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How Much Money do Programmers Really Make?
bigman2003 asks: "ADTmag.com recently released a list of average salaries for IT workers. Usually when I see these lists, I find out that I am grossly below the average salary. But this time I was very surprised to see that I am actually above the average! This is partly because of a recent raise, but it is also because the numbers quoted in this survey are lower than what I've seen the past from other surveys. This report quotes about $56,000 for the average application developer. I am a web developer (sure, laugh all you want) and I wanted to know specifically: How much are other web developers were making? And- How many hours a week does it take you to make it?"
not enough.
Anywhere between $0 and $150,000 or more.
How much money will a typical programmers make when the offshore/outsourcing trend levels out matures?
I wonder what a comparable salary in say India would be, compared to the same job in America?
Just curious...
Need a Nerd?
Nerd Systems
It's not that easy. Where you live, standard of living costs, specialized training and abilities, years of experience, etc, all influence and alter this. Averages give you an idea, but you have to go on your abilities and what you can find. If you like your job, it often means more than an extra 5-10k per year. I think the real issue here is that people like to know how they rank compared to others, and reality is way to gray for that black & white approach.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
Aerospace engineer. Spend 80% of my time programming simulations in C++. Fresh out of college make in excess of 50,000 plus much better than average benefits.
I really wouldn't be surprised if it varies considerably. $56000 sounds high dollar to me but I live in the South where there is no money anyway...
Is that before or after taxes? Or is it only in Redmond, WA (I don't work for M$) that people get paid around $100,000?
Student Research and Development
For what it's worth, I know that entry-level (fresh out of college) software development engineers at Micrsoft get paid $75,500 a year for base starting salary.
Anyone know Google salaries?
By "average" are they referring to the mean or the median?
The mean salary may be 56,000 dollars-- but I'm fairly sure that the median programmer's salary is denominated in rupees.
If you live in Iowa and are making $70k per year, it's a good job. If you live in Manhattan and you're making $70k per year, you're at the poverty line.
The only reason why publishing companies waste their time on such surveys is that people are so interested in the topic. The unfortunate thing is that the data is meaningless on a national scale. But, it sells advertising!
I'm a big tall mofo.
...these averages will drop by at least 70% by the time I graduate and actually work in the field.
...or some technology will eliminate all jobs entirely. (Based on my karma, this option seems more likely -- in that case, I apologize to everyone else.)
The cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river.
Presently billing $35/hr, no cap. I'd like to be pulling more per hour, but contracting is feast or famine. The lack of hour-cap is nice. So, if I don't crack-up and go on a shooting spree, I'll pull in about $90-100k "this fiscal year".
How much are other web developers making? No were needed. I make $10 an hour for basic stupid HTML/CSS stuff, $20+ for more complicated stuff, minimum $25 for maintenance code. However, substantial breaks for large contracts means I'm averaging $3k a month or so. (pure profit, fuck taxes)
$20 an hour, works out to $42k/yr
Stop! Dremel time!
$47k
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think of these as two very different categories. Even if the web developer does all the "back end" work along with all the "front end" web-facing interface stuff, there's often a completely different mindset when it comes to releasing/ patching/ updating to the customer. I'm not going to say there's a lack of discipline, but it is so much easier to tweak a production server than it is to make a change to a large native-compiled, retail-boxed, advertisements-printed application.
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Well, let's separate developers from code monkeys. Now, code monkeys average about $45K. Developers average about $75K. Sure, I pulled that out of my ass, but it's a big ass, what else do you want me to do with it?
Keep in mind that if you're not living in one of a few areas of the country where plentiful IT jobs keep salaries high, you'll probably be making a lot less than the average. I've known plenty of senior sysadmins living in Middle America on ~50,000 USD. But it usually balances out, because the costs of living in high-salary areas are much higher.
I'm the entire IT dept. at work. I do it all. Planning, repairs, security, network maint, application support, etc. We have 85 trucks around the nation all tied in with GPS and email. I manage and support the whole damn thing.
I have 25 users and 1 server. When trying to figure out what my salary should be, they never have an entry called "dumbass who takes a job as the entire IT dept."
Does anyone have any idea what someone like that should be making?
Me: $46,000 - 40 hours, California
Coworker(s): $80,000 - 40 hours, California
It varies wildly.
I'm not a programmer, but I make $98,000 in a technical support position for a big company that went from tech industry darling to tech industry joke in the last few years. And no, it isn't SCO.
By technical support, I mean customers call me on the phone and ask for help with our software and hardware on their expensive support contracts and I help them out.
As a web programmer I make just over $62K, in the bay area. For me, it's enough...
Given that IT can easily be interpreted to be basic support staff and networking, which on average earn less. Of course a senior developer and a network support tech have, on average, a fairly large delta in the amount of specialized knowledge needed to perform the duties.
Personally I think real programmers working meaningful jobs are worth a bit more than that 56K, but I have seen way too many knuckleheads making more than that in the last few years, so...
A bowl of rice or a few rupies?
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
You could just post as an Anonymous Coward.
60k, 3 yrs out of college. Not enough to buy a decent house though, freaking LA.
I am a web developer (sure, laugh all you want) I aint laughing on your salary or position, but you being a web developer should know to give a warning before linking to pdf files. It does annoy people.
Why not post as an Anonymous Coward? I make $51,500 a year. I'm fresh out of college (a year now.) I work for a large coporation and was recently recognized for my outstanding contributions to the line of business ($1500 bonus.)
Part sysadmin/part programmer. $30K of it is in vested toilet paper though.
10 yrs exp., C/C++ and VB (argh) = $80K
I started out back in 1998 as a developer making $60K for anywhere between 40 and 100 hours a week. Before I was promoted to management, I was making $72K a year for 40 hours with a ton of perks. Both jobs had good benefits and working conditions, but I do enjoy the pay increase for management.
Hrm... seems this disparity isn't only in the music industry. More and more, the IP makers aren't earning as much as the IP owners. What should be done to correct this disparity? Personally, I'd like to see a forced reduction in the life and value of IP. This includes patents and copyrights. Patents last too long in today's fast-moving technology world. Two, three and more generations of the same basic product are developed before a patent runs out. And in the case of the GIF compression method, the patent practically outlasted the usefulness of the 'device' in question.
Copyright reductions should go without saying. These copyright vampires are robbing the public of measureless amounts of art. I wonder what politicians we can bribe into supporting this directive?
Off topic? Crap... I was just thinking about how IP owners routinely rape their resources and I went off on this rant... sorry.
Some year's I've made $35,000.00, others (well...one) I made over $200,000.00. Depends on so many factors, the industry you cater to, the country, the type of development, but most importantly: if you are working for yourself (better $$$, no sleep) or others (worse $$$, a tiny bit more sleep), or both (best $$$, sleep when your dead).
What's more important is who you work for; cheap corporate 'meat for the machine' development houses who don't pay overtime makes that $45,000/year worth a lot less than a small independant house who plays BBall on friday afternoons.
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If picking on you won't help, then I'm really in trouble.
I was hired on at my current employer in February of 2004 and in the nearly 2 years I've been with them I have not received a raise. I lowballed my expected salary to 42,000 CAD when I was hired since I had no formal education but 4 years of experience. I managed to win an award from them in my first month of employment but still nada.
I've since gone to school to get a piece of paper, while still working 1/2 time. I'm starting to feel a little underappreciated even though I'm usually given framework/system level assignments, and senior level resources come to me with questions.
Am I being unreasonable to expect a raise even though I'm in school?
I've begrudingly convinced myself to wait until I graduate next summer before asking, but I'd like to make what I think I deserve which is somewhere between $52,000 and $60,000 and I don't think they'll give me that much of a raise in one go.
Any thoughts?
P.S. I'm considered a Senior Java, Web, and PL/SQL developer.
Thanks.
How much you make is pretty meaningless without normalizing by cost of living. $50k in Idaho is effectively 2x as much as $50k in San Francisco.
-me
Its the age old question of Mean or Median. With a few earning millions, it will drag the mean up, but not the median.
The median is generally accepted as being the more appropriate method to determine average income, but sometimes people use the mean to skew the figures for one reason or another.
My salary would be a lot higher if I could convince McDonalds to value my MCSE.
yes, I am a grad student and making hardly 14k/yr., sigh! had to post anonymously..
$53K, 1 year out of college, and I average just under 40 hours per week.
By January 19, 2038, I hope to be comfortably retired. But for you younger folks programming, you may have a window of opportunity. Remember 1999? I was offered scads of money to reprogram some systems in a language I hadn't even learned yet, just so they could be assured of making it over the Y2K hump.
IT jobs still pay around 20-50% more than non-IT jobs, which is the only important fact. (with the exception of lawyers, doctors, and other professions , of course)
I am a web developer(php/mysq/javascript *groan*) working in a guy's basement. there is a backstory to all of this(I went from knowing jackshit to knowing a lot in about 2.5+ years). Now that I know a lot, I know I'm underpaid.. but I'm also bored of the work. blech.
I'm a web developer, doing fine, but I'm not really conformable divulging what I make on Slashdot.
