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InfoWorld 2004 Salary Survey Results
tverbeek writes "InfoWorld has released the results of their Salary Survey for 2004 [pdf], and in the intro they declare that there's less bad news and more optimism, as IT budgets and salaries in particular are starting to creep back up. So now we get to witness the curious phenomenon of Lake Anti-Wobegone, as all the techies we hear from complain that their salaries are still below 'average'."
Is there a listing of the companies that they talked to? This way I can make my map of where to grab their job applications from.
Hmmm.
A good European observatory is Jobserve where I have been able to consider the falling then re-growing number of job offer during the last 3 years.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
It's no surprise. When I was at college, it seemed half the people in my class wanted to get into IT just to earn lots of money. They saw how much a programmer could make. None of them had a love of the subject. They all became web monkeys.
Then there were suddenly a lot of people with computer skills.
Surprise surprise, the salaries went down. It's all about supply and demand.
Meanwhile, those of us with a love of the subject have the actual deeper understanding of computers that allow us to command a decent salary.
A 3.4MB PDF file? On Slashdot? Do you not like them or something?
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Somewhat relevant is today's dilbert
Back in my day, we didn't get raises. We got dirt. And we liked it. Dirt allowed us to build dirt houses, dirt garages, and make dirt pies. We could even get the horses to run on dirt. The damn hard thing was getting those gosh derned horseless carriages to run on dirt. They aaaalways gave us problems.
So you young ones should be glad you get money. Cause you never know when they'll pay in dirt again!
all the techies we hear from complain that their salaries are still below 'average'. First off, who is going to complain because they are making too much? Sometimes the minority is much more vocal than the majority *cough* christian fundamentalists *cough*. It is human nature to complain.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Ok.. I am not sure what to think by the graphs, but is it a good thing or bad thing that the majority of the IT Budget pie, as asked to managers, is "I don't know"? On a lighter note, it did drop 3% points from 03 to 04.
Hmmm.
..because it looks too much like the scale that salary.com uses.
Right now, I'm a "software engineer III" according to my company and salary.com. But according to salary.com, I'm making $20k less than the median salary. My company's solution? Change their scale. Now there's like 8 levels and it doesn't match up at all. Maybe they're hoping that the mass exodus will stop?
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
Link to Google cache of the Salary Survey file.
So.. you'll now be making $20,000 more than?
Where is this lake mentioned in the article ? A Google search reveals nothing.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Since it's a 3.4MB PDF that I'll never get to read, maybe someone could answer a question for me:
Is the increase in the average salary for an IT worker, or the average IT worker's salary? In other words, does this count the ones who are unemployed or doing burger duty at Mickie Dees? It's great that salaries are going up, but is employment?
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Granted the only one in my department is me but I support 45 people and their computers!
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
Well if they all claim that they're below average we know it's not true.
In this ever shrinking world people and skills are more a tradable commodity than ever before. How hard you work no longer has much to do with it, how much you can produce is. Hardly a newsflash, been going that way forever. But some still think they _should_ be making more money.
Straight from Google's cache
Take off every 'sig'!
All your 'sig' are belong to us!
How come we never see salary surveys of salary surveyors? Do they not want us to know how little or how much they make? Maybe they are making 6+ figures and just don't want us to know about it so they have they don't have any competition.
Anyway...no big surprise that IT related salaries slide a bunch the past few years. Supply and demand. There are a bunch of IT workers looking for jobs and it has been a "buyers" market, not like in the late 90's.
What I wonder is how do salary trends here [US] compare to those jobs that have been outsourced? Did the outsourcees salary increase/decrease/stay flat? Just wondering if there is any connection between the two.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
I started out loving the IT field. Gradually, it was ripped out of me by the typical working conditions: rediculous deadlines, long hours, managers who didn't have a clue, being called in the middle of the night, etc ....
It wasn't until the late 90's that I thought that I was being paid almost enough to deal with that horseshit. I know there's a few of you folks out there that thought we were overpaid. I guess that's where the system works. I felt I was underpaid - so I left. You feel you're being paid adaquately - so you stay. I honestly hope that enough people like me leave to give you guys a decent salary again. Because even if pay goes back up to the year 2000 level, I'm still not coming back.
