't sound unreasonable. Companies will continue invest in IT projects, as there is real return on careful and reasoned investment.
Why do you think that employment will return to the Y2K-Elevated pre-2001 levels? Seems like the over-investment in Y2K IT fallout is what we're dealing with here, and I'd be suprised if we don't end up with 1998 employment levels. (with some upward adjustment for the honest to goodness benefits that can come from automation and improved communication).
... at least for applications development and support ... American workers are being replaced with H1-B visa imports. It's more commonplace, and it's happened at the last 3 shops I've worked at, and in once case my position was replaced with an H1-B visa holder - the firm there doesn't like to use the term "outsourcing", they prefer to term it out-tasking. The bulk of the programmer team resides offshore (in India, or Maylaysia, or Indonesia, or Mexico ...), while a few business analysts and lead level (which are mostly staffed by H1-B visa workers employed by the contracted offshore firm).
Here's a list of prominent Fortune 500 companies that have moved all or a significant portion of their application support and development programmer staff offshore, that I and/or friends have had firsthand experience with:
The trend seems to be to move data center and system programming operations to the likes of IBM but to move the application coding development and support to offshore vendors. I can't speak for smaller/medium sized firms, but at the big corporate shops, this is a certainly a constant for contemporary times.
Sorry if it appears that I'm ranting, as this issue has affected me personally and it sucks watching friends and colleagues struggle to find work, unemployed for entirely too long now, about to lose their house if their wife/husband don't have a good income and they can go back to school to learn another craft. It's really disguisting to see foreign labor still imported and populate the workplace when these experienced individuals go hurting. Especially when those brought in or those who work in foreign centers aren't even close as qualified - with unverifiable references and doctored qualifications. Yes, it's gets personal when you study and work hard to put bread on the table for your family and you are powerless to stop the curtailment of opportunity. Being programmers, it's our nature to be independent and introverted, and that works against us - as I couldn't conjure up a scenario where this would occur with um, let's say truck drivers. There'd be blood in the streets.
But to hear all of the politicos du jour speak, it's simply a matter of education! Poppycock. In the new paradigms of globalization, it really doesn't matter, as "knowledge" jobs can be moved just as easy, if not easier, than manufacturing jobs. There's some deeper questions that need to be asked and answered in the new century. Else we end up in a universally feudalistic model, with a small fortunate few and the the rest of us left to fend off eachother for the few morsels tossed our way ...
And the ITAA are nothing more than tech industry lobbyist shrills, who have only the interest of employers at hand, and care not for the tech worker.
Here is an open letter to Mr. Harris Miller of the ITAA, in response to blatant misinformation propagated by him and other lobbyist shills.
AZspot
"Industry Standard" Paycuts in IT? makes good companion reading here.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Yeah but my old company (IT Consulting) is cutting all the people with degrees, and keeping all the losers who'll never be able to get another job like it. Granted, they'll be closing their doors by the end of the year with that strategy - but that's what they're doing.
I'm a 2000 man.
These are the same people who said that 450,000 jobs went >unfilled last year because there were not enough qualified technical people. Let's get some truth on the scene here (previously linked from slashdot here, here, and here). The ITAA is an industry spokes-puppet which is trying to spread a misconception that there is no jobs shortage, and that there is no unemployment, so that the industry can beg Congress for more slave labor force called H-1B. And I'm not referring to merely having more people than there are jobs. The real danger of the H-1B program the ITAA is constantly promoting is the fact that employees under this program:
That last one is especially sinister because it means that the usual market forces, supply and demand, and competition for skills, is NOT allowed to function for H-1B workers, giving employers a windfall of what is essentially cheap slave labor. They are hired into jobs the employers claim require extended skills, and paid only the average programmer salary (not the near double amounts such skills would normally draw) because the H-1B law only requires the average to be paid based on all programmers (not specifically those with the required skills).
In other words, what the ITAA is spouting is a bunch of crock.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
From my view, things got bad in early 2001 in general in DC. (And they had gone bad up and down the east coast in mid-2000 for the manufacturing sector that I used to work in.) They are turning upwards; the various on-line job site (like DC.Techies.Com) are now consistently turning up a dozen or two jobs consistent with my profile every week, a big boost over what it was a year ago.