I don't mean this as a personal slam, but that exact attitude keeps salaries low. Why NOT talk about your salary? If you don't talk about it, you can't know how you compare. And although you might not care how you compare in a rat-race sense, you damned well should care that your employer treats you "fairly"...
Me, I make just a hair over $40k. Sound low, for someone with 10 years experience? In my area, I can afford a mortgage on that. And together with my SO, as a DINK couple, we do pretty damned well combined.
TALK about your salary! Don't brag about it, that just sounds obnoxious, but chat. Make sure that neither you nor your friends have gotten royally screwed.
I will never understand people who have this phobia of discussing how much they make. If you make something truly obscene (either minimum wage or seven figures), okay, you might have a reason to shy away from the topic - But within an order of magnitude of "average", help create a basis of comparison! It only hurts us, the workers, to remain tight-lipped about it.
Same company for 6 years so far.
103,000 last year.
Miami, Fl.
I wear multiple hats. System Administrator, Manager, Programmer, Trainer, etc.
Web Developer in Manhattan (w/ 8 years experience).
69K
45 hours a week.
But I know which way the wind is blowing, so I'm almost through law school and should get a sizeable pay raise (2x) once i start doing Computer Law for a large NYC law firm.
Total Sellout
A salary survey is nigh useless to begin with, and this one seems to be worse than normal. "Average salary" - what's that? Median or mean? Where's the standard deviation? What does 'broad spectrum of organizations' mean? Is it geographically diverse?
Here's another hint: a survey requires people who answer surveys. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that people making on the high end do not generally go out of their way to answer salary surveys, whereas people paid average or less than average might be a bit prone to worrying about their salary and therefore filling out surveys and looking them up.
Want to make more money? Instead of asking what other people make, ask yourself:
* What can I do that other people (or most other people) can't? What makes me good? What's my strength? How can I be better?
* How much is what I'm doing worth? How can I use my skills to create a larger value for a company or client?
* How can I leverage my work to produce more?
* What have I done that has exceeded expectations, that could not have been predicted and is a boon for whoever pays me?
If you have already come up with good answers for the questions above, you're probably making way more than the average already.
Be in good financial shape. People living paycheck to paycheck hurt themselves because they end up afraid to take risks. Save up a large cushion of living expenses - while 4-6 months is a normal financial planner's estimate, make sure you can get an additional 12 month's worth by the time that 6 is up. With the 18 month cushion you can afford to try a lot of other things.
Finally, if you don't like what you're making, consider doing something else. A friend of mine is making over $20/hr plus benefits reading gas meters. If I was getting paid a lousy $50k to program, I'd have taken a job at his place and spent my day walking around outside. If you find yourself on the low rung, maybe this is just not what you're meant to be doing.
To break into civil service, I took a pay cut from 60K (as a senior Java/Perl guy) to 43K (and had to start doing VB6 -- UGH). However, a few years later, I'm up to 52K with amazing benefits AND a pension, and I've passed a promotion test. So shortly I'm going to get boosted up over 55K, with the potential to hit 70K within five or six years. And the jobs I'm trying for are all Java jobs, so I'll escape all this VB silliness.
If you guys try for a government job, you have to start at the bottom (the 40's) but you work your way up fast, you've got great job security, and one day, you'll have a pension.
It's worth a little sacrifice, don't you think?
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
$65,000 now, but I have a review coming up in a few weeks, expecting to walk out with 73K + extra week vacation. 4 years out of college. Might seem good, but 15 hours of my week is spent commuting, so the number goes down with respect to pay/time.
Half-way through college (20 years old), making $35/hour (roughly $73k a year). Web developer on contract for ISP based in the area (take a guess).
If you quit and are begged/pleaded with to return and are offered a raise then you were being under-paid.
If you quit and leave with a pat on the back then you were being over-paid.
(... bottom line you are just a serf that will live a boring-unimportant-debt-filled life and most likely will welcome death after 30)
That depends on whether they can - or can't - write proper english sentences. ;)
..... How long is a piece of string?
Apart from that, it presumably depends on Location (I've seen 30 miles make 2/3 difference), Industry, experience,
no taxation without representation!
... to your willingness to not do what you want.
Generally, you won't earn as much working a job at the small company doing exactly what you want as you would as a no-name at a big conglomerate, but you can't put a price on job satisfaction.
Make web-based simulations for the DoD and Navy. I make $49,500 + extremely good benefits. I also have a raise coming in a month and in February (partial raise).
Why would anyone pay attention to an IT survey from a company that appears to post it's data as a scanned graphics image converted to PDF. Their web developer doesn't even know how to add a left hand margin to a web page. Check out the source code for the shortest CSS style definition you'll ever find! At least it doesn't contain any of those pesky CSS syntax errors!
You are making too much.
You are responsible for the design and implementation of the entire system, and yet you allow a huge, honking unreliable single point of failure that can bring the entire operation to its knees - you. That doesn't smack of good systems design to me.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I am/will be doing COBOL/CICS/Data Warehouse development and expect my salary to rise accordingly as all the guys who are there now plan to retire in 5-7 years.
-Steve
My job title is Programmer and I mostly do web apps, with very little front-end work (and the part that is front-end is because our lazy designers insist on using Dreamweaver and thus cannot put out decent GUIs. Bleh.)
My salary is right on mark at $56,000, though this is in Southern Ontario so the job market is not necessarily the same as where you work.
I know some programmers who make more money, but they're also programming more critical apps than I am. I know programmers who make less than me and are also working on more critical apps than I am. Salary seems to depend more on company than on the work being done.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Just under $70K USD, 40 hours per week. Web developer, which means application development and what they now call "architecting", so I do the backend, mid-end, and frontend programming, HTML, XML, database, whatnot. I'm in Washington DC and wish I got paid more (of course), but with no degree and given the alternatives (and I've lived through the alternatives), I can't complain.
I still can not understand why the average pay of a well-seasoned applications designer is still no match to that of a recently-graduated MBA. I mean, a company like Sun cannot exist without programmers and the like, right? And yet the survey indicates that a marketing droid gets paid better. What's the deal?
Or, think of your generic MBA graduate. They step in business they have no knowledge of and still get a better starting salary. Why? What is the contribution the make besides controlling the sprawling chaos that drives human activity?
This whole thing is messed up, value is being created from absolutely nowhere (what value marketing and business strategists bring to the individual collaborator of a company?) Maybe Marx is right.
If you're at the top of your game, and you've been doing it a while, you can make out like a bandit. If you just finished your useless degree and you're on your first real job, you might get paid less than someone working at barnes and noble.
I'm one of a number of people I know that are in the $100-120k range these days in relatively cheap cost-of-living large cities (think Phoenix, Houston, etc), doing programming, systems admin work, or a combination of the two. The only thing holding you back is your level of skill and experience.
I think the more important question here is:
Whats the best way to ask for a raise? I know a good amount of people believe they are underpaid, and a decent number actually feel they are overpaid.
That said, for those who have actually asked and recieved: What is the best way to approach your boss and ask for a raise?
I'm posting anonymously because I dont want colleagues seeing what I make now.
I was bitten by the bust. in 2002 I got laid off, spent 6 months looking for work and could only get $10/hr. writing web apps in php. in 2 years I went from entry level to being in charge of major projects, being the resident mysql guy and managing 3 underlings. I wrote perl scripts and shell scripts to manage backend services and integrate systems. If not for me the company's ecommerce overhaul would have failed miserably and been a year behind schedule, they even told me it wouldnt have gotten done without me. So with all the late nights, and I mean late. 18 - 20 hours straight on several occasions. 70 hours a week or more during crunchtime. working from home to 3am, keeping up with how people below me were doing and I got a measly $36k. This was in NJ, about 10 minutes from NYC. people I talked to in the city told me I was getting screwed, even for NJ. other companies in NJ were offering $50k entry level. I got out of that --ithole and found a better company to work for making almost double the salary with benefits that put anything else to shame.
web developers are a strange breed. its hard to measure one against the other unless you know what they bring to the table. If all you know is HTML and CSS (real css, not just the stupid IE only kind) then $40k might be a good average. IF you are also the graphic designer, tack another $10-15k. but for applications developers and database managers, you should be making $70k minimum no matter where you are in the country. In metropolitan areas, more.
In my old company I was on $235,000 but I was a manager there (though I mostly wrote code). I'm not self-employed, I'm a regular salaried employee. I'm 38 and I work in a fairly specialized field. But basically I write 3D graphics code. I like to think I'm well paid but I own one of the lower cost houses in the blocks around me (Oakland, CA). In a few years, when the interest rate on the mortgage goes free floating, I probably won't be able to afford to keep the house. I.e. I'm not paid well enough to buy a house here.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Obviously they make enough that they could donate some of the profits of Slashdot to the victims of hurricane Katrina. But they choose not to. Why?!
I was working for a small company in southern ontario, making medium sized web applications.. and I was getting around $40K (canadian dollars!)... I am currently getting only about half of that. Yeah, the economy has gone in the crapper looking from a web developer perspective.
Meh.