You mean this one [The Lottery]?
Is it pathetic that I only knew that cause it's mentioned in The Simpsons? I think it's the one where Kent Brockman wins big. Homer chucks it on the fire when the news (Kent) mentions the book has nothing to do with the lotto.
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
tax free, last I heard. And they'll add the label "Contractor" or "Consultant" for free.
This survey really means nothing to me unless I can at least see a list of the companies that they surveyed. Pay is different in different areas of the country, and for good reason.
Anecdotally, the results look quite high to me. Maybe they surveyed companies where the cost of living is really high (silicon valley, etc.) I'm from the midwest, so I don't really expect to see numbers like this around here, and I don't.
I suspect that since a lot of companies had either layoffs or less hirings, there are less people for them to pay. Therefore, those who they kept can get a little extra money cause there is less waste on the less talented group of people.
See this study on the Lake Wobegone effect (pdf).
20 mil and I will! Learn Esperanto with 20M others.
Stands to reason: Half of us will receive below average compensation. The other half will be above. And then there's that one guy who will be making precisely average wages.
Can you be a little more useful in your references please? There is no way that we are going to be able to do a google search on "The Lottery" and figure out what the heck you are talking about. Also, I find your "chinese guy" reference a little offensive. Not only that, but in my experience the people (chinese or not) who work 80 hours per week all the time are not particularly more productive than the 40-50 hour people - and they don't get higher salaries as far as I can see. I think that we have an unusual spread of salaries now, because anyone who made it through the massive layoffs still has the "boom time/stop the hiring raids from competitors" salary, which is 2x the salary of everybody else. At least it is like that in telecom.
I'm seeing this same sort of thing happen at a lot of firms. Many firms seem to be taking the attitude of "Well, given how bad the economy is, you're lucky to have this." But the truth, at least in my area, is the economy isn't bad. There are well paying opportunities out there. So the race for the door continues...
But let's not forget, they hire "only the best"! Surely the best will work under their conditions, right? Right? Right?
OK, so where does a sysadmin (more specifically Unix sysadmin) fall under? It's definately not helpdesk. ISIT technology analyst?
Given that the reported figures are averages, I guarantee that 50% of people will be bitching! The other 50% will be bragging.
Remember, people, average is only a line that everybody deviates from! Nobody is average.
I was only out of work for 8 weeks, but that was enough for me. I ain't complainin' about my salary any more. No, really. I haven't yet. I've complained about other salaries being too low and some being too high. But mine's just right!
Now, I will complain about a lack of focus, nonexistent project management, unreasonable expectations and unclear goals. Heck, I'll complain about that all day long.
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
Compare your salary.
I hate looking at these things. They always show I'm underpaid.
"When I was your age"
:)
go purchase it legally from itunes or something
I suppose you can file this under the $4000 toilet seats and $50/nut and bolt combo.
The money is used to secretly funnel funding to UFO research.
Live forever, or die trying.
How appropriate to see this posted on the same day as this Dilbert strip.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
When they can hire, code monkeys in Russia or India for a 1/3 of what are making, I'm almost afraid to get too many raises... Don't want to price myself out of the ballpark.
I don't know about you, but I'd love to hit paydirt!
Yeah, 3.4 MB and it was only 75% downloaded after 15 minutes? Anyway, I don't want to Know! I'm happy where I work, and I'm ignorantly satisfied with my salary. Last year I spent 12 months working at a crap software company. They had a market niche and the competition wasn't enough to make them get off their asses and write good software. Instead they had been stove-piping and patching together various client-database applications for 10 or 15 years. When I left for another company, everyone kept asking, "Oh, you're leaving because it's better money?", and I'm like, no, I'm leaving because the company I'm going to work for actually tries to design and implement good software. The fact that the salary was higher was just an added bonus. I would have taken a pay cut to go to this company. But everyone's always fixated on the money.
