Slashdot Mirror
SAGE 2003 Salary Survey Announced
MrRules writes "The 2003 SAGE Salary Survey is now open for business. Last year's survey (results here,
slashdot articles here
and here)
was quite an interesting read. Last year saw over 10,000 participants, making it the largest global participation sysadmin salary survey ever.
This year there is a separate survey for those who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks, so we should be able to see some real information on what has been happening in the "jobless recovery", and what effect outsourcing has been having on this sector.
The survey is conducted annually by SAGE, the professional association for practising system administrators." As a general rule, I *hate* linking to surveys, but SAGE's is one that's definitely worthwhile..
Canadian
when your email starts with "php" :)
I will be very interested in seeing what the effect of outsourcing will have on the wages of US based tech firms. I suspect that they will tend to be lower and continue to do so for the near future. I know that outsourcing lower paid programming jobs is a good thing for business. However, I can't help feeling that in the long term it will have consequences beyond just salary.
Could linking this to all slashdot readers possibly skew the results of the survey??
Though I don't make as much now as I did when I was lead web designer and FuFuKachu.com, I get all the donuts I can eat now.
This year SAGE extended the survey to Bangalore, India. I've been moded down. ugh.
Yeah but a good sysadmin is worth his weight in gold...
Or something...
Hello there! In a similar vein, http://www.engineersalary.com/ provides salary statistics for many, many types of engineers. All you have to do is answer a few questions about just what precisely it is you do, and it will do its best to pull records of similar people.
[SNIP]
The Engineering Salary Calculator searches over 253,000 records in our database, and returns your salary result based on degree, experience, position, industry, skills and location (within a 50 mile radius). Your result is obtained from a minimum of 100 matching profiles. If you search a location that doesn't have at least 50 matching salary records, the area expands from 50 to 75, then to a 90 mile radius. Records older than 360 days are excluded.
In the case of a unique skill set combination (if the database can't locate more than 25 matches for the location using the 50-75-90 rule), it will expand the boundaries to state, then region... and finally nationwide. In densely populated metros like San Jose or Boston, your salary result is compiled using hundreds of records (in most categories)... but in less populated areas (parts of Montana as an example) the search has to expand to a wider area to provide a relevant comparison.
The calculator is designed to always return a result. There are cases where it will not return a local result: MS in Mechanical Engineering, working as the Chief Engineer for a Nanotechnology company in AK. In cases where a search produces too few salary matches nationally (threshold <250), the result is compiled by performing an interpolation of all available data. An unreasonable set: Nuclear Engineer, working in RF with skills in Aerodynamics - will generate a result that is not credible.
[/SNIP]
Michael C. Hollinger
So you make 7 figures, then? You must be one hell of a programmer.
Kanye West had it right.
"I'm telling you when it falls - [sysadmin salaries] all fall down!!!"
At least he's good for something, eheh.
... counting the two after the decimal, of course.
Could someone taking the survey please post the questions? Or a link to them that I may have missed? I'm curious but don't want to click through and spoil the results with my non-admin footprints.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Well, a good sysadmin is certainly worth a normal employee's weight in gold. It's a rare one who is worth his own weight, even in silver.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I wonder if anyone will admit to having a SCO certification....
A while ago, some a-hole in my area went around installing SCO-Unix in a bunch of local government and health industry offices in my area - police stations, small hospitals, etc.
These people are more upgrade-phobic than you'd believe (the desktops often still run Win95 or even 3.2). So it actually does come in handy, yes.
Thank you for your support.
professional association for non-practising system administrators was unable to be reached, and the procrastinators union said they would get back to us.
...to me how a voluntary survey is in any way scientific?
Article header did not mention this salary survey only applies to system administrators. I got to page 2 before I figured it out myself. This is what you get when you let system administrators submit articles.
Neither the header nor the survey itself mentions if this is US only. This is what you get when you let system administrators create surveys.
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I support spreading santorum
Rob Kolstad, the listed contact on that page, is also the Head Coach for USACO, the US Computer Science Olympiad team, if anybody thinks that could possibly be significant.
o /
http://oldweb.uwp.edu/academic/mathematics/usac
If you can code a network aware application, then you probably have at least the fundamentals of networking down, and if you are a capable network admin, then you probably can sling a mean scripting language, which means you have the fundamentals of coding like encapsulation, OOP, data structures, etc. down.
Assuming that all us OSI Layer 4 and below people have to be on-site (which is far from a given), we're still vulnerable to outsourcing. When all those programmers are unemployed, guess whose job they can retool for fastest and be best qualified for?
Now guess what happens when the supply of sysadmins far outstrips the available jobs (even worse than it does now)?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Taking surveys on the web like this can't be a good method, especially if they're slashdotted. There's no guarantee you're getting any kind of representative cross-section, and if it's slashdotted, you're pretty certain to get an unrepresentative cross-section (e.g.: who has more time to read slashdot, employed or unemployed people?).
-- Moderation in all things, exceptions to all rules --
I am a 21 year old IT geek who's been working in the field as a consultant since I was 11. Though my clients at that time didn't know my age (did everything online or used older friends as intermediaries), I still managed systems, wrote code, and even taught some online programming courses. The survey is bouncing me as it refuses to believe that a 21 year old could have 10 years of experience!
