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IT Salaries to Grow 0.5% in 2005
halfacrayon writes "According to Robert Half Technology 2005 Salary Guide, average base pay for IT professionals overall will rise 0.5% in 2005. Data security analysts will command the highest salary (up to $93K), while system auditors will enjoy the highest increase compared to 2004 rates (5.1%). IT instructors are holding the bottom spot in terms of gross revenues (salary could go as low as $43,250) and business systems analysts will barely notice the increase of 1.9% that they should expect in 2005."
I work for a company that consistently gives 4% a year. Last year I made considerably more with a salary adjustment. Is this not the norm?
That, however isn't just the IT depts but entire organizations, with the notable exceptions at a few places where executives cut nice retro-active deals, even as the ship was foundering around them.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Home prices have increased 40%, inflation is over 3% and despite the tax cuts, about 1/3 of the average paycheck goes to taxes of one kind or another.
One step forward, Chapter 7 steps back. Thanks boss.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Unfortunatly inflation is around 2%, so you are all going to get a little poorer.
Storage being cheap these days, It has gotten so bad when all these companies store info on their own servers and hire people to make sure it's secure, and then the companies fuck it up later anyway. It'd be better, and overall cheaper, if there were a few security storage companies handling all your info. I would put more faith (well, a little more) in a company whose business model surounds being a secure storage company, rather than have my data secured as a precautionary afterthought of most companies these days.
As IT has matured it seems that the people who stand to gain are those already employed in the field. Lots of people on here will tell you there are no more IT jobs available in the US, but that is just plain wrong. Check any of the jobs sites or staffing firms and you will find plenty listed. However, most of those are looking for experienced professionals who have several years experience working in industry. If you have that, there are plenty of opportunities out there.
What more people usually bitch about is how the relative difficulty of entering the field has increased for newcomers.
I am a Linux Systems Administrator of 20 machines for a small time company in a small town of 50,000(which is the county seat). I command a salary of $28,000 and I am told to like it. A combination of corporation in big cities and the economy drive the average wages. Unless my current town is so drastically different these wage studies must only take into account large cities of 100,000 or more.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
I'm making in the mid thirties and was out of work so long I feel lucky. Felt lucky, anyway. Geez.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I like the company I work for, but unfortunately, I may need to go someplace else if I want my career (and salary) to advance...
...just my 2 gil.
The national debt
;) ) and if everyone goes expatriate, the tax benefits are totally worth it.
The interest we will have to pay on the national debt
Inflation
So basically you can think of an average 0.5% growth as your petty little cost of living increase. Enjoy the Bush tax cut while you can because as he spends like a crackwhore with a stolen credit card, each person's "share" of the national debt will blossum. that means a bigger budget every year and eventually taxes will have to go up big time to keep the leviathan from choking on its own excess.
How about this. Why don't a bunch of IT companies set up shop in Costa Rica and pay their employees to move there? The advantages are enormous. Cheap cost of business, you're close to America, exotic location for the young employees (and exotic women for the young geek men
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Most of my peers (experienced J2EE developers) make at least CDN$75K and I clocked CDN$90K in 2004. All this in one of the cheapest provinces (Nova Scotia).
Canadian wages are very decent compared the the cost of living here. I used to work in the UK and despite making more money there according to the conversion rate, the purchasing power of a CDN$ is just so much greater in Canada that it felt like getting an 80% salary hike.
Right... it's gotten harder to waltz in to an industry with very little to bring to the table. I interview a lot, predominantly grads into a fortune 100. It has gotten *easier* to hire people who are good, not because the market is saturated, but because I am getting less people who are pursuing a career in IT purely cos they think it will make them big bucks. I don't want those people, I want people who are interested in what they do. Otherwise, ultimately they are wasting my time, and their own careers. They won't stay long, and they won't enjoy the time they do spend.
Taking some of the "glamour" out will be better for the industry, and it will be a better fit for the people who choose to do this. Money is, or should, be a secondary concern for everyone involved - there are bigger priorities here.
The indirect affect is that the perception of value of the IT work is lessened as well. Managers and owners hear that overseas IT workers will charge much less, so outsourcing is always an option if salaries rise too much. They will bring this up in salary discussions.
I had a future career as an IT worker/manager. I decided the future was bleak enough to get go back to school and get a Master's degree in management, not IT management. I now know enough about planning, finance, reporting, cost structure, leadership, supply chain, knowledge management that I can feel confortable mooving into another field.
Which is sad because I love IT. But I don't want to be around when all the jobs disappear. Like what happened to textiles, aerospace, and manufacturing. Sometimes its good to hedge your future.
Good luck everybody.
I think I would like to survey IT salaries of other universes at this point. Maybe in another universe the damned Brits never touched India, and they instead speak vietnamese in reverse or whatnot.
Table-ized A.I.
Insanely bad idea. Now that you blackmailed them into a raise you'll be let go as soon as a suitable replacement is found. Mark my words.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
What about un-employed hackers?
five percent of zero is still zero.