I went to school for liberal arts, so I'm one of THOSE web monkeys. But I learned my shit, and I'm happy to be making what I consider to be decent money, although most developers who have a degree and the same experience as me would probably feel undervalued making my salary. But like I said...I'm not going to RTF3.4MBReport. Sometimes Ignorance is Bliss.
Christian Fundamentalists are about the most quiet, reserved, introspective people the world has ever known.
Course, you wouldn't know that if all you heard about them was what the lamestream media told you, but hey: That's the way things have always been, and the way things will always be...
We've managed to slashdot InfoWorld into oblivian. sigh. yeah, i guess this is -1 redundant.
It's not actually a full size book, but a short story. I remember reading it in 6th grade as part of a "special" reading program my school had entered me in. It was a pretty disturbing story to read when I was 11 years old, what with small town residents gleefully stoning a girl to death in superstitious hopes of improving their fortunes. I also remember thinking that Shirley Jackson was one of the cuter authors pictured in the book of short stories.
poor little website, never had a chance...
That impressed me. I love prairie home companion and listen to it faithfully even though I knew nothing about it when I lived in Minnesohda years ago.
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
...at least for me. I managed to get over a 20% increase in January through a salary adjustment. How? I worked my ass off. Smartly.
I did the normal IT stuff, but I also introduced new (free) tech, held training classes for staff, and generally took honest interest in my job (something I don't always see in the 19-year old wire contractors we sometimes hire).
This January I basically presented myself as a needed member of the team, explained my salary adjustment request (using an Infoworld-like survey) and got my boss to back it up to management (not hard, because we treat each other well). There's methods to increase your chances of getting a good pay raise.
If you are underpaid by more than say 10%, leaving is your best option.
I thought I was underpaid some 8-9 years ago, and did just that. In 4 years I almost tripled my income.
The bullets fired at your car and the car bombs are free of charge too.
I think thats whats throwing off the curve, making salaries to high. Combine Bill Gates salary with the average shmo making 40k/yr (less if you work for a University or government), and you'll raise the average to the 80-100k that we are seeing!
If he was, he'd know that it's completely possible for most people at Lake Wobegone to be above (or below) average.
Consider an exam taken by 4 people. 3 people score a 10. 1 person scores a 2. That makes an average of 8 (10 + 10 + 10 + 2 = 32. 32/4 = 8). Most of the people scored above average.
This is why Mean and Median are useful concepts.
See subject.
You can read it here The Lottery if you want to bring back some old memories.
Bill gates made $865k last year. Far far below the average wall street tycoon. Of course, most of his money comes from selling stock...
Here in San Diego, dirt is so expensive that they pay us with checks. I made over $80K last year, but can't afford more than this miserable little apartment...
Even though the HTML version is coming through so damned slow, you've got to give the guy who's responsible for the smoking crater that used to be a web server props for posting the alternate link.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
The company I am with is willing to train me in more advanced networking topics beyond what I have learned. My boss also said that depending on how well his employees perform, they will get their raises. I know what I'm getting is way below the average for people doing similar type work, but in this job market, you take what you can get until conditions improve.
People complain because the averages are scewed. The cost of living on the west coast vs the midwest. There are 100X more IT people on the west coast, where the cost is MUCH higher. If I'm close to the average (living in the midwest), I know I'm making a good deal of money for my area.
Those graphs should include cost of living and a calculator for getting "your area's" average salary.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
It's very easy for MOST ALL of the surveyed employees to be below average.
Imagine (the exagurated example) of 99 people making $1 and only 1 making $2. The Average is $1.01 and 99% of those surveyed make below it.
Now if you're talking about the "mean" . . . .
Sheesh. Please don't associate us with them.
*grin*
if someone come up with a calculation relating the # of slashdot comments on articles to global it salary pay.
I bet there's enough data to start.
So you mean that $11,700 I'm making a year as a graduate assistant isn't good pay?
