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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.
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http://news.com.com/2061-10788_3-5770608.html?
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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.)
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.
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
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.
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.