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SAGE 2004-2005 Salary Survey Announced
Nalez writes "The ever-popular SAGE Salary Survey is ready to go and available to all computer administrators. Everyone who participates will get a copy of the results. The survey takes 17-20 minutes to complete. SAGE members can access the 2003 results and you can read all about previous SAGE surveys."
I read these every year but I wonder how useful they are. I've never heard of anybody going to their boss with survey results to ask for a raise, and I can't imagine getting your pay cut because others are making more. Perhaps the benefit is in planning for new hires? Telling people you pay better than market rates?
As a consultant, I don't use these to set my rates, and the information is usually historical rather than predictive -- what I'd like to know is what's going to be paying more next year, not last year. But I'm sure there are other uses. Makes for great gossip if nothing else.
Speak Up About Poor Software Quality!
It doesn't matter if we punch in $20,000 or $50,000 or $100,000. The only important thing anyone needs to know out of the result... you are buying less for your dollar in 2005 than in 2004. Most U.S salaries including non-ITs are absolutely unportional to the economy.
.com boom or spoiled the real estate market at your investment expense. In that case, none of this applies to you. Happy 4th.
Average joe need to spend almost 70-80% of the their paycheck to maintain the same standard of living. Of course that is unless you got rich in the
I imagine the survey will look a lot different next year if things keep going the way they are. The article below talks about a company out in California looking for a programmer at $15/hour.
a g=ubind.bld
http://news.com.com/2061-10788_3-5770608.html?
t
June 30, 2005 3:26 PM PDT
Coding for $15 an hour?
Could a computer coding job paying just $15 per hour signal something's wrong with the tech world?
That relatively measly amount is what's promised in an ad for a "ASP.NET Programmer" on the America's Job Bank site. The job, which calls for "at least 1 year's experience either in school, at work, or a combination of the two," is being offered by employment services company AppleOne, according to the ad.
Salaries are for women and feebs.
Real men bill the client directly, with an arrow stuck into their door, shot from a bow they've made by hand with a string they've strung themselves from tanned bear entrails.
If payment is tardy, the second arrow should be lit on fire before the bill is sent.
After that, you may have to get nasty.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Am I the only one who finds filling this out depressing?
Especially when you fill out the bad bits about the current job. And see that you checked most of the boxes. And then realise that is says "please specify no more than three."
*sigh*
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I have tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. Antifoidulus you are my father.
Does anyone have decent Canadian Salary Data? I'm particularly interested in figure for the Ottawa area...
Most of the PC Technician contracts I been getting in the San Francisco Bay Area are usually between $16 to $20 per hour. However, I been getting offers for work outside the SF Bay Area (mostly in Southern California) for $50 to $60 per hour for the same kind of work. Can anyone explain the difference?
For convenience, will they automatically convert the salaries to rupees?
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Because the SF Bay Area is filled with people who can do it. I bailed out a long time ago, I was doing SA work there in 2001, and the wages were shrinking fast for new contracts. There is an entrenched group of Senior people who own houses and have local investments (kids in school and the like). They won't move out of the area because their life is there. Since they are fighting to protect their houses and mortgages they will work for dirt cheap. 16 year UNIX and Programmers will work for $36k/yr. Thats just sick.
Take my advice, RUN! I went very far away and I am back to my salery level of 100k+ in a distant city. You don't find that in SF/Bay anymore.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Develop it, and make a fortune charging folks for access to your information!
Oh wait... no one in IT would pay. They'd yell "information wants to be free"!
Nevermind.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
...and find out how much the average pay really is... I'm guessing somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 a day.
Then everyone in the states making $15/hour could start to feel real fortunate when they fire up their microwave on another bowl of ramen.
Art Schools Dietzilla
I did my part to bring the averages down and broaden the standard deviations, by including my mid-sized city, midwestern, academic compensation in the dataset. The compensation results in these surveys are so alien to the job market in which I work that I don't know whether to laugh at them or just cry.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You're free to hand over your salary data but in order to see the results from 2 years ago you have to be a member?
No thanks.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
16 year UNIX and Programmers will work for $36k/yr. Thats just sick.
Why is everyone so surprised? Isn't this one of the expected outcomes of PC-based FOSS software like FreeBSD and Linux? I'm not saying this was a goal, just an anticipated side effect, the downside outweighed by the upside. When a particular field of knowledge and experience becomes commoditized the price that the knowledge and experience commands drops.
In the early to mid 90s many people honestly believed that Unix was on the way out, that it was destined to become a niche. Few people invested much time in learning Unix, we used it in school and when the staff polled the CS majors about how the program could be improved a very popular request was classes on Windows programming. Thankfully the staff said that the university teaches concepts not the flavor-of-the-day OS, go learn to program Windows outside of class.
So those people with Unix experience were rare and able to command high salaries. Now enter FreeBSD and Linux. Many CS student I knew didn't really care about the GPL or the politics, all they cared about was that they could do their Unix based homework assignments on their PC at home and not have to wait for machines in the lab or dial-in through a damn modem. A handful got into FreeBSD and Linux. Between the former and later groups Unix knowledge and experiece became widely available. If my company needs a website I don't have to go out and buy an expensive Sun box and hire expensive people with Sun experience. I can go out and get decent PC hardware and use FreeBSD or Linux and hire a far less expensive person to setup and maintain them. Sure the Sun hardware is more robust but for many businesses it doesn't really matter.