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
From everything I've been seeing lately, work is increasing, but much more for the independent contractors than for the large companies. With everyone trying to save a buck, these people are likely on the leading edge of any up-tick. After a co-worker was laid off and spent too long looking for another job, he went independent and is booked solid for the next several months, and makes his salary after just over half a year of projects. Granted, you can't be the typical office leach in this position, and you spend a lot longer doing your taxes.
Is it just me, or does everyone you know that looks at these things, complain that they are below average?
Is it because the only people that read these things aren't happy with their jobs/compensation?
Is it because the people that answer the surveys report too high, so going to be below the average?
Or, are they just useless?
Anybody else get redirected back to article when clicking on the pdf?
But the story summary did imply that it is "humorous" that most techies (ok, ALL techies) complain that their salary is below average. My point was that it's mathematically possible for most people to be below average.
I cant belive that these amounts are even a little accurate...
If a help desk person is making more than $7 an hour
then something is wrong. I say that because they dont exactly put the "help" in help desk. (I will qualify that by saing that i am talking about the partners.org people)
Anyway..
I make a bit under $30K and I'm a Research Technologist... what are others getting paid?
You misspelled 'living wage'.
Seastead this.
I'm from Central PA with a double major in Comp Sci. and Information Systems from Susquehanna University. Its a very well known school and is up there with Yale, etc..
I also have my Certifications in MCSE & Comptia (which is a joke). I'm into the Network, Database, Web programming.
My salary? 35k a year. Granted our company sends us on a cruise every year, but still that amounts to below 40k.
I was the IT Director for a medium size county in PA, and now the Network Admin for a nice growing company.
Am I underpaid? Yep, I think so. Considering my education cost me close to 85k with books, etc. I won't have that paid off for the next 20 years, and if I don't keep investing in my education, those 4 years from college won't amount to squat.
With all my bills I usually break even, or a little above. I don't have the luxury of investing my money into something else, because I don't have any. Any IT job like mine in this area won't pay more than 40k. Unless you are willing to compete against about 200 other appliciants.
It's these damn companies wanting to save a buck here or there, so their board of directors, CEOs and Presidents can by that 10th vacation home out in the virgin islands.
I worked hard for where I am at, and if I had to do it over again, I would've gone into another field. It sucks because Computers were my passion. The blood-sucking money leeches who won't compsenate me for what I do is driving the passion of my job right out of me.
BTW, I was on call 24/7, due to me being the ONLY IT person for the county and responsible for their 911 call center. That's how cheap some organizations are.
One of the other replies to this comment doesn't fully appreciate what you are saying, I think.
I have a friend that got a huge raise last year. His team was also shrunk form 5 people to 1 person. His salary jump was less than the total cost of the other 4 people, but quite significant for him.
So the question is, is the increase in the average attributed to all the layoffs, where all the worst, lower paid, positions cut? This would raise the average salary, while reducing the total salaries paid out by a company.
My wife is hiring for a low-level Python programming position. She can't seem to find anyone who knows Python who is willing to work for under $100K.
Just a data point...given the rise of Zope solutions for mid-level web content management, I think this is a growth industry.
I wonder how people are saying that this survey shows wages for IT workers increasing. It doesn't - in fact, it shows exactly the opposite.
I can see how you might believe this if you read only this paragraph:
But go ahead and read the next two paragraphs:
So the message is this: if you're not upper management - that is, if you're not part of the system that sets the salaries - the people who are part of upper management will continue to screw you. It's not going to get better on its own.
The salary of middle management and IT staff went down. It's just that the salaries of upper management went up by enough to raise the average.
Got lucky and working in sector not too affected by the tech crash.
Wow! Using this Rich-O-Meter since I earn 1 Pound per year, I am richer than 28,400,064 other people in the United Kingdom! On top of that, there are only 29,399,936 people richer than me! Then, I was so bold as to compare myself to the rest of the world! But I figured before I could even get a plane ticket out of the U.K I would need to be earning at least 500 pounds a year... So if I was making that much then there are 2,899,458,618 people poorer than me and 3,100,541,382 people richer.