Problem is, a lot of the businesses that have folded up over the last couple of years have been heavily tech-dependent (e-commerce companies and such) - when the shakeout came, IT jobs were disproportionately affected. In a way, it's been the opposite of previous recessions, where the jobs lost were at the high end of the food chain. Since the normal pattern over time is for economies and businesses to grow, ultimately jobs will be added, but at a more reasonable clip than happened in the bubble. That doesn't help a lot if you're out of work today, though.
After all, they're called bubbles at least partly because they pop at some point.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The "armies of rebooters" are a byproduct of the cost-savings that came from the client-server revolution. Killing the big glass room had a price tag associated with it: We put way too much intelligence into the client side and then expected a dumbed-down OS to keep the whole thing running. OK, we learn our lessons and move on. A more stable OS, thin clients, platform independence, smarter servers, centralized storage of data -- the return of the glass room. Back in the early 90's I predicted that people wanted PCs (instead of ASCII terminals) on their desktops only to get a GUI interface -- that local CPU power would be mostly wasted and installing local copies of front-end software would prove to be more of a liability than an asset.
Go back a few yuears, everyone is trying to get on "that Internet thing". High demand for programmers/web designers/sysadmins drives up salaries. Dot coms go bust, there's flood of new IT graduates into the market and companies are cutting pack on web presence. Demand for IT professionals drops and salaries begin to drop. I know a guy who did some very innovative work at Ask Jeeves who's about to be evicted because he can't find a job in his field.
There's no grand conspiracy here.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
As far as the ITAA report which said IT jobs will grow - bullshit! The ITAA is the *enemy* folks, they're the ones who lobbied to bring in hundreds of thousands of H1B's, they're the ones that did away with overtime laws for "computer operators", they're the one fighting to keep section 1706 in tax code (which drives independent consultants into body shops) and so forth. The ITAA is lying - the ITAA is who was talking about shortages for years before the current glut. Don't you people see the commercials on TV talking about a technical career while everyone is being laid off or getting pay cuts? Don't you all realize there is a massive deception going on - wonderful careers in IT are being advertised for while things for the profession get worse and worse?
I can't believe that the same BULLSHIT that that the ITAA has been saying for the past several years has made it to the front page of Slashdot. I know it is on dice.com's front page and other places - they made their bullshit report recently to counter things like Representative Tancredo's legislation that would tie H1B caps to the unemployment rate (which is the highest in 8 years).
So you morons who think you're some kind of programming super-genius who is a "hard worker" and is some kind of socially retarted dork who puts all his self-value in how much computer skills he has - can you please explain why not only jobs are being cut but why salaries are being cut? It's called supply and demand, folks, and the ITAA has been at the forefront of raising the supply of workers, hours worked by them, and their mobility (especially that of H1Bs or those who would like to be independent consultants).
Now, most IT professionals I talk to don't want to form a union (collective bargaining association) which leaves us with one solution - a professional association, just like the doctors (AMA) and lawyers (ABA) have. No, not the IEEE, they've sold out to corporate sponsors when they had efforts to lower the H1-B cap killed. The Programmers Guild is the best organization I've seen of this type. Joining together and fighting for our profession against the ITAA is the only solution.
My web page, the Oncall Guild, has more information about all of this, mostly links to good sources of information about non-technically related things to our profession. If you want to be part of a million individual super-genius hard-working dork programmer lemmings headed off a cliff, be my guest, if you want to join together with other engineers and fight the employer-financed ITAA in a non-union association, join the Programmers Guild and read the information on my web site.
Never forget that:
Seastead this.
Where are you located? A $40K salary would be pretty comfortable in Iowa, and $63K is going to be tight in Silicon Valley. If you are not in the US, consider also the strength of the US dollar. Considering the exchange rate, cost of living and housing, things may not look so bad.
After being in the business for over 10 years, and being on unemployment for the first time in my life, it's a VERY humbling experience. Especially the fact that I have mouths to feed, and a mortgage to pay. And, to top things off, The Labor board is requesting a meeting w/ me to make sure I'm lookng for work! Do they think I LIKE getting $375 a week instead of $1400 a week? Don't they realize that I do NOT want to be on unemployment? Jeez!
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
It's 1996 Compaq hardware, with PPros that LIKELY have failing VRUs.
Trollbutt.