$229,000
Level 4 Software Engineer, Mt. View, CA
I'm the entire IT Department at work. I do it all as well. From being a receptionist, to doing technician work. My title is Software/Firmware Engineer (I am pretty much the only software guy there) doing research and development using a combination of programming languages like C/C++, C#, Python, Delphi, etc, interfacing with GPS and Satellite modems. I am making $13/hr Canadian.
So, is anyone here hiring?
first job: 40k, stayed there for a year and a half.. second job: started at 65k, 5 years later left at 75k. Current job: 95k. I'm a PHP/MySQL developer and various titles I have /have had: Systems Architect, Database Administrator. Honestly, I feel vastly underpaid. I work around 30 hours a week if that.
in Manhattan at a private university. Add to that generous benefits (4 weeks vacation, free tuition for the entire family, 200% match of retirement payments) and you will never want to leave a job like this :) It's stable, too.
I feel like I am doing OK on $80+/year doing database administration work. But that's after well over a decade at the same company, starting in the $20Ks as a developer. Too bad the company is run by asshats. Still though, it beats food service all to heck, is air-conditioned, has free coffee and I only have to work 40-50 hours a week with rare exceptions.
My free advice: pick something boring and specialized, and be the best at it. Either you will find no work at all or you will be paid pretty well for doing it by someone who really needs you.
--
You know what free advice is worth, don't you?
I'm a software developer. I don't do application programming nor do I do system programming. And frankly, I think I would be bored to tears in either of those positions. So where is the Software Developer salary survey?
Fresh of of college. I have an EE degree but I write firmware for ARM in C. $55000 in Socal.
I've been a developer for the past 22 years and have been pretty much exclusively contracting for the past 12. My lowest rate (all W2, as opposed to 1099) was $35/hr and my highest (so far) has been $67.50/hr. I get paid for every hour I work, so when crunch time comes, I'm looking at the fat stacks o' greenbacks, (which takes the sting out of working weekends). My best year, I grossed $160K because of a good rate and tons of OT (averaged 55 hours/week). My worst year I still cracked $80K, and that was back when $80K was still pretty extrodinary for IT. In a good market, I can't imagine a single reason for not going contract.
I'm primarily a web-developer, although I've done some simple desktop apps for internal company use. I started my current job one year ago at $38,000 and now make $45,000.
The money is OK, I suppose, but the reasons I like my job have nothing to do with money:
- Flex hours: I can go in at whatever time I want, as long as I work 8 hours.
- Food: Cappicinno/espresso machine. 2 fridges stocked with snacks. Once a week we order in from a restaurant and bill the company.
- Breaks: Although I get the standard 15 minute breaks and an unpaid lunch, they don't mind if I take some extra time and then make it up by working later that afternoon.
That might seem like standard fare to most of you, but this is my first "real" job (since graduating university). It's a big change from my summer job experiences driving a forklift and doing HSI tech support.
it all depends where you live, not what you make. i make about 70k pa AUD. if i lived in one of the major cities this would only be average, but since i live in the sticks, it's a lot. the average wage is 33k pa here. i do freebsd admin and system development work btw, and it's all contract work.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
From what I hear from people who've accepted jobs as software engineers at EA here in Vancouver, the starting salary there is about $50K Canadian, give or take a little. Of course, since they're on salary and work insane hours (80 hour weeks do indeed seem to be the norm for at least some unlucky people, my bf included), I suspect that if you calculated their wage per hour, it would be obscenely low for the work they do.
:)
I'm not sure how that compares to other places... hopefully I'll know a little more after I do my first co-op work term
I do web development for an institution in Eastern Canada. Pay is about $25K per year in American dollars, which is pretty typical for this region (and for the record I have a graduate degree in CS). And I'm certainly not complaining -- there are literally millions of people in developing nations (say India..) that are willing and able to do the work for a whole lot less when it comes right down to it. Anyone with a job should be thankful. If you're gettingly like $50K+ American to do this job, you should be down-right ecstatic.
Am I being unreasonable to expect a raise even though I'm in school?
Whoah, leave off that 'even though I'm in school' clause. As strange as it seems, the best deal these days is to quit and get a job somewhere else. Nobody seems to give raises anymore. (At least not worthy of note.)
Want a raise or propmotion? Quit. I have never got a raise while I have worked in IT of more than a buck an hour, yet I have nearly doubled my salary twice by just getting a new job. You would think that a company would value experience, but noooooo....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I have the situation that I don't really know what my job title is. I think officially I'd be a web developer because the application that I'm writing happens to have a web front-end.
However it's over 100,000 lines of PHP, JavaScript and Perl and is a lot more than just a web page.
I don't get classed as an application developer in my current company because I'm not working in C++ or Java.
Still, AU$150k is my current pay.. so convert that to $US if you like.
Anything is possible, except skiing through revolving doors.
Building software (web or otherwise) is important, but it has become near worthless on it's own in the face of offshore/outsourcing. Unless you can work with stakeholders to understand the goals behind requirements (and all too often fix them), you'll be stuck being a "web application programmer" and you will limit you advancement opportunities with every year you rack up under that title. That is, untill you're pushed out of that job and then out of the job market.
Smart businesses that have core business value captured in software(while still being relatively slow and stupid), are starting to figure out that they're dead in the water without people who know how to build software AND work with, develop, and prioritize business needs. The sad truth is that in today's market, there's a lot of people out there accessible on the 'Net who are just a little bit faster, sharper, on more on the ball for technology XYZ than you. Your primary advantage has to be that they don't know your companies business. Your secondary advantage then becomes that your goals align with your company (you think some offshore shop will tell your company they're about to waste thousands of dollars? I don't think so...). If you get to know the business, understand it, and start to improve it through the software you help both define and build, you won't be seen as a stock "service" that can be budget trimmed.
While you're at it, make sure you're in the right environment. If you have to keep asking yourself why the company is trying to re-invent a wheel it can buy off the shelf as a part of it's core business model, you've got two choices: 1.) find a way to build in something of value or 2.) get the hell out. If you've noticed there's no unique business value and room for product or service expansion, you can bet to hell people higher up the food chain are thinking the same thing. If there's some competition in the market, your competitors are thinking it too.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Here is honest. I have no degree but 12 years experience as a C/unix programmer and earn $75,000 a year in the midwest. I love my job, have a good boss, good benefits and work with mostly nice people. I have worked in terrible jobs for poor salary but I have spent 12 years climbing.
"I'm an Internet Professional!!!"
Interesting and specialized works too. It also makes you feel better (assuming you derive any kind of pleasure or self-esteem from your work).
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I'm a Configuration Manager which means no one really knows what I do, but I'm paid well for it.
One company was paying me more than $350K per year. Of course, I was a W2 contractor which meant I didn't get any stock options, but that somehow didn't seem to upset me all that much.
The company went bankrupt after nine months mainly because they were so clueless (hint: They were paying me $350K). I was suppose to convert them from Visual SourceSafe to ClearCase and ClearQuest, but I was suppose to do this without a dedicated server and without interfering with the developers.
I couldn't do any training either because the developers didn't have time for that type of stuff and I couldn't do anything that might slow down their development like transferring the source archive to ClearCase and rewriting their build scripts.
To give you an idea how strange things were, there were less than 20 employees out of maybe 50 total employees who used the network for development (6 developers, 2 QA testers, and eight data modelers). I was suppose to put our source archive on a Solaris box, but have the developers access ClearCase via Windows.
Well, no problem as long as both the Unix and Window boxes use the same user names. That meant no spaces in user names and user names of eight letters or less. Our Windows logins were firstname-space-lastname. I asked our SysAdmin if we could convert everyone over to the shorter logins (or at least the users who would use ClearCase), and he answered it was impossible because of Corporate Policy.
I sat in a row of about nine cubicles, which was empty except for me. I use to bring my bicycle inside and put it in the cubicle next to me, but I was told that this was again against Corporate Policy because my bike would get in the way of the people sitting in that row of cubes.
It was a crazy place, and I hated working there, but when someone wants to pay you $350K, what do you do?
I'm a junior-level system administrator in Houston, working for a branch of a large aerospace company involved with rockets and space stations and satellites and things.
:)
Our piece of the pie is ~100 servers, ~4000 users (out of ~160,000 globally). I deal with SAN administration, Altiris CMS L1 administration, general W2k system administration (our worldwide multi-domain AD implementation is both awesome and terrifying), and documentation & config control because I'm both the youngest and newest guy in the dept.
I've a B.Sc. in Information Technology, no professional certs, three years industry experience, and my salary at this point is ~$52k/year + however much overtime I care to work
Plus, I get to meet and talk to astronauts
I'm a new grad. I graduated last year.
I work in the Vancouver area, BC
I'm working with a startup, they have limited cash.
I do software and hardware programming.
Makin $33,600 CDN or $28200 US...
is this normal for new grads working in a startup?
heh, I'm a grad student and I make less than that. Well it's supposed to pay off eventually... right..?
TS/SCI, full poly:
Senior: $100,000+
Recent grads (within 3 years): $55,000-$80,000
One exception: I know a guy, just turned 23 this year, joined a company at $92k. His benefits are on the light side though.
Some interesting benefits/perks I've seen:
if all you programmers spend 4+ years at college earning your degree, racking up huge debt for tuition, then get out and *only* make $40-60K ? GTFO!