So basically, I can't afford to live anywhere, but I can afford to feed myself and buy toilet paper! You never know how bad life is until you can't get toilet paper. I wonder what those 2,899,458,618 people wipe with?
Maybe, just maybe, we've reached the end to downsizing.
Well, good for you. It's a little late, of course, but I suppose if management could have, they would have sold the fucking paint off the walls too.
About half of us have moved on, not only from "IT" but also from corporate "culture" altogether.
It no longer matters how much a salary is when management can gladly fire people with a few minutes notice for no reason.
Now, if employees could stop making house payments with a few minutes notice for no reason, THEN you would hear some bitching.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
No thanks. The money's no good if you can't spend it; I've grown to like the land of the living.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
You must work for SCOX.
were a few years ago. In the last few months particularly we're all trying to pass work off to each other for lack of time. I hear about how bad it is on the news but, from the people I know scattered about the US, things are going very well. Anyway nice to see things are good across the board.
-- Note to liberals, yes please flee to Canada.
A survey that doesn't consider the cost of living for each particular location, is irrelevant to all of them. For example, Joe A in Silicon Valley might be thinking "Gee, that's kinda low... It costs me X just on house payments alone", while Joe B out in OshKosh Wisconsin might say "Wow, I only make $20k/year -- I'm under-paid!!!" yet for him, the same X for housing might be 1/4 what it is for Joe A.
.sig for details ;)).
I live in Winnipeg, for example, and the cost of living here is one of the lowest in Canada. My family in Ontario can't understand how I can get by on so little, but I have surplus by Manotoban standards.
The unfortunate thing is, people here are still only catching on that there's a tech slump (up and coming programmers, that is). They're still being fed the same lines as in 1999 about IT being the biggest thing going, and surveys like this are used to boost their confidence in the job market (look, make $80k/year to start!), but in reality there are almost no jobs at all here, and the actual average starting wage for a programmer in Winnipeg is minimum wage, or unemployment.
Fortunately I haven't had to update my resume just yet, since I started my own company (see
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
Every ex-IT worker or anyone that's every been fired simply has to read this web site. It changed my life. http://www.spiritone.com/~andersen/employmt.html
So, while people with two years of experience, have seen a computer once, are now taking the jobs that were once open to me -- and I have 14 years of experience in the industry. It pisses me off, and I cannot find work as helpdesk, yet incompetent people who were swinging a hammer at the crack of dawn a year ago are gainfully employed. Pisses me off.
Too much experience will get you unemployed.
/. Readers are generally below average one way or another
In one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, people who perform vital tasks (digging ditches, cutting trees, raising cattle, paving roads, roofing houses, etc.) are paid so little that they have to work seven days a week just to make ends meet.
Production in our country is incredible. We throw away almost as much as we consume. Its not like our resources are so limited that everybody can't have a comfortable life with some free time.....its just that we can't seem to organize ourselves well enough to pull it off.
*sigh* Indifference, greed, egocentrism, and even cruelty seem to be the necessary ingredients to any successful economy. It just seems like there should be a better way.
Albert Einstein said in 1954 (near the end of his life): "If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances."
with your new career. Like I said, the system works.
Do you people even bother to read salary.com's details on their data. It's very accurate. It's gotten through surveying HR departments and it takes in a ton of details about the company size, industry, location, etc. This is not bad data. You've just got a bad job.
Cost of Living....
San Jose Residence - Makes $40,000/yr... 1 Bedroom apartment + utitlities costs 15,600/yr so around 39% of your yearly pre-tax salary is spent on a place to live...God help you if you have car payments, pay taxes, feel like eating something other than ramen....
Pittsburgh Residence - Makes $40,000/yr...Owns a 4 bedroom house that costs 15,600/yr....
Ave Molech Setting
something like 40% of the people who got the job are looking for another one.
There is NO loyalty anymore. I would be willing to commit to an employer if only I knew they would treat me decently. But that just does not happen.