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
The problem has several facets, some of which are of our own making and some of which are endemic to the software development approach, tooling, management and processes. Our problems start with a point-of-view which I discuss last.
.
.
Until this point is addressed, we can expect artificial pénurie perpetrated to keep H1B immigration up and salaries down while the local job market is being slashed to increase worker competition, and outsourcing to the developing nations, like India.
1) Productivity. MIS productivity sucks. MIS, or Informatics or Data Processing or what ever nom-de-jour you want to use, has always been and is still being run like a trade/craft, producing hand-crafted little gems when what's needed is art by the yard.
2) Cost. As if the speed of delivery wasn't bad enough, the costs of a craft style production system are ultimately way beyond the ROI.
3) Management. MIS (mis-)management is and has always been the blind leading the ignorant. I have witnessed intercine inter and intra departmental battles worthy of medieval knights. There were no hacked off limbs (a paper cut is an occupational hazard in D.P. though when its your pink slip it cuts pretty damn deep) but people's lives have been ruined, if not ended. But that doesn't get the job done and in the end, that's what counts.
4) Policies and Procedures that proceed by divide and conquer which cut out anything which is not entirely germaine to a system's implementation are fundamentally destructive and self-defeating. The parts of any system that deserve focus are not those parts that are entirely self contained but those that interface with other systems. This ties in with the next point.
5) Architecture Its amusing that in an industry which uses and develops systems built so heavily on soit-disant relational data bases management systems (DB2, Oracle, Ingres, PostGreSQL and others,) nobody seems to understand what a relationship is
Our systems keep focusing on the objects of a system without ever developping an understanding of the relationships involved, and the objects are basically and fundamentally monotonic and uninteresting while the relationships are what's important in a system design.
But our entire academic curriculum can't come up with or teach better, more descriptive and more realistic names for them than: is-a, has-a, has-some
To draw a parallel with something we all see every day, there is nothing in the CompSci curriculum which teaches the difference between:
a) a pallet of bricks and a sack of concrete on a loading dock,
b) a common garden wall
c) the Cuppola of the Piazza Duomo in Florence Italy, the largest free-standing brick and mortar dome in the world, a masterpiece of Renaissance architecture and where, on its very steps, were born the mathematics and practice of artistic perspective.
What's the difference? Its not the bricks. Its not the mortar. Its the relationships between the bricks.
Until the profession wakes up to that fact, integrates relationships as first class objects into the analysis, documentation, design and implementation of systems and starts being serious about reusing components, they're doomed in a downward spiral of H1B immigration, cost-cutting, off-shore out-sourcing and people simple doing without.
The world can't afford little hand crafted gems. It can barely afford art-by-the-yard.
Think! http://wage.packet.org/ wander round the wiki.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
How can we increase jobs when we have over 1 MILLION third-world immigrants per year??? 1 million. Does anyone realize the population explosion that is occuring? and will occur within the next few years? The US tries to save the third world. However, there are 800 MILLION third worlders. The 1 million we take in a year doesnt even leave a dent. I am NOT against immigration. I'm against MASS immigration. What happened to the 200,000 per year we used to have the past 50 years? When we needed immigrants? Pollution, Jobs, Traffic, are some of the MANY things that get affected by mass immigration. If they can add jobs, where are they getting them from? Are they going to bring all the companies that went to Mexico because of NAFTA? I don't think so
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Hmm, I can just speak as a currently out-of-work UNIX admin. Here's the way my salary progression went:
:) In any case, this was the height of the dot-com boom, and this was another dot-com.
1994-95: $20/hour working contract for a small ISP doing sales & support.
1995-1996: $13.50 an hour, but full-time work, with a small screwdriver shop in Las Vegas doing UNIX (my first experiences), Windows, and Netware support. We were heavy into Netware.
1996-1999: $37,000/year plus bonusses. (Note that this equates to roughly $18 an hour). Was a unix/linux/windows/netware network admin for a now out-of-business computer game company called Singletrac. They were the ones that did the original Twisted Metal series for the Playstation. Unfortunately, they over-expanded, sought a buyer, lost major talent, dried up. The usual "game house that gets too big for their britches" syndrome.
