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Post-crash Salary Survey
MrRules writes "It's that time again;
the 2002 salary survey's are out.
This year there's an interesting twist:
SAGE,
SANS and Sun's
BigAdmin site have combined to run the largest global
participation sysadmin salary survey ever done.
What I like is that this is different to those surveys
done by HR departments -- this is real data on how you
spend your time, by sysadmins for sysadmins. It'll be interesting to see how things have changed over the past 18 months."
Don't know about you but I get worried that this is as good as it gets salary wise, after big jumps through the bubble it's quite possible that this is the pinnacle of our (techies) earning potential for a long time to come (I know boo hoo, but still a strange position to be in)
In my last job which I left a few months back there had been a pay freeze on for 3 years. Whilst the price of good went up our wages stayed the same so in essence we were taking a pay cut. Going from what I've been hearing frm other people who are looking is that people are offering pretty much the same of down. Thats the way I'm reading it.
The economy is down and as there are so many people desperate to get jobs companies know they can offer lower rates and there will normally be someone who will be able to do the job well and except whatever the company is willing to pay.
I would be interested to know if there were still any growth areas but I think not apart from prehaps skills in very specialised subjects
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
I had to take a position as Sysadmin, Oracle DBA, Developer (mostly java) in order to keep my phony baloney 6 figures salary when my dot.com went dot.bellyup. Are there still jobs out there where you're just doing systems administration?
Over the same period I've had four ten percent "take it or leave us" pay cuts, leaving me with a huge dent in my take-home pay.
How are other programmers faring? What's your plan? I'm sticking where I am for the time being and DEFINITELY plan to move on as soon as the market picks up.
It won't suprise me at all if this survey shows negligable changes in salaries over the last 12 months - companies prefer to make redundancies to cutting wages as the effect on moral of those who are left is much less.
However, if the statistics were an equivalent of GDP for IT industry professionals (i.e. an estimate of the total take home pay of the profession) then the figures would almost certainly be utterly horrible.
According to www.jobsmeta.co.uk and www.jobstats.co.uk advertised vacancies in the UK are running around 50% of the middle of last year - in addition the hourly rate/annual salaries have also slipped (due to simple supply/demand). It wouldn't suprise me if IT-GDP (for want of a better term) was down 20-30% on the year.
Really this is just a way of saying things are tough all over - I'd like not to complain, but as one of the many people who are looking at the moment this market sucks and the reasons can't really be reduced to simple one-liners or attributed to anyone/thing in particular.
Right now a couple of months off to get some R&R thats been lacking over the last 5 years doesn't go amiss - but in a couple more I'm likely to get really flexible in what I'll look at just to avoid going mad at home. My main concern isn't a pay-cut (my essential bills are around 30% of my last salary) - but I don;t want to take a job outside of my key skills, people pay a huge amount of attention to your last role so it would be like writting off my career to date.
In the mean time I'm doing the odd day of freelance work - its not a lot but its covering the bills.
I guess we'll see where we end up.
Actually, maybe not. I'm a sysadmin in the Navy (IT2, that's SGT to you, ground pounder), and with BAQ, BHA, BAS, completely free medical, per diem, 30 days vacation a year, and so forth and so on, I'm making roughly the equilivant of about $50,000 a year. There are some sysad jobs out there now making far less than that, and my last civilian job didn't pay much more.
:)
Of course, being in a hostile fire zone (read: no taxes) helps some.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
" My salary declined 100% to 0 FUCKING DOLLARS per hour, week, month AND year. And i'm pretty sure its a republicans fault."
you may be more right then you think
War is necrophilia.
Of course, being in a hostile fire zone (read: no taxes) helps some. :)
Until some of that hostile fire comes your way. No thanks, my life is worth more than ~$1K/month to me.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It depends on what your field is.
For regular bussinesmen its a recession. For IT workers its not just a crash but a depression. Not only are our jobs being cut but we are being outsourced to India at the same time. The good news is that the pay rate is so rediclously low that many people who went into IT for the money will leave. This leaves true geeks left assuming they have college degrees and years of experience.
I myself am applying at Wallmart tomorrow. I am young in my 20's and have great computer knowledge but only 2 years experience and no college degree. HR actually thinks computer science degree's teach you desktop troubleshooting as well as system administration and programming skills. Its a shame even linux kernel developers can not get jobs today because they have no cs degree as the same time vb weenies who are gifted in mathmatics are taking the jobs instead because hr thinks that degree will make them better programmers.
http://saveie6.com/
This is the first tripple dip recession in history and while Greenspan has done a phenominal job of keeping it from being a crash Bush has not helped one bit. In fact his retarded trickle down let's give the top .25% 80% of the tax benifits policies are sure to extend the downturn and keep millions of working folks underemployed for years to come. Sept 11'th had little effect on the economy other than the airline industry and general consumer outlook (though even that is debatable given the strong housing market, people generally don't invest in big ticket items unless they feel at least somewhat good about the future)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Try working in Academia....
:-)
I'm the sole admin, postmaster, backup/veritas & webmaster, for a network over 120 UNIX machines, with everything from Linux PC's&Mac's, through Ultra5's, to E6500's, 48-processes IBM pSeries and 30-way SGI boxes.
About 350 users worth of "drag" to go with it...
Salary works out at about 29,000 dollars.
Which is why I code pr0n sites "out of hours"
What you are saying is that the last 4 years have created unrealistic salaries for people who skills do not give the business benefits those salaries demand.
Or to put it another way, if you plot the salary curve for the last 20 years and factor out the
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
3 people:
1. pays $90,000 in taxes
2. pays $9,000 in taxes
3. pays $1,000 in taxes
You realize that you overcharged and have $10,000 extra dollars. How should the money be divided up?
Then people complain when the 3rd person only gets $100 dollars back/cut and the 1st person gets $9,000 back/cut. Saying the tax cut/rebate was just for the rich.