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Post-crash Salary Survey

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the checking-out-the-world dept.

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."

4 of 342 comments (clear)

  1. Sobering Thought by zeoslap · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)

  2. Pay Cuts by md81544 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I work as a contraact programmer in the City, London, and over the last year have taken on extra work in C, C++, VB, PHP, JSP, ASP, Oracle, SQL Server and shell scripting as a result of other guys leaving.

    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.

  3. This survey is only going to tell 1/2 of the story by Sensor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:military by corbettw · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.