1999-2001: $55,000 a year. Shot the moon in the interview and they gave it to me; I thought I had won the lottery!. Was doing UNIX support exclusively, and got to run the systems administration team (that was fun!). Got regular raises up to $77,000 a year by the time I left for the next big thing. The company was thirty seconds from doom anyway, but many got ticked off that I jumped out of the tub while they were circling the drain
2001: $85,000 a year. Telecommuted to a small Silicon Valley company. I was all fired up about it, but I discovered that telecommuting is not really for me.
2001-2002: $85,000 a year. Worked for a tech startup here in Salt Lake City, Utah. They were still coasting off the dot-com boom, but just barely shut down. Did UNIX and Cisco support mostly.
At this point, I almost consider my salary history a liability. Realistically, my family would get along just fine on US $45,000 a year. More money than that is really nice, but it's gravy beyond our expenses. We're a typical middle-America family, three kids, no car payments, house payment, student loans, etc. I expect at my next job that I'll get somewhere between $65,000 to $75,000, and that will be just fine. The ride was nice while it lasted, but with my experience, I was overpaid.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
I can only hold down one job at a time (well I could do more, but it isn't easy, and doesn't fit in with what I call my life) I don't care about fewer jobs, so long as there is one job that needs someone with my exact qualifications.
Unfortunatly my boss informs me that I'm already in that job, and have very little chance of finding a different one in todays market (But at least you have a job, unlike a lot of people you know), so he can treat my like dirt.
Lowering costs helps company X put companies Y and Z out of business. Once that happens. you have less choice, so you have to put up with lower quality.
As a programmer of Indian origin, I feel somewhat qualified to comment. Before I get to my main point, I need to provide a bit of a preface. Programmers from India that come with an engineering degree typically are much better at the problem solving and analysis that are required in IT than are folks from a sciences and the arts. The reason for this is that engineering and medicine are typically the higher (far higher in the case of compute related stuff) paying professions and the competition for admissions to these courses are fierce. In a process of evolutionary selection, typically the candidates better suited to problem solving and analysis are the ones that make it through to even getting admission to the professional schools.
Granted, as in every other field, a percentage of those admitted to egineering are duds. But statistically speaking, the odds are really good that someone from an engineering background in India is Good at IT. Conversely, the people who dont get into engineering and medicine are typically less suited to IT.
And now onto my point....
Coming from an enginering background myself, and having worked for one of the companies that do offshore development, I noticed a curious phenomenon amongst my (then) colleagues. The vast majority of them had scorn for the skills and capabilities of the average IT worker. I didnt understand this until I came to the US myself. Then I realized that the average IT worker in the US is more likely to be a former third grade teacher who sought a better paying profession than a graduate of engineering. My (then) colleagues were falling into the trap of comparing apples to oranges. They were comparing themselves and their colleagues (who were mainly with engineering backgrounds) to people who werent, and of course, in that comparison, the US worker came out short.
The correct way of comparing things would have been to look at where the people with engineering backgrounds (and in the US, this is only a rough indicator of problem solving and analytical skills, I know) went, and then, comparing themselves to the skill and efficiency of those workers. When I did that comparison myself, I found that there really was no inequity between the US and the Indian worker.
You (and many others) seem to have fallen into a similar trap : you are equating all Indian offshore companies without recognizing quality differences. This would be something like comparing IBM to Poppa and Momma IT Inc. The company that I had worked for hired really good people. There are companies from India in the same field that hire predominantly from the Arts and Sciences fields and because of the competition I mentioned before, the people that they get arent (statistically speaking) as good as the really good ones. So, the conclusion is, you can get really good work done at really cheap prices, provided you pick the right company!
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
They came after the web developers, but I was not a web developer, and I did not object.
They came after the Java enthusiasts, but I was not a Java enthusiast, and I did not object.
They came after the open source developers, but I was not an open source developer, and I did not object.
Then they came after the ordinary, decent programmer, and there was no-one left to object for me.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Quick answer: variations in the cost of living. The problem is that the cities in the US with the bulk of the tech jobs are, even now, well after the dot-bomb, horribly overpriced. Now, obviously, cost of living varies from place to place in Europe, too, but at least in England (don't know about the continent) the variations aren't quite as extreme. (Well, except for London and not-London, which is about as extreme a variation as you'll find within any one country ...) So what might be a decent salary by overall US standards is jack shit in the cities where most of the IT jobs actually are.