I admire their attention to detail in data validation, but I can't be the only geek out there who started young.
I'm a 107 year-old woman from Azerbaijan, who's interested in paint-ball and hang-gliding. Last year I made $476,513.50 as a systems admin.
Oh no, wait, that's for the New York Times registration.
OK, so do they mean employed as an admin? I haven't done that in about 1 1/2 years, but I am employed at Target. So do I take the employed version, or the unemployed version? And yes, I'm trying to find an admin job.
surveys (nice forms Slashdot!) so someone will argue that the results are skewed. Of course its pretty clear that unemployment is deliberately underreported by official policy. I am officially not unemployed even though I do not have a job.
They seem to blur skill and responsibility. It's hard to tell the difference between a senior system adminstrator and a CIO by their definitions.
This site is geared more towards "real" engineers. Good luck finding anything useful for IT positions...
That's why I posted it, good sir (or madam) ;-)
Michael C. Hollinger
There are some mighty anemic goth geek type admins at my job. At least one of them is worth his weight in platinum.
Beware of stereotypes!
Why did that get modded "Flamebait?" There is nothing but sound statistical evaluation in there.
I started to take the survey, it is like 20 minutes long. I hate long surveys. Oh well. They seem to ask the same questiosn over and over and ask questions where I say "i dunno" and I just guess. Making the survey totally useless.
Who believes him? In 1993 the internet was in its infancy. No company would hire someone to do consultancy using only email or other internet mediums in 1993.
oh bah .. fuck SAGE .. the minute someone walks
in the door and talks about their SAGE membership
i chuck their resume out
gimme a damn break
I sure hope no one draws any conclusions from this survay, or if they do, they are damned careful about it. A good survay always tries to randomize who is asked within a certain selection of qualified people. In this case, the results will without a doubt be skewed. I wouldn't believe a single number produced about this survay, and I would not draw any conculsions about the 'jobless recovery' from it either.
The argument might be put forward that slashdotting the place is the perfect way to make sure the right people answer the survay. I would utterly disagree though. I would bet my eye teeth that slashdot's demographics are horribly skewed.
The average slashdotter is more likely to be out of work simply because people who are out of work have more time to read slashdot. It might also be that slashdotters are more likely to be working because they are generally more interested in their field of work and hence more dedicated. I couldn't tell you how it is skewed, but I can tell you that it WILL be skewed. I would take the survay results with a grain of salt. I would call them interesting, and perhaps even an interesting in relation to the employment of people visit slashdot and other sites that link to the survay, but the utterly meaningless in terms of the population as a whole.
So, enjoy the survay, but I wouldn't get upset if you see that your job prospects suck or that everyone else is making more/less money then you.
Oops, so my half-year salary was too low for the salary survey and the fifth page says "the number has to be between 5000 and [alotmore]"... insensitive clods
When doing remote outsourcing, it's often difficult for a traditional project manager to develop a good working rhythm with the development process. So, specifications and timelines must be planned out much more precisely and more ahead of time than when doing in-house work. Further, a remote project manager has to be very good at communicating the vision and expecation that doesn't necessarily translate well into the functional specification.
AFAIK, all outsourcing development shops will furnish you with a project manager that will work in your time-zone if required, however - it's important to keep and pay your own in-house project manager that specializes in remote project management. This is not a cheap specialization. If you rely on the remote project management alone, you may be surprised when your expectations are not exactly met. - The mock-ups come in after two solid weeks of work, and they don't look like your expectation, etc.
That's where a design developer comes in - bridging the gap between technical specifications, and design expactations. You can go back and forth with the outsourcing P.M. on mock-ups, or you can do the mock-ups yourself, and send the full set so work can get started immediately.
While in-house consulting is, technically, outsourcing - when they are local, it's much easier to for the project manager to explain the vision along with the hard specifications - as well as remain deeply involved in the design process.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I'm somewhat torn over salary surveys. While they are of a little use to see the extreme boundaries, I can't help but think they really don't measure the market value of the jobs they say they measure. For one, after the last two years of IT chaos, can anyone really say what IT salaries should be? Two, these surveys typically are not adjusted to eliminate cost of living as a variable. Three, they really don't fully factor out the differences between independent contractors and regular W-2 employees (what about employer payroll tax contributions, 401K contributions, office utilities costs, pizza at meetings, etc.).
In short, are these surveys worth anything at all in negotiating for a new job? In other words, newbies are still torn over whether to ask a modest $35/hour as a contractor or take the plunge and ask for $60+/hour.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Thanks for the link, it actually worked! It calculated my base salary to within 1k. Similar stuff I found on the web tend to low-ball my salary by 10-15k.
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The winners of the "Favorite Job Properties" were things like casual dress, challenge, and good co-workers. The survey is obviously flawed, because only 1.7% of the responses cited "Free or cheap food, drink at work" as a plus.
I will gladly turn in my health coverage, wear a tie, and do data entry all day long in exchange for "drink at work" capability.
somebody bent my whookey.
we should be able to see some real information on what has been happening in the "jobless recovery", and what effect outsourcing has been having on this sector.
I was not ask about my job outsourced in an old soviet republic, or how much I was paid when it happenned!!??