Damn you Bush for making me work for a living.
http://www.wom.cc
Proud Owner!
Peace.
Even more interesting is that engineering jobs requiring minimal training are also being offshored. A good example is quality-assurance (QA) software engineers. A Chinese engineer, with a horribly thick accent, told me that his company does not hire any American QA engineers because doing QA is much cheaper in mainland China. So, when his company completes a major software package, the management ships it via Internet to mainland China, and the Chinese QA engineers will then test the package.
In this never ending offshoring, what is the next "bottom rung" (of engineering) to leave America? Verilog engineers?
For that matter, if you lose all of the low-paid jobs, and cut everyone else's salary by less than half the difference, the average salary STILL goes up.
The US has outsourced a LOT of the lower-paid jobs, but relatively few of the higher-paid ones. To achieve a paltry 0.5%, there must be an unbelievable downward pressure on wages. And both bosses and the Government will be keen to see that figure stay low, as it will reduce the inflationary pressures.
The days of "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work" have passed, and everyone is joining in the game of massaging the statistics.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Ok, sometimes IT includes programming/development, sometimes IT is maintainance, support, and administration. Which is it? When they say IT salaries are increasing, what do they mean by IT? Can we come up with some more accurate terminology? As a software engineer, I usually am categorized into Engineering, as opposed to IT - but there seems to be no consistancy.
Regarding the US job market for programmers - there seems to be jobs here in the Silicon Valley/SF area, but they just put you through a ringer during the interview process (3-4 interview sessions of 2-3 hours each), and then give you a lowball offer. If you have a specific domain knowledge that is valuable to someone, the situation becomes a lot better. I wouldn't really be interested in relocating, so I have no idea what is going on outside the Bay Area, but I keep getting people asking if I'm interested in BREW/J2ME positions, since very few people actually have experience with that technology. Not that it's a particularly difficult domain to understand/learn.
A lot of companies seem to think that the bad economy means that hiring top notch developers should be cheap and easy. But, in reality, these are not the people that stay unemployed forever. Most of your top talent doesn't stay on the market very long, leaving you to sift through thousands of resumes and hundreds of interviews. At my last company, we got some smart people coming in and not getting the job because they felt they could do better, or that they didn't want to pay much. It was a tiny company, which has less leeway for supporting people who can't do their job well, but I remember a couple people who I thought were really good and my boss decided against them for, I felt, trivial reasons. I think those decisions were justified either consciously or subconsciously by the economy.
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
Because $93k doesn't seem that much for a top notch programmer.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
I know the parent is a joke, but it's important not to confuse average pay increase with your annual raise amount. It's possible for the average pay to increase only 0.5%, with most people getting 5% raises.
Fictional scenario
-------
Before:
Employee 1 - 10,000/yr
Employee 2 - 20,000/yr
Employee 3 - 300,000/yr
After:
Employee 1 - 10,500/yr
Employee 2 - 21,000/yr
Employee 3 - 300,150/yr
In this case, the two worker bees each got a 5% raise, while the mega-rich CIO got a measly $150 (it's an improbable example on many levels, but just to prove a point). The average pay only increased 0.5%, but MOST people got 5% raises.
The source is robert half technology. They are a head hunting firm that agressively robs its consultants. I think they just want to pay less to engineers so are posting these bogus rates. In the silicon valley you can add 20k to each one of those numbers easily.
Think "electrician".
I started as a tech, spent the last 27 yrs in all manner of developer-consultant gigs, and I'm seriously thinking of applying for a journeyman electrician job.
Intellectually it's cake, it can't be outsourced, and they make the same money.
Cheers...
The revolution will NOT be televised.
for the 73 IT people left in the United States
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
A 0.5% isn't too bad. At the last company I worked at, my boss gave me a $0.05/hour increase and he thought that was a big deal. He got mad when I reminded him that the company five years ago -- under better management -- routinely gave me 40% raises.
Anyway, I found out his nickel was bigger than mine since he was able to build a house on the coast when most people couldn't afford to buy a house in Silicon Valley.
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) introduced a bill to reform the H-1B visa program titled the "Defend the American Dream Act of 2004". His strong letter to the editor of the New Jersey Herald indicates that the bill will be re-introduced in the 2005 Congress. I can't recall the last time I have read a written statement from a public official that was so highly critical of H-1B.
To review the American Dream Act follow these instructions:
1) go to http://thomas.loc.gov
2) enter H.R. 5413 into the search engine
Pascrell's website is at:
http://www.pascrell.house.gov/
Click "Contact Bill" to give them feedback.
IT salaries to rise 0.5%? That's great...
...until you factor in inflation, to get the *real* salary growth rate, rather than the nominal rate.
Consumer price inflation (CPI) is around 3.26%.
Basic microeconomics (the Fisher Equation) says you take the wage increase rate and subtract the inflation rate, in order to get the real wage growth.