I live in Denver, which is not by current high-tech American city standards a terribly expensive place to live -- and my wife and I live in a one-bedroom condo that is currently worth ~$150,000. If we buy a house, which we'd like to do soon, we're looking at a minimum of $200,000 to get something decent, and probably more than that. Figure out the numbers and you'll see why current US IT salaries for us grunts aren't astronomical at all.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
While you bemoan the growing dominance of foreign programmers, note that foreigners bemoan the dominance of American IT. "All these American computers when we could build our own, slap restrictions on their import!" America makes a lot of money exporting IT products abroad.
So if we make money selling products and services abroad, is it so terrible that other countries do the same? That's the way the global free market works. If we try to restrict foreign programmers, you can be sure they will slap tarrifs back on our products.
In general, I find most people have a very naive idea of the way things work: they assume America is God's Country (TM) and so we will always make tons of money and all the other nations will always be reduced to begging for scraps. The reality is that the rise of America coincided with a very strange period for others: colonization and WWII. As countries have rebuilt after the devastation of colonization and WWII, expect more competition for America and a more even distribution of capabilities and wealth.
Lies about crimes
The reason teachers get paid 31k/year for 10 months (Yes, I know it's hard making a living on that, and they have to take summer jobs, but you didn't say what she earns there, so it doesn't count) is simple - supply and demand - they can obviously get enough teachers of the quality they want (they meaning the people paying the taxes) for $31k! If they couldn't, they would have to raise the pay scale.
Some people ARE willing to pay more - and we move into areas with better schools, which usually have higher taxes
One thing I find fairly interesting is that in NYC, the bottom performing schools get significantly more money/student that the top performing schools! The interesting part however is this - More money gets to the CLASSROOM in the schools that perform well than the schools that perform poorly! (Can you say corrupt bureaucracy?)
Please excuse any mistakes on this, but I'm on some fairly nasty drugs right now, and can barely stay awake
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Personally, I have never enrolled into college. However that does not mean that I have no spent the last three years of my life trying to read/learn/expirement with everything and anything I can.
I feel that for someone with 5 years of Tech backround, three in unix, I have learned a lot. I usually have no troubles holding my own against a college graduate. But in the general sense, I fall into this "under brush" category.
Think about this, people like myself, we do truly do this for the love of labor. There was no driving force of college, just myself and a box. My own internal drive to learn and educate myself. To me these are sometimes more often the people that will really excel due to the motivation it took to get this far in the first place and the remaining drive of learning everything you can in an industry that advances as quickly as this one.
I just think that perhaps before you stand on your Berkely soap box, that sometimes you should appreciate there are more important things in knowledge/skill/education than college.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
I don't know about the US at the moment, but I've heard much the same said of the UK, and it's certainly not true here.
A guy I used to know was laid off, and sent his CV off to dozens of agencies. He got only one interview, and moaned about it for days.
That sounds harsh, until you realise that he wanted to work the same five minutes from the office he always had (after taking the piss out of those of us who commute for years), expected at least as high a salary as he was on before (in spite of the fact that he'd been paid considerably more than the going rate for his skill and experience for some time) and so on.
I, and several other friends, have been looking at moving over the past few months, but we've been more flexible about location, package, and so on. None of us has had any problems finding interviews.
A lot of people complain that it's impossible to get jobs at the moment, people are very lucky to find them, etc. I'm sure, for some people, that's genuinely true. If they have families to support, a mortgage to pay and so on, moving can be hard, and I sympathise.
OTOH, a lot of these people are just whining because their massively overpaid jobs have run out, and now they're going to have to compromise with employers like the rest of us. For these people, I have little sympathy, I'm afraid. All they do is piss off those who do have jobs, and weaken the case of those who don't because of genuine bad luck.
At the end of the day, no-one has any right to be employed just because of some piece of paper they have or some item of experience on their resume. Your skills and experience are only valuable if someone needs to use them. If they don't, you either develop new skills and experience that are useful, or you relocate to somewhere where your existing skills are sought. It's not a hard concept, and whether or not we like it, it happens to be the way the world works. All we can do is deal with it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
No, no, Kleenex is useful. You can wipe your nose with it. It has a reason for existence, and what it is supposed to do, it does well.