I'm just a simple UNIX Sys Admin, who started at $65K, and within 3 years has attained $90Ksalary+bonus. No college classes, two certifications that various employers paid for.... and no, I'm not a 'senior' or management...
Shop around for your employment...
Details: :)
Company was tight-fisted financial services company;
Job was developing apps in Python, either stand-alone or in Zope; Integration with various MS apps (this was a Windows-only shop);
I was attractive because I've done 14 years of experience in all things IT and was a jack-of-all-trades;
I got paid $75K to start, and was raised to $80K when I started managing three engineers and had my title changed from 'Software Engineer 2' to 'Senior Software Engineer'. I considered myself underpaid, and at my next job started at $93K. As both jobs came after about 4-6 months of unemployment, I didn't really negotiate salary too much
I was promoted and promoted, given many salary raises above and beyond, and many bonuses for work above and beyond. While I never asked for my six-figure salary, it was nice to have cuz I didn't have to worry much about financial woes.
Then a small company merged with ours, essentially swaggered in, a (allegedly) corrupt CEO (allegedly) cooked the books, or (allegedly) ordered them cooked, we went $35B in debt, our stock went from $54 to $2 (yes, 1/27th!), and the security unraveled.
No problem, that salary would come in handy now... until some British chick came in, one week on a conference call told us all to get approval before ordering office supplies and in a month or so we would look at our financial "situation".
Two weeks later 1/5 of us did the perp walk... Lost my job, lost the chance to finish the 3 years to full pension (after 21 years with this company). And, finally finding out not many companies want to interview someone that old, or making that much money... Doesn't matter what you've done, doesn't matter how good you are, if you can't even get the interview, salaries you made are only relevant in one way. Bitter? Yeah. Get over it? Yeah, but it's not easy.
A blessing in disguise, I'm now a completely independent software developer and stand to make more than I ever did working for d'man. But a lesson learned. Don't consider your salary in and of itself. Consider the ethics and environment of the company that may screw you (my sense is there aren't many out there anymore that won't.)
I am fresh out of college at UT. I work in Austin making $20/hr programming in Delphi. It's not a lot, but I am just out of college. Maybe one day I will reach the average :(
B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas
I'm 2 years out of college and have been with this company for both of those years. I started at 28k, but got a good raise 6 months ago because I rock so hard. Too bad I don't rock at asking for more money, but live and learn, no?
Most of what I do is database work, so I've been looking into DBA jobs. Is it true that they pay 50% more than dev jobs? Does it suck THAT much?
App Developer is to NASCAR auto mechanic as Web Developer is to Jiffy Lube mechanic.
According to Google, you make "Astronomical Unit (US$ 150) = 2.24397 × 10^13 m U.S. Dollars"
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
.. or whatever the buzzword is today. It's mostly freelance or contract systems administration for small shops (<10 servers, <50 workstations), mostly Windows 2000 or 2003 server based. Some of it is emergency care (viruses, poor backup protocols, etc.), some is training, some is customization - writing scripts for applications (which are all basically database front-ends) and templates for data entry. There is very little coding per se, but if you're familiar with SQL or VISTA (Google it), this is a growth industry for the future. My current income: >$200,000.00 per year.
CMS is open-sourcing VISTA (the electronic medical record system developed by the VA) and offering it free to medical practices. So far, the startup costs and lack of technical skills have been the roadblocks to large-scale adoption of EMRs by individual medical practices, but this will change. A bill recently introduced into the Senate will link use of a electronic records to better Medicare reimbursements. Just like electronic claim submission, which went from recommended to financially encouraged to mandatory in 10 years, I predict EMR wil be mandatory in a decade. Although VISTA may not be the actual system used, the systems used at that time will all be VISTA interoperable.
Jump on in, the water's fine. In South Florida, there's more business than I can shake a stick at.
...cuz you're making triple what I make and I live in San Francisco. A 30-year mortgage payment on a $600K house at 8% interest is what -- $4,200? Where's the other $137,000 a year going?
Breakfast served all day!
I gave up the road-warrior thing some time ago (best rate I saw working hourly was $125. I know that the body shop I was working through was billing my time at $200+).
I took a job with a massive Silicon Valley company for $139K/yr. I left said employer a couple of months ago for various reasons. Together with the very well-timed stock options, my annual compensation came out to around $300K/year, all told. Minus the Tax Man's pound of flesh, I took home around $200K/year. Now, I've got the luxury of not needing to work for several years, so I'm talking the time to write a couple of apps of my own.
As nice as that money was, I've realized for some time that the only way to actually get *rich* is from property, not wages. The highest hourly most people will ever see, at the pinnacle of their career is usually less than $500/hr. The most I've ever made for the time I spent on a project was when I developed a product that I retained partial ownership in, and got a royalty.
The best advice I can give anyone, is invest, invest, invest. Go with real estate if you're not comfortable with risk, go for the stock market if you've got some serious ambitions. If you're REALLY sure of a stock going up, buy options, not shares. Good luck, everybody.
actually, the better companies have defined pay levels...you know what everyone gets paid and why...if you want to get paid a higher pay level, just meet the criteria.
I can believe this for a full time position, but what about contractors? I am a PHP web application developer (laugh if you wish but from what I am hearing you have no reason to), and I average $75 an hour, so about $150,000 a year. You might also say that is when you have contracts, but I have seen an increasing upsurge in interest for my abilities in the last year and I can fill up as many billable hours as I am willing to work and still have a ton of work to do.
Maybe the interest is just increasing referrals over time or my experience, now 5+ years, but it might also have something to do with the market. I am not building a contact forms or little stuff, I am building very complex business applications based in PHP and MySQL for companies who are increasingly truning to more powerful open source technologies.
Starting after the dot con crash, I dropped to 70K. I am back up to 400k now. I am doing better then I did during the dot con days! Im a Java Programmer, though I do bring problem solving and other skills into my work. My billable rate is $200/hour bulk time and $300/hour short projects. Naturally my customers are large to very large companies where the cost of the problems I fix is larger then my bill to fix them.
Fast, Cheap, Good
If you want it cheap, go get someone else.
If you want it fast and good, bring money we will talk.
The article title is "How much money do programmers really make?" but the article is really about Web Developers.. hehe... not programmers.. tsk tsk
By reading other canadian web developers posting here, I am a bit relieved that I'm not the only one getting extremely crappy pay. If it weren't for the fact that I love working with computers, I would have quit the IT field long ago. But what else can a 30-something web developer do in life? I have no other skills other than IT skills.
Meh.
Lets take my example-I make 58,000 a year base. I program code, make installs, take tech support when the basic techs can't help, and then spend about 25% of my time overseas installing the software I write, installing the hardware it uses to do its magic [think integrated hardware monitoring systems], training people how to use it, etc. I have been all over the world doing it, I goto China so much I now have a multiple entry visa with unlimited entrys for the next year. Right now in my spare time I am learning Chinese.
Everyone says I am underpaid. Am I? I just don't know. I can't afford a mortgage here though, my salary is 2,000 above median for the area.
Thoughts anyone?
in Austin.
posted as AC to protect my anonymity.
I used to be making more than I am, but since 2001 I am making 20% less. I'm making a little bit more than your salary, but I should be making about 30% more than what you show. At least that is according to salary.com and their numbers.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
At the ripe old age of 35 I was making 6 figure salary for the first time at a dotcom. I managed to grow it to $135k a year as a manager of development. Left that and ended up at $175 an hour doing pure development work - life was good.
Now I'm struggling to find 20 hours a week at $40 (Less than $40k yr) - life sucks.
IT sucks.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
My salary? Try dividing $56000 by two. Then subtracting some.
I can't complain too much, it's enough for rent, car payment, insurance, and food where I live, barely. And they don't complain too much that I frequently show up an hour late. (I stay late everyday, so I make up the time)
But considering the lowest numbers I've seen mentioned so far are about $14K higher than me, maybe it's time to seriously start looking for another job. I hate waking up early, but for that much money, I can manage.
Maybe not
I'm making $24,600/yr.
I have a 4yr. degree in Computer Sci. and I've found, for my age bracket and VERY much to my surprise, that I'm more knowledgeable than the majority of people employed with my company.
I'm barely scraping by.
I start my first real full-time job Monday, as a programmer with a company on Long Island, and I'll be making $50k plus standard benefits. I am fresh out of grad school with an MS in CS.
Regional differences in pay rates totally swamp any validity in comparing one's salary to a single "average" figure. Regional differences can easily account for 30-50% of a difference in salary, and that's even before you take into account at what level in their career these people are.
These surveys are useful for seeing overall trends in the average salary (whether it's increasing or decreasing, and at what relative to what it's done in the past). They're not at all useful for determining whether your salary is above or below average for what you do, where in your career you are, and where you live.
Alternatively if you tell your co-workers how much you earn and they go demand a raise they may get fired or quit in disgust which means you'll have to take on their workload. If everyone goes and demands a raise you might end up invoking a round of layoffs resulting in a few overpaid programmers being left in the office who have to handle the entire workload. Them Against Us rarely sums up the relationship between employer and employee.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I pay all three of my software developers $80k/year or just above. We are in a low-cost-of-living town, too. If I paid them less we'd be in trouble, productivity-wise. I want them to worry about work; Not worry about meeting their fiscal obligations, etc.
