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..

Comments

Impact on outsourcing will be interesting

[drizst 'n drat]

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.

Re:Impact on outsourcing will be interesting

[silas_moeckel]

Funny I do this all the time, besides hands on break and fix there isnt a whole lot of things you cant do remotly. It has a cost associated with it for the KVM switches the console over IP devices the Lights out cards etc. For Routers and Unix boxes it's easy enough to just use a serial term serv with a modem to get into anything you might need. Some of the better PC server MB's even have serial bios redirection allowing you to watch the device post.

Sys admin stuff might be harder to overshore but it's not imposible with some one time costs.

Re:Impact on outsourcing will be interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't sound like SysAdmin work to me... and I am a SysAdmin. We have hardware support contracts for important servers.

Could someone...?

[Otter]

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.

Re:Can someone please explain....

[djeaux]

Aside from surveys given to captive audiences (e.g., student surveys or evaluations of faculty done in classrooms), surveys are generally voluntary.

A good "scientific" survey has a carefully designed target audience & would likely use a stratified sampling design as well to ensure that relevant subgroups were appropriately represented. Of course, respondents themselves become the actual survey population & properly presented survey results emphasize that the results represent "X percent of survey respondents." In a scientific survey, "return rate" or "response rate" is an important measure of the effectiveness of the survey & should be used to examine how well the intended sample panned out.

I think what you might mean is an open survey that anyone may take. About all that can be done in an open survey is to set up some system whereby folks don't "stuff the ballot box" & if the survey is anonymous, the technologies used for that (IP tracking, cookies, etc.) can be circumvented by anyone who is determined to stuff said ballot box. Read the disclaimers on any Slashdot poll...

Bad Filters

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Sage skill levels are a little strange

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Surveys

[Mr. Piddle]

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.