People who get a certification without having any real experience have no purpose. Get some experience, THEN get a certification. That makes it worth something to indicate that you learned some stuff in your years on the job.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
Heck I'm an electrical engineer, do I consider myself an IT worker? HELL NO, it would be nice if the general public (and /.) made the disctinction.
to me IT isn't even programing, its the guys who do server/pc support maintenance, upgrades etc. Skills like that are more of a commodity, being a good programmer/engineer is not. For every design engineer you have several test/systems engineers who test their work(design engineers get paid more in general).
When did IT equate engineering and programing? They are not the same! Repeat again! They are not the same!
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
There is alot of reasons for that. A large bueracracy is one of them.
In poor (as in poverty) schools, alot of money is spent running health clinics and providing social and mental health services that comes right out of the schools budget.
In addition, there is often higher numbers of disabled children for whom the school must legally provide alot of expensive services for.
In NYC you have other peculiarities. School custodians purchase personal vehicles with school district funds and steer lucrative coal (yes, many NYC schools are still heated with coal) oil and food service contracts to friends, amoung other things.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
and give them visas.
....
Do the math - H1b Visa Programs are merely an attempt to get cheap labor and not pay for American workers.
If you want high tech people to immigrate and become American citizens - those with advanced degrees - great!
But instead we cut down on US jobs for American IT workers and don't cut the H1B jobs.
Follow the money
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I'm not going to be surprised if I get all of 2002 off.
I ended a lucrative contract in December, and was planning to hang out until February, but the offers coming in were lame.
Management doesn't understand that it can't improve its business' efficiency by interfering, it can only brake it.
If the job-creation projections are right, I should be getting offers at an attractive rate just about the time my sabbatical fund is down to the 6-month get-a-job-dumbass cushion.
But if it's wrong and I start looking askance at my retirement accounts, hey, framing hammers are cheap, and day-labor that speaks English is the first in the back of the truck.
--Blair
"Income averaging, the Welfare of the '00s."
We DID have coal till last year - they are now gone
Charlie
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
You're doomed. I've been doomed since I graduated in December 2001. Never a bite on any job I applied to, online or otherwise.
So you'd better contact your local retail businesses, because it's going to be a long search for a job. Hopefully your parents won't mind having you back for a while, if not you'll have to bunk up with multiple roommates in some cheap apartment, have no car, and live paycheck to paycheck.
Don't worry about that economic upswing - I'm sure the government can import enough H1-B's to take care of that. Yes, I'm in a bad mood today.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
The $15,000 chemical engineer. *sigh*
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Thanks, I'm glad you appreciated it! The simple fact is, people were paying for someone with 5 years of experience what required 15 years of experience before -- and the network administration field has only been around as a viable career choice for around 12 or 14 years. Netware was the king of the hill from 1988 to 1996, with NT bringing up the rear but gaining fast frmo 1996 to 1998. After 98, Microsoft gained the lead in commodity server operating systems. However, for larger corporations, UNIX has been and will continue to be the standard by which all others are measured :)
The basic thrust of my post was to say: don't feel bad. At this point in my career, I value stability over finances so that I can plan for the future, sock away enough money for retirement, and build my side business in my spare time.
Realize too there is a wide disparity in the type and quality of network administrators. Run-of-the-mill Windows NT/2K/XP admins are really hard to find jobs over $60,000 in the Salt Lake City area. Most hover around $40,000. However, if you are a UNIX admin or information systems security specialist, particularly with major, relevant certifications, it really helps a LOT. A CCNA, CCIE, or RHCE is a really big plus. And you can't "fake" your way or "study" your way into passing some of these critical certifications; you *must* have practical problem solving experience, since for some of the higher-end certifications you are thrust into a lab to fix these machines. The Cisco stuff is particularly grueling, but no certification is a "blank check" like some of those MCSE puppy mills had people think.
My opinion: Silicon Valley inflates wages a LOT. Take any salary figure which is representative of your skills and experience which you get from those online polls and chop about 20-30% off the top (at least) to get what would be a reasonable salary for you. A lot of it boils down to negotiating skills since it is MUCH easier to negotiate a higher salary with another company than to negotiate the same raise with your current employer. For the next 12-18 months though, I wouldn't try to job-hop! It stinks.