I know it all is based on where you live, but for me at least I make a mere $14/hr as a web developer where I work. I currently do not have an official degree in computer sciences and/or design. *shrugs* I live in N.Cali so I am not sure how well that is in comparison to others, but man oh man. . . Do I wish I was making what some of you all are.
A living testament to the value of picking the right horse career-wise, I make $85k doing Java/J2EE/XML stuff about half an hour outside of Boston. I jumped on the J2EE bandwagon before it really got rolling, and will forever have just that much more experience than the next guy.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
I'm a web application developer, working in the IT department of mid-to-large sized corporation in the suburbs of a mid-to-large sized East Coast city. I was hired for my mad Java skillz, but I spend most of my time managing the build process and puttering with the version control system. I have 5 years experience.
I make $70K a year. That's $2K less than I was making 4 years ago, but allegedly there will be several K of bonus sometime in the spring. The hours can be long, but I do get 4 weeks vacation, which rocks.
Also, I work with good, smart people, which is key. At my last job I made $60K and worked with idiots.
...you're only worth what somebody else is willing to pay you.
I've heard the same thing from my last employer and while it's hard to disagree with such hard-nosed economic logic, I think it breaks down for a lot of IT jobs because IT jobs tend to be pretty fluid -- they often flow around the rigid HR-type job descriptions. Developers admin systems, admins doing programming, DBAs doing admin tasks AND programming, guys (like the grandparent poster) doing it all. Immersively intellectually challenging work that involves taking calls once a week about spyware and why the Intraweb is down? Or repetitive tasks, but never suffering end-luzers?
The "other job" that may pay me more may or may not include more job responsibilities, but I can almost guarandamtee you that the other job will not end up being the "same" job.
And then there's the whole question of "pay". How much are some bennies worth? How much is it worth to have a job with a ton of flexibility with start-end times vs. one with real rigid work hours? And if the former is a 60 minute gauntlet of traffic and the other is a 10 minute walk?
A boss who's a dick but makes sure to hire a lot of sharp people? A boss who's a saint but tolerates nincompoops? A closed door office vs. a low-wall cube in a farm? 8 days off you can take whenever vs. 3 weeks that requires D-Day logistics to be able to take a single day?
All of these things jumble together to make the "someone who pays more" concept so untestable that it's hard to measure.
But that's for C++ application development on a 1099 contract basis only. Not sure what a full time web developer makes.
I completely agree. It's a little-believed sociologic fact that employers want people to keep their salaries secret (regardless of reason) for the specific fact that it allows them to pay the same workers different amounts. I've never heard a single phrase applied better since I was but a wee 20-something and was told (in passing) by a manager that "Hey, you know how it is, the squeaky wheel gets the grease..."
/always/ tailored to the current employees and never hold true to everyone in a specific position.
I get so frustrated when people balk at the idea of discussing their salaries - how are the majority of people supposed to truly know their worth. One of the other posters mentioned the better companies having defnied pay levels, but these are
I'm glad someone was modded-up for airing these opinions.
-volve
I work at one of the big auto companies in the detroit area doing primarily inhouse web applications. The nicest part is it's a 40 hour 9 to 5 type job without any of the crazy work schedules/casual overtime I always hear about.
My first job fresh from getting my masters in software engineering from one of the big name schools in CS I'm making $62,000 from one of the big consulting firms as a developer/analyst. This is in San Francisco. I turned down an offer of $80,000 in NYC. My friends from school working @amazon started at $78,000 + 15,000 signing.
But I've got an interview on Thursday for a place offering $35-$40k CDN.
I am a J2EE developer in manhattan and I make $54,000. That can seem average but a Studio apartment will cost about $400,000 for 500 square feet. Sucks.
I used to work for Ameritech (one of the Baby Bells), and I was making $53.5k/yr... in 1997.
Consultants make a *lot* more (figure 25% more).
On the other hand, my last paying job was only $50k/yr. But then, what do you expect, 4+ years into the Bush Depression*?
mark
*Isn't it about time, in the midst of a "jobless recovery", to redefine "recession"? Perhaps, instead of "two or more quarters of falling GNP", it should be "two or more quarters of falling median income"...and a depression is four or more quarters. This puts us several years into the worst depression since the thirties.
Not enough. Not nearly enough.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I started at 56k with stock options and profit sharing (have yet to see if those are worth anything). First year after finishing my BS in comp sci. Had quite a bit of experience during my undergrad years tho.. internships, contract jobs, working with professors on small projects, etc.
i work crazy hours.. 6 days a week * 12 hours
i work with some of the greatest minds in finance. they are pulling down 1-2 mill in a bad year. 20-30 mill in a good year.
me, i make $85 base plus bonus (20 last year, i expect 40 this year). i have a masters, 2 years experience.
the work i do is specialized, and is a whoring out of my grea mind. this salary minimum. near new york city it buys you a 1 or 2 bedroom, and as many gin and tonics as you can buy. but you aint rich.
i still think i'd make more at a startup, gettin a phat cheque one day. that or pimp out harder and become a finance CS geek, instead of a CS geek.
I don't mean this as a personal slam, but that exact attitude keeps salaries low.
Not discussing your salary on Slashdot? I mean, if you're talking about not discussing your salary with coworkers, then yeah, you might have a point. But not putting your salary on Slashdot, to be forever archived, I can see the point in that.
Personally, I'm not divulging my salary because it's ridiculously low and I'm embarrased by it. But I'm an accountant, not a "programmer" (at least for bill-paying purposes), so it's really not that relevant anyway. When I was a software engineer, first year out of college, I think I made $56K. Of course, that was 1998, things have changed a lot since then.
Well, if it would raise your comfort level just post as Anonymous Coward.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Actually it does not work like that. I am in a managerial position, and whenever I am consulted about salaries, for surveys or "industry job dictionaries", I always provide figures 10-15% lower than real salaries. The reason is very simple:
;)
- people already hired, while reading such surveys, do not feel discontent about their pay level;
- people I am looking for, on the outside, would appreciate our job offers, and associated salaries, when compared to "surveys".
There is another aspect, related to "pay vs. job level" never mentioned in any survey: I have a pool of "stars" whose work I [financially] appreciate at levels incomparable to any industry "average". Those are the people who could carry out difficult project all by themselves, and/orcould intervene once, either in a critical situation, or during a tight schedule, or under highly-pressured conditions, and by the results of their work provide a fantastic ROI. Sometimes I tend to call these people "my group of uber-geeks"
All in all - surveys are like marketing or sales data: deceiving, misleading, and understated (as far as pay goes), or overstated (i.e. how much one has to know and work, to get $x)
== With enough Will Power, one could move mountains. With enough Brains, one would just leave them where they are ==
Second year Network Engineer in an all Cisco/MS company. $72k/year + benefits. I have no certs and no degree but I started at tech 1 and worked my way up in about 4 years. I've hit the highest netowrk position I can get at this place with the exception of personel management roles which I do not desire at this time. I am hands on all the way and always have been. I've changed careers before when I hit that stagnant position and I would do it again to prevent boredom.
Benefits:
5-15% annual bonus
5-15% 401k contribution
15-20 vacation / 10 personal
rotating pager duty adds $100/week
average 2-7% annual raise
Where in the nation are you located? I am in Detroit and make less than 60k doing web dev, app dev, dba (as much as I can) and network administration :-/.
I'm American so when I first got here I got a job teaching English. After 8 months of kids trying to stick their fingers up my ass (it's called "kancho") I decided to get back into design/lite programming/project management. Before I left the US in 2004 I was probably make about $50k/year living in the upper midwest. Pretty good dosh for the area and I was probably working an everage of 2-3 weeks a month.
So getting back to Tokyo, having pretty rough Japanese skills made it tough to find a job, but I finally found my current gig. Basically I'm the technology guy. My title is Director of Internet Development and project management. Sweet huh? Basically I'm making a dynamic catalogue site using PHP and Flash as well as setting up a server and internal network.
How much do I make? About the equivalent of $30,000 US. Basically I'm going into the local convient store at the end of the month with a bag full of 1¥ coins to buy some food. It sucks ass. This is pretty standard for my age, 28, in Japan though. It's assumed that since everyone lives with their parents they don't need to make as much money when they're younger. I got an interview next Monday though, so now that I can speak Japanese I expect to make a better salary.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
I'm in Tennessee, and $50-60k for a web developer (one who does backend work) is about right. I was a programmer not long ago making a bit over $60k with 4-5 years experience. Next rung up the ladder would be $65-70k as a team leader - most team leaders at the company had anywhere from 7 to 25 years experience - still doing mostly programming. FWIW I have a graduate degree which seems to have positively influenced my salary.
People have been pointing out that cost of living has a huge impact on the meaning of salary numbers. But, unless you're living in an unusually high COL area like Silicon Valley, Boston, or NYC, I think the numbers you see on national surveys are reasonably applicable +/- 10 or 15%. You probably have a good idea on whether your area's COL is higher or lower than average, and you can adjust your expectations accordingly.