When was the last time you heard a Mennonite lobbying for anything? When was the last time you heard a Seventh Day Adventist lobbying for anything? When was the last time you heard an angry mob of home schoolers lobbying for anything, much less screaming at the top of their lungs, "WE'RE HERE! WE'RE QUEER! AND WE NOT GOING AWAY!!!"
By and large, these people just want to be left alone. It's the tyranny we call "The Government" [aided by its allies in the media, the universities, the unions, and the professions] which seeks to destroy them, not the other way around.
I hate to tell you this, because I sympathize, but until people like you stop doing such tremendous amounts of work for 35K companies won't stop paying that. Consider yourself too valuble for 35K, even if it means moving on.
Especially considering that his administration inheirited the IT slump.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I have a subscription so I read it a couple days ago....Nothing like a survey to make you feel worth more than what you make. :(
"An average help desk support specialist made $43,133 this year, down from $46,236 in mid-2003."
... nada. Guess I'm stuck in my less-than-average help desk job for now.
Well, phooey. I knew I was getting underpaid, but I didn't know how badly. As soon as I can actually find one of these "average help desk support specialist" jobs, I'm moving. With four years of experience, it should be easy to find, right? In the single page of employment ads or the four-page career sections
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
I live in Atlanta and I'm actively involved in the hiring process where I work. That number is utter bullshit.
Seriously, I've been out of IT for a year. Used my contacts. Used some headhunters. Used job sites. Mailed in paper resumes. Applied in person. Even moved. Finally, applied at a furniture store yesterday. Blah.
Be happy if you have a good job. Heck, be happy if you have a non-burger-flipping job.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
...is a short story where the members of a town by tradition hold a lottery where all draw pieces of paper from a box. The person who draws a slip of paper with a dot gets stoned to death in order to help the harvest. good 'ol human sacrifice
... for my break. I work on a big farm/industrial/residential complex in georgia, I do a lot of the outside grounds maintenance, meaning I push the jungle back. I grew up in rural michingan mostly and always worked on farms, so I can relate to your predicament. I can't tell you how many farmers I have known over the yearsd who just gradually got put in the poor house. I don't think most people realise that the family farmer is about disappeared, and all you have now is international corporations who happen to be into agriculture and developing global food (and shortly water) monopolies. They think real farmers get those subsidies and sit around and don't work, what a hoot! They'll believe every urban newscast drivel they see.
When I came in I had to take my shirt off and wring the sweat out of it and hang it up on the line before I came into the house. I was running fence lines today trimming, and I had to fix a broken steel gate that had popped off it's hinges. Later I will go mow with a diesel mower, and maybe do some trimming with the chainsaw and use the big chipper. I'm only hired part time, but that's all the hours this neogeezer can handle in the georgia heat anymore, although when I was younger I could work double that pretty easily. I admit I just can't now.. I work about 5 hours a day, then another few around my own gratis house (3 room shack really), which I get to live in to work here. For cash I make 30$ a DAY, and MAN, yes, I am tired of hearing weenies moan they can't live on 50 or 70 grand a year, yet they got the scratch for new cars and 35 inch TVs and whatnot. I am *sympathetic* to the plight of the outsourced workers,in general terms, having had two factories shipped out from under me and shipped overseas before, and I keep having to go from job to job, learned a lot of skills before and still learning new ones, but the pay levels keep dropping as opposed to expenses. I've been warning a people about this globalisation scam for YEARS now, but it's only the past two years that any white collar workers have even paid any attention to it because it started hitting them, before when it was only blue collar it was "tough crap to you buddy, I got mine so fug off". I got told that a lot, but I still am sympathetic, because those guys were really faked out it appears. maybe that modd is chaning, I hope so. The globalist goons love setting people against people so they can ALL be ripped off and no one looks far enough uphill to see where the real culprits are.
I am LUCKY that I haven't been replaced by a 20 year old illegal immigrant yet, at least my boss is a true blue american and will only hire legals, unlike most of the brain dead bubba rah rah rah nascar and beer doofuses around here who are wondering why housing costs keep going up and property taxes going up to build schools for the illegals, and why they have to constantly keep adding on to the police departments and why the county hospitals are all running in the red and etc. Yet globalisation was supposed to improve the economy. I sure ain't seen it, and just cheap crap at walmart don't count, because even walmart crap ain't cheap to me anymore. I made more money in the 70's and 80's than I do now.
