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2002 SAGE Salary Survey Finally Released
Ted Cabeen writes "The 2002 Salary Survey run by SAGE, SANS, and Sun's BigAdmin Group profiled in a March Slashdot Article has finally been released. Everybody who participated in the survey is entitled to a copy, as well as current members of those groups. How does your salary stack up in the post-crash economy?"
I work for a rather large unicolor octo-barred-logo company. Our salary reviews come once a year, in April, with little chance of a raise in between them. This year they handed down a new policy. Part 1: All employee's below a certain band, err, salary range, and who are performing at at least the "I have no reason to fire you" performance rating, get a raise. A 3% raise, but a raise none the less. Part 2: The "variable" bonus which is counted as part of our salary, is now cut in half. This "variable" bonus by the way, has gone down each and every year I have been with this company. Now instead of top performers getting somewhere between 12.5% and 16%, I believe 6.5% is going to be the best you can do. Part 3: To save money this year, all pay increases, which normally take effect May 1, will not take effect until July. I was one of the 'lucky' ones. I got a Band, err, salary range increase, which usually guarantees a better raise. Not this time. All told, if I am a top performer (not handed out too often) with my variable bonus, I will be making slightly less than the bottom figure on my new pay scale. Great. Makes the frequent 80 hour weeks (no overtime pay) Sooooooo worth it. I do however, understand that I am in fact lucky to have a job to bitch about. I am lucky I am not one of my contracter coworkers whose pay has been cut multiple times over the last year, and get two weeks off, without pay. I also understand that what makes some of this possible is also the same reason I can't spell the name of any internal help desk agent I have to call, or understand half of what they are saying. I truly dread seeing this Salary Survey.....I am afraid once I see the numbers, my Red Swingline(tm) and I will have to take action. Good Luck to us all, thanks for the forum to get this out. J.
Worker happiness doesn't vary in response to one variable alone.
That being said, I really do enjoy my 29 days of vacation, and I can live reasonably comfortably on my pay.
I would, right now without hesitation, take a 15% pay cut for five weeks' vacation a year.
What is so funny to me is the huge emphasis that the government and pressure groups put on the notion of 'family' here in the US, and yet at the same time don't want to give workers the rights to rear their children (in opposing the Family Leave Act), nor want to give them enough time off to actually spend time with them.
The average American worker works an obscene amount of hours. I am 100% positive this does not stem from any sort of American 'work ethic', but rather from the fact that you have to be seen as working more than your co-worker in order not only to get ahead, but to simply keep your job. The high levels of stress that follows are what lead to domestic problems like drug abuse, alcoholism and violence.
The idea of four weeks' vacation would never fly here, because greedy CEOs and stockholders don't want to see their all-precious profits possibly drop. But imagine the long-term benefits: Lower health care costs (rested workers are less stressed; less stressed workers are healthier), more motivated employees, and a happier populace with spare time to spend money vacationing.
It's a win-win situation, but I'll never see it in my lifetime. I'm a Canadian living in the US, and I've been thinking about using my right of return privileges (my grandfather was a UK citizen) to go to the UK and work for a few years. Sounds like, as usual, the Europeans don't have their heads up their asses like in this country.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
Eventually, management's answer was presented to us in a meeting. They explained that, after surveying the market, they were paying us correctly. The said that the reason we could see the higher figures elsewhere was because everyone else in the world was paying too highly...
Oh, and they also claimed that we couldn't actually get these figures we read. My response was "empirical studies suggest otherwise", which got a bit of a look. I resigned within two weeks, and another guy I was at the meeting with resigned the next day.
Cheers,
Ian
The article you link to only project Saudi's IT growth at 8,000 jobs annually - hardly a threat to the American IT worker. Quit your whining and compete for your job just like most manufacturing workers have had to over the last several decades.
Repeat after me: international trade is not a zero-sum game, and the growth in international trade has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the last two decades, while providing rich countries with cheap, high quality imports. If you can't handle change, what are you doing in IT?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Maybe I am just getting F'ed... but I am in the 1-2 years experience range, and I know hardly anyone (programmers included) in the IT field who are making 50k a year (the average reported in the survey is (50,558 for 0-1 year guys w/ a bachelor), and certainly not any sysadmins at all- and thats in the NY metro area, where the costs of living (and thus salaries) are quite high. The fact that those in the 2 year range see a 5k drop in average salaries really makes me wonder if they had enough of a random sample, and a large enough sample altogether. Similarly, when I see average raises in certain metro areas being 87.5%, I think there is something significantly flawed in this survey to actually use it for anything meaningful. I get the feeling this survey attracted types who wanted to show off their earnings, or raises. I mean how can the group of 5-9 years guys get 6.8% average raises, while guys w/ 10-14 years experiene recieved a whopping 22.6% increase, yet their elder 15-19 group also only recieved 6.9% raises. I just cant see how this could happen to the actual group overall. Another glaring hole- guys with 1-2 years experience falling into the ambiguously defined 'level 4' (4 being highest) group. That many people came out of school and rose to CTO in a year? It is interesting, but to use this as a basis for actual salary comparison doesnt seem right. It seems even less scientific than a slashdot poll to me.
If you poorly manage your money, then your salary can be nearly irrelevant.
One interesting concept is the "true wage", as described in the book Your Money Or Your Life. In order to figure out what you really make, you have to factor in all time spent, including travelling to and from work. You then have to count your work-related expenses, including eating lunch out, business clothes, car maintenance, etc. You're also supposed to figure out the "life energy cost" (i.e., if your job is hellish, the rest of your life will not be great), but even leaving that aside, jobs might compare much differently than they look on the surface.
Additionally, it's easy to waste money and so create a "need" for more money. Living on frozen pizzas/TV dinners is expensive, and will probably lead to more health-related expenses. There's a lot to be said for having a lower salary, whether by working less or taking a lower-paying job that's more fulfilling, and lowering your cost of living by driving a good used car, not buying ridiculously overpriced "designer" clothes, etc.
Then you get into wisely investing your money, etc., and you start to see how people who don't look so great on paper are better off after everything has been added up. It really is how you use it rather than the size. Of course, if you take this to an extreme, you start expending more effort than is worth the money you might save, but as with everything else, balance is key.
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