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

I make $14/hr

[php at OH dot com]

Canadian

Re:well, that goes without saying

[php at OH dot com]

my initials are php ..... It wasn't my choice no.

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

[B'Trey]

While not immune, it would seem to me that the sysadmin community is much less susceptible to outsourcing than other IT job fields, ie programming. Unless you include telephone support as part of the sysadmin field, it's difficult to do a sysadmin's job remotely. Certainly, you can telnet in or conect remotely and do some routine tasks, but that's slightly more difficult if the network goes down.

Re:Impact on outsourcing will be interesting

[Allen Zadr]

A lot of murmuring around me has been about big companies being burned by the high (hidden) costs of outsourcing. Especially in programming and IT.

In software, companies are often dismayed by the fact that they get exactly what they ask for and have to pay for it even if it doesn't meet their expectations. So, many companies have had to hire a project manager and design specification developer team for any major project, and the extra salary from these jobs, along with the communications delays that goes with it has often been a break-even situation.

For outsourced IT, those who need 'immediate help' will bother the few tech-savvy (a/k/a knows enough to be dangerous) co-workers instead of being berated for putting in an Outsourced IT ticket. This leads to a cut in those worker's productivity, and often leads to other problems when these folks make symptoms disappear instead of fixing the issue (Pop-Up blockers?).

Some departments of larger companies have hired 'receptionists' that are actually IT people who answer the phone, so that immediate help can be had without being budget dinged by corporate for over-use of outsourced IT.

Of course, the hidden bleed of paying $30k or more for someone who's official job is to answer the phone - just because a department is trying to get around the rules... well, it makes outsourcing a bit expensive all of a sudden.

Re:Impact on outsourcing will be interesting

[drizst 'n drat]

I would for the most part agree with you that a sysadmin is less susceptible however, with remote administration capability, it is not totally immune or off the plate. I have seen quite a push in my organization to do exactly that -- remote administer not only workstations, but servers as well.

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.

Skew Survey?

[dbretton]

Could linking this to all slashdot readers possibly skew the results of the survey??

Re:Skew Survey?

[Willeh]

I doubt it. They're asking sysadmins, not some kind of demographic like women barbers. The disproportionate amount of slashdot readers who are in fact sysadmins will be (on average) just as well paid as non slashdot reading sysadmins (is this making it sound like a cult to anyone yet?).

I work at Krispy Kreme

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:FWIW

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but a good sysadmin is worth his weight in gold...

Or something...

In a similar vein... http://www.engineersalary.com

[Hollinger]

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]

Re:FWIW

[Anonymous Coward]

... counting the two after the decimal, of course.

Re:FWIW

[Otter]

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.

SCO cert, anyone? Anyone at all?

[Nathaniel]

I wonder if anyone will admit to having a SCO certification....

system administration only

[truffle]

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.

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...

You're not looking at it systemically

[jeko]

The fact is that most good coders are at least mediocre sysadmins, and most good sysadmins are at least mediocre coders. Both jobs usually require a general CS background. I refer you to Fooker as an example.

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)?

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.

My salary

[Anne_Nonymous]

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.

Employed/Unemployed question

[mrdogi]

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.

What is the point?

[Shihar]

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.

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.