Well, I hope this was informative at least for somebody.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
Well, like I said, it's not that bad everywhere in the US -- just in the places where high-tech jobs are. Non-high-tech workers in such cities either work at jobs where they make good salaries -- lots of yuppies who barely know how to turn on a computer make a lot more money than I do -- or they live in Godawful cheap apartments and pray nothing bad happens month to month so they can make the rent. (Note than generally in American English usage, you own a "condo" but rent an "apartment.") There are plenty of decent places to live in the US where my salary alone would be enough to buy a nice big house for my wife and me, with money left over. Unfortunately, while there are some jobs to be had in those places, they're not programming jobs.
The relatively high population density and good public transportation have probably kept this situation from developing to the same degree in Europe. Although it sounds like to actually buy a house is as bad in Luxembourg as it is here, if not worse. I don't know, the American attitude toward having an actual, individual, free-standing, single-family house is probably kind of unusual in the world.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I can understand off-shore outsourcing, but this H1B thing is pure crap. ITAA *made up* numbers pulled from their arse to manufacture a "labor shortage".
IOW, they lied to congress to kiss up to MS et al.
We cannot stop off-shore work, but to keep bringing in lower-wage indentured servants to take away taxpaying citizen's jobs is a crying shame.
Slavery Has Returned. It is called H1-B.
Table-ized A.I.
(* Hey, it's called globalization. And globalization makes the world a better place for all us. At least I always thought so... *)
Globalization says nothing about importing cheaper *workers*.
If the gov tried to do that with say bus or truck drivers, you can rest assured heads would roll in the capital. Geeks have no political teeth, so we get it in the behind.
Soon: "First Wallmart sold cheap products from the East. Now they sell cheap workers from the East. Save 30 percent by getting the 12-pack, still in the original boa....um packaging."
Table-ized A.I.
Your sig fits just fine. Try another. Thank you for using a sig.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Don't feel discouraged by that magazine survey. The analysis in it is horrible and doesn't normalize the data based on cost-of-living. Also, the numbers posted are salary+benefits, which counters our salary-centric thinking. Trust me, inflation still needs a lot of time before the average American programmer is earning $90,000/year.
The cost-of-living index in the U.S. easily ranges from 0.9 to 2.5. Approximately 2.5 would be for cities like New York, approximately 2.0 would be for Chicago, while 0.9 would be for a rural town in the southern U.S. Literally, New York requires 2.5 times the salary to live well than the rural southern town. The magazine survey simply ignores this fact, leaving everyone who lives in rural southern towns look poor. This couldn't be further from the truth, since it is easy to argue that the quality of life outside the city is better--less stressful, friendlier people, etc.
In general, I think magazine surveys like this are published to look good rather than to be useful. Each time I see one, I feel bad for all the college students who will see it and question their worth at a time when they are already under stress. The publishers really should either not publish these articles or, at least, hire an statistician/economist to make the numbers realistic.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
This same thing has been happening with engineers too, not just IT people. The language barrier still causes lots of inefficiency though. If a business starts recruiting workers from outside the US for their US business, I have no problem with it - assuming the person really is the best suited for the job. If it's simply done as a cost-cutting measure (AKA. We only have to pay these guys X amount instead of Y!), they're being shortsighted. The poor English skills many of these people possess causes countless wasted hours redoing work due to misinterpretations of a manager's instructions, or inability to read English documentation.
I've run into Novell CNE's who didn't even know how to delete or rename files at a DOS command prompt.
I've also met CNE's who were absolutely brilliant though. As usual, having the certification doesn't really amount to a hill of beans, in and of itself. The only reason, IMHO, you might have better luck with CNE's than MCSE's is because the CNE isn't hyped up much anymore. People choosing to get certified in it nowdays do so typically because they already work hands-on in a Novell environment and desire to become better at it.
Everyone wanted the MCSE after all the radio and newspaper ads promised you an instant high-paying career job just by passing the exams.
If companies were smart, they'd test potential new hires themselves - and not be concerned with the possession of these certs. Ask them what *you* want to know if they know!
I've never thought they were the same. In fact, where I'm at, we have a seperate dept. for software development and IT.
Nonetheless, many good IT people have to know at least a little bit about programming of one type or another. For example, maybe you're writing complex batch files to automate processes on a server, or maybe you're working with SQL statements, or debugging troublesome macros in Excel? This isn't the same as application development, but it does take some of the same skills as programming. Often, it's skills like this that seperate the "senior" level IT staff from the rest.