The government and wall street is doing EVERYTHING it can to destroy rural america economically, and internationally they are doing everything they can to get the rest of the planet to despise us, except for what cash they can still squeeze out of us. My boss was telling me he is one more new law away from the government putting him out of the poultry business, which he has been in since 1953.
I don't know what is happening any longer in the urban areas, but I know we have a lot more in common with fellow struggling to maintain a normal life americans than we do in trying to emulate those government/business globalist crooks and believing their lies. 20 years of globalisation has resulted in nothing more than record deficits, record crime, record bankruptcies, highest debt to savings ratio, highest number of home mort
Complaining that salaries have gone down is just plain pathetic. I mean, that stuff happens when the economy goes to hell, like it has.
On the other hand, a good thing to complain about is the fact that staff and lower management salaries have gone down but upper management salaries continue to go up. Now that's just plain robbery.
I've been programming for a living for 15 years. I've tried management, I hated it. I've seen the writing on the walls. I'm not going to go much further in this field than I've gone, so I'm getting out. I'm sure I'll still write software as a hobby, but no more of this crazy field for me anymore.
I just took a 9 month vacation and realized I still love programming for myself, which was a relief. I was starting to think that I was hating programming, but it looks like it's just the business.
One of the most common measures that we see quoted in statistics is the mean, or the average. When there is a "bimodal" distribution, that is, clumping at the high end and clumping at the low end, the average is misleading. An example of this can be found in the claims for the benifits of the Bushies tax cuts. Bushie quoted the average benifit. That factored in all of the rich people who benified a lot. This was used to suggest that those "average families" that Bushie appeared with in photo-ops would benifit as well.
When there is a bimodal distribution a more representative statistic is the median. If you take a set of numbers, say the benifit from the Bushie tax cut, and sort them, the median is the number that is in the middle of this set (e.g., if there are 101 numbers, the 50th number is the median). Here you don't get a bias from the high end. If Bushie had quoted the median, instead of the average, people would have immediately realized that they were not getting much and that wealthy people were getting a lot.
Which brings us to income statistics and the point raised in the parent post. If the median salary was quoted it seems likely that computer industry salaries would have remained constant or declined.
We are definitely seeing bleaker times in the computer industry than I have seen in my twenty plus year career. And I include the 1992 downturn. However I think that part of what is happening is that the factors that have effected other job catagories are now effecting "knowledge worker" jobs. My guess is that if you were to look at the median, not the average, income of individual workers, you would see a decline over the last twenty years.
The government frequently quotes household or family income, and again, they quote the average. During the last twenty years some classes of workers have done much better than others. In particular, until 2000 those of us in the computer industry were on the winning side. Many of us saw our salaries increase dramatically. In the 1990s few would have believed that unemployment in the computer industry would be higher than overall unemployment.
For those outside of the "knowledge worker" catagory household income has increased or remained steady, I theorize, because increasing numbers of women entered the workforce. Espeically in urban areas on the coasts where two incomes was necessary to survive as a middle class family.
I find it interesting that few people ever talk about the individual worker median income, adjusted for inflation (the common statistic quoted is household income). Quoting adjusted individual median income might throw into question the fantasy in the US that we are such a wealthy country. What people would find is that while we are, indeed, a wealthy country, over the last twenty years the wealth has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller faction of the population. As the economist Paul Krugman wrote, this is "class warfare". But it warfare practiced by the rich and the powerful on everyone else.
I don't have a bad job - I just made a bad joke.
I was unemployed at the end of last year and beginning of this year, not I make around $36,000/year, I would say that is definately an improvement.
-- Any comments seen here are not mine, but a mixture of alchohol and lack of sleep.
I'm not sure what the number is -- but I'm sure western techies can't compete with Indian techies when it comes to their cost of reproduction.
Seastead this.
