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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."
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
I should forward this story to my boss. Then again since I work ar EDS I'm just happy to be one of the contracts thats not NMCI
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
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.
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 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!
The company I was at previously did give a rise every year, but more of the order of 7-10%. On top of that we had quartely bonuses of between 1 and 2 thousand. One year I got a rise of seven thousand, with bonuses totaling nearly the same amount.
Why did I leave the previous job? Why, why, why..
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.
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!
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.