And can barely pay rent, I'm outta here...
In Wisconsin, so COLA is lower, but with an assoc (completing bach), 4 years military exp programming, 3 years consulting and coming up on my 1 year anv with my permanant position (read: pay negotiation), Numerous certs, 3.95gpa on my assoc.
I offered myself up on a silver platter to the company, $40k + benies. At the time I had an unemployed wife, a new born child, and a part time consulting gig. $40k+ gets us health insurance, our morgage and bills, and enough money to keep our vehicles running.
But luckily, renegotiations are just arround the corner, and in the last year I've cut office expences $50k by improving some software systems reducing the manpower needed, and have been the primary developer for a series of frameworks and our new portal system. So I'm in pretty good position to negotiate for a hard core raise.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
That's what we'll all be making, eventually.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
In my case I develop data-driven Web sites, develop client/server apps, do database modelling and administration, some network/server admin, and some graphic design. Plus the here-and-there stuff like "here's a 10-year-old encrypted Word file we need to access in PDF format" hack jobs. Am I some percentage of everything? Or do I add them all together? I know I am well compensated, so I guess it's programming plus some other stuff to come up with my true worth.
I guess what I'm trying to say is yeah there are some robocoders that only code all day, but many of us are jacks-of-some-trades that don't exactly fit the mold of one survey or IT area.
Well, I must make a mental note to adjust any figures we receive from you upwards by 10-15%. Unless, of course, you know that we're onto you in which case you'll just give figures that are 20-30% lower ... but see, we'll know that so we'll just bump you up by 40-60%. But, if you figure that out, then ...
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is like asking a bunch of guys how long their penis is. Either they're really proud and can't wait to tell you the answer or they're lying.
Since parent won't, I will. I make about $63k as a jack of all trades for a small shop. I spend 80% of my time programming, but also run the SQL server and do the backups and desktop management. For geographic purposes, I'm in St Paul, MN. There's been some discussion about the relevence to location for IT salaries. I find that to be somewhat limited. So long as I have a fat internet connection, I can take a laptop and do 95% of my job anywhere in the world. On the other hand, I find it more productive to actually be in the office where I don't have distractions and can get direct feedback from my coworkers about the projects I'm working on.
I've checked Salary.com for my job title and region, and found that it was about 20% higher than what I make. So either I'm being underpaid, people are lying about their jobs/salaries, or only the ones making the big bucks are there bragging about it. I don't think it's that I'm underpaid, because most companies are interested in offering me 20%-30% less than my current salary.
The job market is whacked right now. There is almost certainly someone else who'll do your job for a significantly lower amount just so that they have any job, and that makes it harder to get what you really want. Because to that person, taking a job for 50% what the salary should be still beats living off savings and low-interest credit cards.
~$82,000
Free Healthcare, no co-pay (ever)
Dental
Free Gym ($90 membership)
14% Annual Bonus
5% Stock Awards that vest over 5 yrs.
I work for the government. Specifically, I work as a lead programmer writing Perl code for the federal courts case management software. I work in Washington, DC, and I have 13 years of professional experience. I make $117K, which is high compared to some of my coworkers, but not as high as a few. I think I'm worth it.
Some of the lowest paid people in my office are the consultants. Oh, the government pays a ton for them, but the consulting company keeps more than half of it. The consulting company has an exclusive contract with us. It's a complete scam, as former executives get lucrative salaries from this consulting company after they leave the government, and thus current executives want to keep the cash cow milking. Or maybe it's true with all consulting companies, but it's still frustrating to see one of our best programmers make $50K when we pay over $100K for him.
Salary amount is MOOT unless you consider STANDARDS OF LIVING where you get the job. $60,000 in DC is roughly equal to $35,000-40,000 where I was raised.
I'm applying for a job... but I'm not sure how much to ask them for, salary-wise. See, the main office is in Michigan. Satellite offices are in Nevada and Canada. I live, and will continue to live and telecommute in California.
So for which state do I get the median salary for when I compare my salary to the average salary for my field? The state in which the company "lives," or the state in which *I* live?
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
I am unemployed you insensitive clod!
The simple fact is, most programmers, just like every other industry are just that, 'average'. You look around and 90% of the workforce wouldn't spend more than a second considering picking up a book or otherwise researching new emerging technologies. They just sit there waiting to be told what to do. Sheep.
If you're ambitious, specialized and good at what you do, money is easy and you'll make a hell of a lot more than the 'average'.
If you make something truly obscene (either minimum wage or seven figures)
Seven figures is obscene?! How do you figure? At my firm (which is identical to hundreds of firms), if you perform for 8 years and make partner, seven figures is guaranteed your first or second year as a partner. We have several guys in their mid-30s doing just that.
Maybe within the context of programming seven figures is obscene, but not in all professions. (And honestly, if you're good enough to command 7 figures as a programmer, you're probably helming the company or in some capacity setting salaries...)
geek. lawyer.
It would be interesting to know the hourly rate rather than the salary since we all know that programmers work like sled dogs in a blizzard 12 hours a day for 8 hours of pay.
If you program for a living and are getting reasonable pay and plenty of quality time with your family and friends then you are probably a very lucky person. If this is the case then please tell me where to send my resume.
I work as a Java developer for Kaiser in the Bay Area, I'm making 96K. I think it's about average for my dept. Mind you, we are not a software shop, etc. For a non-software company setting, I sense 96K is pretty good, even here in Bay Area.
...I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me!
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Here's a nifty Cost of Living Calculator for the United States. Looks like the data is a little out of date. Anyone seen a more recent one?
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
I had the unusual privilege of being the database administrator for our financial system. I could see why they didn't want anybody discussing their salaries with anybody...
$60,000 in St. Louis doing OO development in the IS department of a huge corporation.
I am an Oracle PL/SQL developer almost exclusively and over the last 5 years i have made anywhere from 60K to 85K working for someone else. My next contract job is long-term (hey a year is long term to me at this point) and pays $50 an hour with no cap on hours.
I'm not laughing at your original note. (meaning, I am not laughing at web programmers) Honestly, I'm currently trying to get up to back up to speed with web programming myself, and I'm finding that when you leave a problem space for 5+ years, it's a lot of legwork to catch up on lost ground, no matter what your area of expertise is.
However, I will say that how much you make programming depends on your problem domain.
Web programmers are paid less, because anyone who has the time, and energy, can learn how to do "web programming". This is because the tools are freely available on the web, and so are the learning materials.
On the other hand, programming for proprietary telephony hardware is not a skill you can learn without access to expensive hardware, and training that is _not_ free.
Technically, I work in the support realm, supporting programmers, which makes my skillset, and willingness to work in such a field, even more "expensive" to my employer; everyone can't learn how to do what I do cheaply, but even if they could, they might not want to work in any capacity as "support".
So when you ask that question, you need to not only, as many others have posted, think about where you live, but just as importantly, consider how easily any other programmer on the planet could learn how to do what you do.
It's not just where you program, but what you program, and how willing and able others are to take your place. That's what dictates your salary.
-Chris
0 experience (fresh out of college), 65k/year before taxes. just moved to the bay area, so not really sure if thats norm around here or if i'm getting screwed. hell, i havent even found a place to live here yet!
75K CDN is about 63K USD, but in terms of the cost of living here, I live fairly comfortably. I program web applications, but I spend way less time doing HTML than I do backend logic.
I generally introduce myself as a "Computer Nerd" but my card says I am a Computer Programmer or some such thing. We are a C/C++ shop but I am admittedly the weakest C programmer of the bunch. I do however know the most about Databases and Web Development which has been a push in our software in the past 5 years. We are in the telecommunications software market by the way.
5 years post-college experience all with my firm. Located in Oakland County, Michigan (generally a more expensive place to live than National Average, far cheaper than Silicon Valley).
I make a flat $60k a year. I work 9 to 5 M-F and of course eat during that time. I have no doubt I could squeeze a few grand out of another company but I like my relatively lax work hours and their flexability (for example, I can take a class in the middle of the day without much hassle and can play with pet projects without too much concern).
Yes, 7 figures is obscene. The fact that you don't realize that it is highlights how out of touch you are with 99.99% of the planet. Hell about 99% of america. After just a couple of years making that you will make more money than most people in the world will during their entire lives. And you expect it.
That's obscene.
Note, I am not blaming you or your profession. It is something that we as a culture have encouraged and are now paying the price. The new ruling class will be the ones who make the laws.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
I work for a technology incubator in the boonies of Japan. My salary is a matter of the public record, so why not -- after taxes its precisely 3 million yen (current exchange rate about 110 to the dollar). That includes medical and social security (which, not being Japanese, I'll get partially refunded in a lump sum when/if I leave the country -- about 80% of one month's salary for every year vested in the system). Living in Japan is expensive (~$600 a month for food for one person, and I weigh about 130 lbs), but I get my housing for very, very close to free. That deal probably saves me close to 10k a year.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
An anonymous data point; may not be representitive for your market/skills/etc.
