IT (And Other) Salaries On The Rise In The U.S.

pertinax18 writes "CNN Money is reporting that salaries for most college grads are on the rise once again. Especially interesting to collegiate (and other) /. readers may be the 4.1% increase in pay for CS grads, and 10.7% increases in pay for others in the field. From the article: 'If those numbers sound enticing, it's probably because computer science graduates are long overdue for a pay increase. "They haven't seen an increase since 2001 and this is the first year, in all four reports, that they showed an increase," Koncz says.' Are things finally starting to look up for us?"

Comments

Are they really?

[Nos.]

I wonder if this isn't a side effect of a lot of the outsourcing to India that's happening. If a lot of the lower paid jobs (tech support and the like) are outsourced, what's left behind are the higher paying jobs which results in a higer average.

trimming off the bottom

[crowdozer]

I wonder how much of this is due to outsourcing. Get rid of a bunch of the lower-than-average wages from the equation and you will get a perceived increase in average, which could then be misconstrued as a good thing. For example... 30K 40K 50K 60K = average of 45K Now outsource the jobs of the 30K and 40K guys so they go work at McDs and you have... 50K 60K = average of 55K Oooh were all making 10K more. WRONG.

I call shenanigans...

[twiggy]

Sorry, but this is not as good a bit of news as it looks...

Unemployment in the IT sector is up (due to both outsourcing AND the struggling economy), so who cares if the people with jobs are getting a bit more money?

Furthermore, this article is talking specifically about fresh out of college newhires - something the person who posted this seems to avoid clarifying altogether.

Guess what? They're getting these jobs and their first increase since 2001 (CS graduates) because the older folks who were making $60k and are now unemployed are gone - a net savings of $11k.

Bottom line: It's still brutally difficult to find a decent computer science / IT job right now, and the people in them aren't getting huge raises. It's also important to note that there's complaints heard 'round the country from IT and CS folks about the fact that they're working ridiculous numbers of hours.

The insane high salaries of the tech boom, however unjustified they seemed at the time, were actually justifiable because these fresh out of college kids were often dumping 60-80 hours per week into their job. (Note that I agree that the rest of the spending during the tech boom, however, was just as stupid as everyone says it was).