0.5% - 3.26% = -2.76%
So, assuming your wage increases with this 0.5% rise, you're still not increasing your pay enough to outpace inflation. This means your real purchasing power will be decreasing this year, by 2.76% if the figure above remains anywhere near accurate.
Salary rising by 0.5% this year? Quite a shitter, if you ask me. But, of course, it could be worse (we could be seeing negative growth).
(The data security guys still come out ahead though: 5.1% - 3.26% = 1.84% real pay increase. At $90k/year, that's another $1656 in purchasing power they can afford, in real terms.)
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
There is no mention in the article about wages for support workers - I am a support analyst at a medium-large (17,000 undergrad) University and they are doing a wage study - I wonder if I'll be making more than I do now. We have lots of money at the University. We don't just do support either; we do project work too and clean machines / administer Perfigo, etc. Any ideas what the average wages of us is?
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
But that aint my point. I'm in IT cos I enjoy it. I'm a technologist, and I'm fascinated and motivated by what I do. Money isn't irrelevant, of course it isn't. But I have a good working life because I enjoy what I do, and my employer gets (hopefully) a better return because a happy worker produces better work. This isn't about a vow of poverty, this is about valuing the 40-70+ hours a week you spend doing something more than the cash you get for doing it.
So I will continue to look for those traits in the people I hire - you want people who believe in the cause, not mercenaries. Of course you want to reward the people who do good stuff, but we shouldn't promise everyone riches just for passing GO.
It's going to end up that the really smart and talented people end up going into other fields.
Isn't it better - for everyone - that people go into the fields they actually have a talent for?
Whoa, hey, hey, hey. Don't blame India for doing well. Blame America for being a capitalist country, where profit is valued over its citizens livelihoods. India is doing what's right for itself and it's turned out incredibly well for them. Good for them. Perhaps America should figure out how to improve its own situation rather than blaming everyone else for the mess it's gotten itself into.
H1Bs fit very nicely into a capitalist society, where the goal is to attract talented workers from all around the world and retain the best of the best. If you can't compete with that talent, perhaps you should look at another career, move to a country with policies that better reflect your worldview, or fight to have your country's policies changed.
Note that one of the prerequisites for an H1B is that the worker is paid on par with what an American worker at the company is paid and that documentation has to go through INS review. I know this from the experience of having gone through the long, slow process of getting one to work two years in California (originally from Canada, but have worked in the US, Mexico and now live in Japan). There are obviously exceptions, but in my experience, us visa workers were paid on par with our American colleagues. Ensuring that this is the case is not the job of corporations, it's the job of the government. Have a word with them if you suspect a company of violating your country's laws.
In any case, even if companies could get away with paying lower salaries to H1B workers, you can't blame them for taking advantage of a programme that expands the pool of talent available to them, made available to them by the government. It is also the INS's job to ensure that H1Bs are only issued for positions where a qualified American worker could not be found (or didn't apply). In any case, if you don't like the H1B programme or globalization in general, I suggest you address your complaints to your local congressperson or the INS, who are responsible for this sort of thing rather than complaining on slashdot.
I'm going to contradict the wage increase. I haven't seen a wage increase in almost 2 years. I won't complain. How many of you actually enjoy going to work? I look forward to my daily experience dealing with the joys of being a programmer, support tech, etc. We'd all like to see a raise, but be real. The average wage going up does not mean you like the job. Choose happiness at work before the extra nickel.
It's all about RTFM.
When IT and labor has fired and offshored most of it's workforce, .5% for the few left that got demoted or overworked doesn't make my day any brighter. I sure as hell don't see it doing 3 jobs.
FL has the lowest salaries in the country as far as IT goes. Especially south FL. one recent job posting asked for a linux support tech with pay of $7 per hour. Pc technicians with 4 years of experience can expect $10 hourly. Forget health benefits.
They're using their grammar skills there.
The average salary hike for IT workers was 12% in 2004. It is estimated to be 12-14% in 2005.
~Once you have your choices narrowed down, the rest will fall into place.
After being laid off (again) a year ago, I started a new php programming job near Cleveland, OH in November. My new job pays LESS THAN HALF of my previous salary, coming in at USD $33k. I don't know about the rest of the nation, but I competed with dozens of people for this position, and commute 90 minutes each way.
When it came time to negotiate it went like this:
"This position pays $33k, and we'd love to have you on board."
"I'd really like to join this company, but that salary is extremely low by any measure. The minimum I could accept is $45k."
"I understand this may be less than what you're used to, however we predetermined our rate of pay prior to holding interviews. We have great benefits and.... BLAH BLAH BLAH... the position pays $33k"
I've never negotiated for a position and gotten NOTHING... shows to go ya its still very much an employer's market.
I was hired, I'm sure, because the company is confident that I'm not going to find a job elsewhere (and haven't so far).
It would be interesting to see these figures adjusted for regional cost of living - they just don't seem to jive with reality in the Midwest.