I saw similar things at school. The university stopped buying Suns and purchased PCs and installed Linux. The vast majority of students and profs only needed a general purpose Unix desktop. The handful that had some very specialized need could get a Sun.
This is all the rational expected outcome of FOSS software like FreeBSD and Linux. FOSS not only frees the users but it also frees the corporations, they are no longer "held hostage" by what Unix admins and programmers once jokingly labeled themselves: the "high priests".
That's about right.
That's 28 grand a year, before taxes. In Canada, that'd be enough to live comfortably (where the poverty line is about 16 grand before taxes). Unless you live in one of the expensive areas of the US, I suspect that'd be enough too. Hotel managers in Hawaii make about that, for example.
Making that much money means you get more money per year than about 60-70% of the population. There is a large gap between rich and poor in the US.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I'm coding for $13/hr -- Canadian dollars. And I am the only Firmware/Software Engineer in the company with a lot of pressure to produce. I am thinking of moving to the United States for better opportunities. Maybe someone on Slashdot can help me.
Didn't they do a few movies about that happening to dead people? I think the movies where called Phantasm
/Creapy voice.
oh yes and don't forget
BOY!
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
As someone formally employed in the IT certification training industry, I can tell you that the results of these surveys are often used by unscrupulous salespeople to sell expensive courses and training "kits" (over-priced boxes of cheaply bound, poor quality books and a CD or two) to gullible persons looking to get into IT. Let's say experienced Cisco admins are making $65k/year according to the survey. This information is pitched to prospective students to imply that they will make $65k if they just buy the $5000 CCNA course and pass the exam. Of course a CCNA and no job experience is unlikely to get you a job at all much less a high paying one. I'll name names: Intense School, Wave Technologies, TechSkills, and by far the worst, New Horizons.
Oh wait... no one in IT would pay. They'd yell "information wants to be free"!
Nevermind.
I realize you're being humorous, but to be serious for a moment, you're both right and wrong. Develop for the wrong market and getting money from people is more traumatic than pulling bones from living animals. (yeah, I'm a programmer) It's just plain hell. However, develop for the right market and people gladly spend money on your product or service.
For example, a service for unemployed people will likely be a hard sell because people don't want spend money while they don't have income. It's all about emotional state, and the unemployed are insecure. They will still buy things, but not something that is targeted at them because they don't have income. In any case, it's not clear what the emotional value of this service would be for said market.
Now, if you could target the friends and relatives of the unemployed, then you've got a market you can sell to. In this case you are selling help/aid/home-charity. Clear emotional value, and the problem can now move to the next step, which is marketing. How do you get message out to friends and relatives that if unemployed Joe only knew how much he could be making, then his life would be so much better?
This isn't a creative problem, it's market research. Talk to people that have unemployed relatives, and see if you can get them to think that giving your information would make things better. Find out what, if any, messages work. Then find out how they would want to give the information to start determining pricing and packaging.
But note, you haven't developed anything yet. If you didn't find an effective message, at least you haven't burned away too much time and living expenses. The last two steps are, 1) build a prototype, and 2) build a business plan. Now you're on your way to making a fortune charging folks for access to your information! It's not quick, easy, or without loads of risk, but realistically "information wants to be free" doesn't have to enter into the struggle.
Whatever.
Nothing as Depresing as finding out that not only is my salary lower than the average fore any kind of computer geak job.
It's not even in the same ballpark.
I'm gona have to move.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
From interviewing people and getting jobs myself, it seems that most engineering or science graduates (especially math/physics grads, or those who have never worked in their lives), assume that who you know is much more important than what you know. The misconception from the "ivory tower" is that socializing is far more important than intelligence or solving problems. In the real world, it's maybe about even with perhaps a bit more importance assigned to socializing.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
We have a need for an Accounts Payable person. You're hired.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
I guess the "inhumane" HR expects candidates to go "WHOOPIE" when they hear "Rhupee"/"Rupee"...LOL/DOH
To piss you off. See, I am part of the global conspiracy you talk about in your other posts. I am out to hound you, to keep you from telling the masses about our nefarious plan. No one else but you can see this message. Part of the Carnivore plan that is "defunct".
Or I could just be a loser with too much time on my hands.
The truth is out there.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
That's roughly what I make (with about 4 years of experience) depending on the exchange rate of the dollar to the euro.
I can't believe the standard of living in the US. Wages are incredibly high, and prices are incredibly low.
For the price of a two bedroom appartment in a poor neighbourhood here, you could buy a family home with a nice big yard and a car in the US. Food and clothes cost about twice as much here, and gasoline about the equivalent of 5 or 6 dollars per gallon, depending on the exchange rate.
On the contrary, your example is consistent with my point. As a matter of fact you seem to be unknowingly agreeing with me. No one is arguing that there are no high end Unix positions, merely that there are far fewer. Perhaps you are merely qualified enough that you can effectively compete for the scarcer opportunities. What has changed is that when talent was scarce those with mediocre skills could still find high paying jobs. Now that talent is not scarce they have to settle for lesser paying jobs. Being part of the "high priest" class no longer means job security. Most of what the Unix admin did when I was in school, late 80s early 90s, is now part of the skillset of some of the incoming freshman.