Location: Midwest city (population ~0.5M)
HardSkills: JSE/JEE, C#, ECMAScript, Ruby, PERL,
DB admin/config, [X|XH|DH]TML, clients
SoftSkills: Trainer/mentor, agile, public
speaking, scalable systems design
Soon:
Company: Tiny ( < 5 employee ) Application
Service Provider
Title: Senior Architect
Comp: 95k, modest benefits, small stake
(valued ~25k)
Perks: Work from home, flexible schedule,
*nice* laptop
Currently:
Company: Small ( 10 - 20 employee ) Consultancy
Title: Senior Architect
Comp: 89k, excellent benefits
Perks: Continuous challenges, laptop
I used to work as a web developer in Manhattan making about $80k doing Perl, SQL and Apache work.
I quit and I now live in Southern California working for a large 3D animation studio and I'm making $75k and working longer hours.
still it's been worth it.
I'll post as an anonymous coward because I'm a coward to the salary subject. I've been in the position where I've found out what the person next to me was making...the exact same as me...yet I had experience and a college degree. That was my smack-in-the-face. Know your worth. Go to monster.com's salary center. Ask around what a should be. Yes, in IT, no one is *just* a (in my experience), as they usually have installed software (a sys admin's job, IMO), been on-call (again, sys admin) or designed a system (architect) or wrote some lines of code somewhere (programmer). So, it's hard to nail down salary on a position title. It's experiences, education and know how (maybe certifications..but that's a whole other debate). I'm a *developer* making 80K in the midwest with almost 10 years experience. .NET, Microsoft stuff. I've seen others in my field making $50K to $120K doing the same or less than me. It ranges on experience and if the person knows how much they should make. It's the tight-lipped folks that do hurt everyone. Don't talk to others at your work...but talking with others at other companies sounds fine to me. How are we to know what is your worth? Sharing. I know too many folks that are getting ripped off on salary because they are too scared to know or too scared to move. Life's too short...and if I'm making $80K to your $40K...I have to work less years for the same pay than you. Look at it that way.
I live in Pismo Beach (San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara counties, very high cost of living) and make about $40,000 doing web development. This would be ample just about anywhere else in the country but here my wife and I are barely scraping by. I have about 5 years of experience doing this and a college degree.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
Bullshit. Efficient markets require pricing data to be widely distributed among participants. When employees keep their salaries "secret," only the buyers have statistically useful pricing data available for making decisions. Isn't it reasonable to assume that the buyers will use this advantage to keep prices low? Sure, the market may clear, but that's not to say that it wouldn't clear at higher prices as well.
Please explain why you think that the suppression of pricing information supports economic efficiency.
I was earning minimum wage as a web developer (php, javascript, LAMP server admin, etc) for two years without a single pay rise apart from when minimum wage increased, my boss made out like he was giving it to from the goodness of his heart. Needless to say i gave up and quit. I would rather sit on my arse doing nothing and getting £50 a week than working all week for £120. I know others might not.
65k with nice benefits in a job that's pretty damned stable. I like the company fairly well, it's not the most exciting work ever but it's a job, you know? The tech platform is pretty much straight-up LAMP, with a lot of xml and related technologies thrown in and the P being PHP (yuck, but whatever, it pays my bills).
I probably exceed the average for my experience level in this area (55k-ish) for two reasons. One is that the company is part of a much larger organization based on the eastern seaboard and as such probably has some of their pay scales based on the larger corp's standards. Two is that I have significant experience dealing with systems administration "in the large" (i.e. designing and putting together very large web site hosting platforms from the router up) and enough database admin to play one on TV. Part of me thinks they pay me that much based on my capacity for pretty much everything but the design layer, but they only really use the programming side of my resume. I will admit sometimes that gets a little boring, but on the other hand nobody is calling me at 3am with a systems or network problem either. (That happened exactly once in the ~2 years at my last job. *shrug* shit happens, esp. if you use cheap-ass x86 crap through no choice of your own.)
And yes, I am very grateful to have a good job. I was sweating bullets through most of 2001-2003 just like the rest of you, but hopefully things are starting to cycle back up to decent levels. (And will stay there for a while. Seems like sometimes the natural business cycle in tech is about ten years, but I haven't been in the industry long enough to really judge.)
We all really want the same thing, that "dream job" that really just boils down to more money and fewer hours. I was looking for that when I was a mechanic, retail management, and now as a tech/programmer. I doubt it exists but I will never quit looking.
Kind of like the "dream wife", you know, the nymphomaniac who's Dad owns a liquor store!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
San Mateo, CA
Embedded systems software/semicustom OS work
fun!
I do mainly application development, but a bit of leadership, database, miscellaneous stuff. 95,500/yr plus benefits with a small company. Previously I worked for a larger company and made significantly less.
Government contracts in the VA/MD/DC area pay well for competant programmers and system administrators. It takes time, but the inept ones are eventually weeded out (much longer than commercial work takes). If you are interested in doing contract work for the gov't, you can do it yourself for higher salary or work for a small company. If you want to keep your sanity, get on a long run contract you'll enjoy. By the second or third year you'll have managed to score yourself a team you can work -with-, not one you have to continuously work -for-.
Defense industry in very expensive MA 80,000 a year, but I bought a place before things got too crazy. have a security clearance. Only work 40 hours a week which is nice, and the benefits are excellent. Nice area, near mountains, beach and NYC are all close enough for weekend trips..
$64,000 in Orange County, CA --- PHP/SQL development
I'm a software architect at a large company. I make $95k plus nice benefits (3 weeks vacation). I work 35-40 hours a week.
Maybe within the context of programming seven figures is obscene, but not in all professions.
Seven figures is obscene?! How do you figure?
How is it not?!?
Most people will never make a million dollars in their lifetime. At $15,000/year (which is what a lot of people make), that's 66 years of working life, and most people only work from ages 15 to 65.
If you make more in one year than the average guy on the street makes in his life, then yes, that's pretty much the definition of "obscenely rich".
When I landed my latest consulting job, I jumped up and down like I'd won the lottery. Then I realized that I pretty much had: there's a "Cash for Life" lottery that pays out $1,000/week tax free, which was what I ended up earning after taxes. I felt really lucky to be out off the assembly line and back to programming again!
So, earn what you can, but at least understand what the term "rich" actually means. Lots of us still work or have worked for minimum wage, you know...
--
AC
I have a full Computer Science degree, love Linux and make $25k a year. I work for a check and credit card processing company and write PHP scripts, manage users (LDAP), the Windows NT Domain (Samba3+LDAP), backups (DVDs and off-site rsync), maintain and build into the website (client tools, time clocks, etc).
Lots of MySQL, PHP, Bash and more recently I'll have to write some first order logic stuff (probably using Prolog) for Sales Commissions Reports. I make $25,000 a year (first job out of college) and that's because my boss had to pay $5k to the recruiting company he hired me through.
It really sucks. The debt collectors, some which have never graduated high school, earn more than me. There are only three people in the entire local office (oh and I maintain 5 other offices in different states remotely) that are on Salary (vs commission) and the only other IT guy there, besides my boss, is some dipshit who went to a school called "New Horizons" and isn't qualified to do shit.
I had a bad recommendation on my resume and didn't realize it. It cost me several $30k jobs in Nashville. My advice to all your people starting out, check your references.
I will say one thing about the company I work for, they do let me work 35 hour work weeks while I got to graduate school. I hope to get my Masters, start teaching at a community college while I work on a PhD and get out of this shit hole.
Sumdog
I'm pulling in $50/hr and doing about 45-50 hours a week. I've got a degree in Comp. Sci. and have 10+ years of corporate experience. I'm a contractor for a firm who's billing me at $75/hr, but that ratio is about to change. More's coming my way.
My success is coming from the fact that I can make the organizations I go into better able to be successful software shops. I went in as a senior general developer type. In the last year I've done very little real develoment. Instead, I've invented a new software document management system for the client. I've helped them figure out why they can't get software out the door, and why what they do get released is failing. Now I'm helping them kick off a multi-year re-architecture project for their entier hiring system. It's NOT because I'm a genius Java developer. I'm not. It's because I've found the principles behind software value. Simple, structured, flexible.
If you want to make money in this business, learn to do MORE than program and bitch about poor requirements. Learn how to make your organization better. Yes, they can indeed find good programmers for less money. So make yourself more valuable than Joe Programmer. Learn how to be responsible to your organization. Learn what it takes to make long-term value in your software, not the latest whiz-bang that's going to flip the next pore sod's wig when he has to figure it out. Learn how to deliver faster code that's more solid and easy to understand. And then learn how to teach others to do it. If you can do that, there will be a line outside your cubicle of people wanting you to work for them.
If you can't do that, either your days or numbered or you're setting your earningsceiling is pretty low. You're a commodity, and not a popular one.
- Sig this!
That's a good point, I've actually been really curious to compare what I make to others. Fresh out of college in June '04 with a Masters in Computer Engineering, I'm working at a start up biotech firm right outside of NYC (in Westchester, one of the USA's most expensive counties).
After one (end of last year) raise, I'm making about $77500. Now I know that is a good amount, but I'm confused what exactly that translates into outside of the NYC area.
The cost of living here is really expensive, and I'm trying to compare this with what is reasonable.