I work for a firm that calibrates salaries for cost-of-living. The difference is not as high as you'd expect once you correct for the size of the city (e.g. Chicago = LA; Peoria = Sacramento).
I'm not reading the article, I'm not even going to browse the comments. I will say one thing & never look back (except maybe to replies).
.com crap was going on. We heard about the amazing wages people were making, so we assumed that we could do as well, or at least similar -- that's where we judged the baseline for our "statistical analysis" of salary.
:) and really, not much to do. If I wanted, I could have found something. Peruse some tech manuals, or review some new software or something equally boring, but at least I would be doing work instead of reading about some crappy (S)NES ROM hacks. Work isn't supposed to be enjoyable. Otherwise, in the morning, you'd say "I'm going to play!" instead of "Ugh, gotta go to work."
/. in stream-of-conciousness mode.
The reason IT people think they are earning "below average" is that they have no goddamned idea what average is. Many of us were graduates or in college/maybe High School while the
Then the industry collapsed, for numerous reasons including paying their staff way too friggin much. We saw it collapse, but many didn't consider that it meant the salaries would as well. So there were fewer jobs on more limited corporate budgets, but we still expected the same wages?
A large factor in this could be the arrogance that comes along with being brilliant -- which most of us think we are (and we may be right). We seem to think that our brilliance is worth shitloads of money, just because it's in a more specialized and a -- here's a key bit -- very new field. Standard IT staff hadn't really existed prior to the 80s. Yeah, there were a lot of bearded gurus & stuff, but not the same as today, where a medium business will have 2-3 full-time support personnel, just to take care of employee PCs.
A prime example of that arrogance (sorry to the person in this example, but I told you when it came up that I thought it was arrogant) is a guy on here a while back complaining that he was ONLY making about 90K a year. My immediate response to anyone who feels that way is "fuck you." I don't care where you live, (short of UAE) that's a lot of money. When someone thinks they are barely scraping by on 90 grand a year, they have no idea the true value of money. Especially if they're single (don't know or remember if he was -- prolly not).
What boggles my mind is that many of these people who are "being robbed" are the same ones who are good enough at what they do to sit around at work playing City of Heros on the company's OC-3 for hours on end. Good for you. Go create work, you mooching bastard. I spent a lot of today sitting around because there "wasn't anything to do," but it's Friday (classic cop-out
If you think you aren't paid enough, ask random people with the same educational level (and similar skill level in their own field) how much they make. Probably less than you.
I'm not a journalist, so don't complain about the rambling nature of the post. I write on
"Meanwhile, those of us with a love of the subject have the actual deeper understanding of computers that allow us to command a decent salary."
Interesting. Love of the job is important. I submite we should then stop heckling all those managers, CEO's, and corporate raiders. Obviously they LOVE what they're doing, and have a deep understanding of the subject, therefore they deserve their salaries, and other bonuses.
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I would never answer a pop-up asking for my salary amount or other personal information. Is this really a secure practice? Are the surveyed people earning less money because they are the type who would answer a pop-up asking for this information?
And for those of us not living in the USA, what sort of taxes do you pay on that income?
My gross salary is around AU$73,000 (plus $7000 in superanuation), but all I get in my pocket after tax is $50,000. Is the situation similar over there?
Advanced users are users too!
I think they're also tax-deductible.
The the analysis you published in infoworld
has some fundamental problems:
In terms of your readers, the figure to look at isn't gross wages, but _disposable income_ ( say after taxes, insurance, housing, transportation). Rising salaries may just indicate movement of jobs from lower cost areas like Oregon to higher cost areas like New York City.
Your analysis doesn't take into account the fact of the predatory, corporate sponsored immigration policy- visa programs like H-1b/L-1 with little purpose other than to reduce the disposable wages of IT workers. This article shows how this works for the economy as a whole. The H-1b/L-1 programs are still large compared to the overall pool of IT workers--and have a much larger impact than outsourcing at this point.
RJB
I read the story - and I still don't understand what you are talking about. What does this have to do with the demographics of pay?