Since people don't feel comfortable revealing their salaries, I hope this helps. I have 15 years of experience. Last year I was a Principle Engineer at a security software company in the Bay Area. I made $115K base and a total of $150K with bonus and options.
$150/hour as a 1099 contractor and I bill about 50 hours/week to 4 different clients. I do mostly Java, but some LAMP stuff, too.
$65,000 / year, in the south eastern United States, 1 year out of college w/ a CS degree. Software Developer and striving for Software Engineer (Windows and Web). I feel comfortable with what I make at this point, but I'm not satisfied for the long haul. Plan on ~$100,000 within five years. That's my goal and I'm sticking to it.
If there was any doubt in my mind as to whether I'm a moron that will never amount to much or not, you've just cleared it up for me.
I run my own business and have so for the past year and a half. Last year I didn't make enough money to actually have to pay federal taxes (after deductions, of course). Year-to-date '05, I have netted $15,208.42. But I'll have to kick 15.3% of my gross income back to Uncle Sam. That's also not including my legal and accounting expenses, my business owner's insurance policy, advertising, office space, etc. Plus, $4,089.45 of that is in receivables from a company that is (was) based in New Orleans.
Yet... I keep plugging along. I love it. I feel like I'm playing a very long game of Starcraft sometimes: Slowly but surely researching new tech and constructing new buildings, instead of doing a mass rush at the onset of the game.
Before you laugh at my numbers, keep in mind that I'm determined to build my company debt free. I have the time and patience to do that and do it right. It can be very hard at times, but it's also very rewarding.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
A link would have been appropiate.
-Adam
I'm an Electronic Data Interchange consultant. It takes suprisesly little knowledge to call yourself that. It takes quite a bit to be good at it. I'm somewhere in between.
Mostly I use shell scripts and translation applications (gui to text-based formats) to move data from one propritary system/format to another.
Though I do use a lot of perl scripting to get my job done, I do not consider myself a programmer. I've never written a program that was speced out before-hand by someone else. All my perl scripts were my own invention to fill a void that needed filling or to analyze soemthing that was suspicious.
Mostly I do damage control beacause none of my predescessors had the time or foresight to design the system well. While I am documenting all the flaws, everything is not fixed yet.
Web developer (Michigan) ~$70k doing Fortune 500 websites. Probably underpaid, but I'm single so... (*shrug*).
I obviously made the most of my luck, but even with these limited skills I think my success is due to:
- superior communication and people skills
- picking simple, cheap solutions that meet requirements.
- being self-sufficient
- realizing that a ton of money can be made doing unexciting but high-accountability work.
More than anything though was just being nice to people when interacting with them. Treating people with kindness and meeting their needs goes a very long way.I realize that not everyone will see such an opportunity or even take it (my boss threatened to sue me). But if you work hard and look out for yourself you can find tremendous opportunities out there.
I saw my salary double between 1992 and 1997, and again between 1997 and 2001. Then the great tech implosion happened. My salary dropped to half in 2003, and right now I'm just coding "for free" letting the wife work as I watch the kids. Quite a rollercoaster ride, but honestly, I'm happier now than I have ever been. Here's why:
When you work in tech for someone else, you are creatively constrained. You look for creative outlets any way you can, but ultimately, someone else is in control of your destiny. You can tell yourself; hey, the creative, fun stuff I'll do in my free time! Yeah, right; your free time should be with your family and friends, not sitting in front of a computer, just like at work. Or maybe you think: my creative outlet is at work! Yeah, right...
Maybe you're the programmer; cool, someone else gets to decide the architecture. Maybe you are the architect; cool, someone else gets to decide your budget. Maybe you're the CIO, cool, someone else affects the architecture, and someone else actually build the sh*t, and if they do a sh*tty job, you're hosed. Yes, you can't do it all. You need to work on teams to tackle big things. But do you really get to decide, in any way, what those big things are? Or are you just being told to dig a ditch at a certain place, to a certain depth and width and breadth?
If you want to be truly happy, let go of the need for the material crap and focus on taking control of your own creative direction. WORK FOR LESS MONEY but take a greater stake in what you are doing. Freelance. Work on a small team. Work part time and free up time to follow your creative bliss. Or just live off the spouse for awhile. It's ok; 50 years ago it was *normal* for someone to stay at home.
Be proactive and choose who and what you rely on, keep things lean and mean, and INVENT; CREATE. Work hands-on at creating.
Remember this: in 20 years, when you look back, will you think "gosh, I'm glad I had a house with 2 more bedrooms, that extra car, those weekends at the cabin. I'm glad I had that extra TV in the bedroom, and took that trip to Florida every year!" Or will you think, "I made some cool stuff. We lived OK. I followed my dream."
If you're reading this, you're probably in tech. That means you're likely getting paid twice as much as everyone else anyways, simply because tech is still a valued commodity, no matter what the outsourcers or people stuck in dot-com-lala-land say. WORK HALF AS MUCH, and invest that extra time into an open source project that you care about... your karma will thank you.
Now, should I decide to pursue this full-time, I'd wager I'd be earning at least $65k annually. I think that's an above-average start for a young chap contracting out of Canada to American clients.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
$600k mortgage, no down payment, 7% interest rate (worst case for a jumbo loan--if you have more than this you are stupid).
Monthly expenses?
$4000 loan
$200 home owners insurance
$750 property tax (1.5% of $600k / 12)
$350 PMI (got 20% down? some loans let you out of this, usually at the cost of interest rate)
$250 Electric/Gas
$40 Water/Sewer
------
$5590
Only the interest paid against a mortgage is tax deductible (which in the beginning of a mortgage will be most of the payment, figure around $42k the first year). 2004 Income tax rates list $146,751 - $319,100 as 33% for single filers, $178,651 - $319,100 as 33% for joint.
$190k - $42k = $148k, or 33% income tax rate (assuming single), so:
$190k / 12 = 15800
15800 - 33% = 10586
10586 - $1000 = 9586 (estimating $1k for other federal taxes)
9586 - 5590 = 3996
$4k to spare every month after taking care of house and taxes? You should be doing fine.
Either you're miscalculating or your company is screwing you over, but I've never heard of $30k for an IT job here. My first job, right out of college, was with NTT--a company about as traditional as you can get--and I was stuck on the same pay scale as everybody else who'd just graduated: roughly $35k/year in salary, plus company-sponsored housing and transportation, so call it $45k/year. After a few years with virtually no raises, I changed jobs, and am now making $70k/year doing R&D.
(Are you possibly not counting the semiannual bonuses? Despite the terminology, those are considered part of your regular salary in Japan. Japanese seem to like getting a big bundle of money every once in a while to splurge with, hence the current system.)
There once was a time when programmers were memebers of an elite cadre of virtual magicians. Veritable high preists of the computer cult. Computers were the size of refrigerators, they cost $1000/hr to run, and they only understood alien languages like PL/1 and JCL. You had to write your own sort routines, and green-screen CRTs with line editors were the state of the art in GUIs. Programming took 4 years to become a neophyte, and 10 to be able to work independently. You didn't put code into the production environment until after 3 months of parallel execution testing on live data without a glitch, and 99.9% uptime was considered marginal. Salaries were climbing at 10-15% a year and the future was so bright you had to wear sunglasses at your desk. Then that m@th3r f&ck!ng b()tt-pirate in redmond had to come along and make everything all object-oriented and point-and-click. We replaced fault-tolerant machines with fault-forgiving users, testing code gave way to just rebooting. Now every nose-picking teenager with a highschool course in visual basic is out in industry writing web-pages, and salaries are in free-fall. We have gone from high preists of the mainframe cult to janitors of the sMegmasoft plumbing. And a certain megalomaniac billionaire is whining because no one will study computer science anymore. Tell yah what, shut down that monopoly and buy a mink ranch in wyoming, and maybe after a few years computer science will get its self-respect, and even decent salaries, back again.
THere's a REASON that Linux is hard-to-use, it's called JOB SECURITY! Computer programmers work for peanuts because they are so willing to make themselves obsolete. You don't see doctors going out and wrtiting a self-diagnosis program that you can use to get prescription drugs, do you? How many sailboats could they buy then? Why do you think that with all we know about genetics we can clone a cow but we can't cure cancer? Because the money is in TREATMENT, not cures. You want to double you salary - refuse to work on point-and click systems - tell your boss they are crippled by viruses. Insist on devloping in "C" using vi and "makefiles". Write you own graphics routines. Make things HARD to do, and the pay will come back up....
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
Senior developer, central Illinois. Just crossed the $100k mark this year, after 8 years at the same place.
I guess I'm in a lucky situation. My dot-com went dot-bomb, but the Fotune 500 company that bought us out rolled us in with our existing salaries and still follow the corporate salary raise percentage, plus annual stock options. After seeing what my fellow I.T. people are making, I guess I shouldn't complain. And I only work 40 hours a week, plus only a couple of hours 1 or 2 weekends a month. I'm on call, but if I work in the middle of the night, I get to leave early. :-)
I lead a pretty simple lifestyle. I don't drink, smoke or drive, so my expenses are pretty low. Basically I just want something in IT where I don't have to deal with psychopaths and office politics. Then I just want to have enough time to see my family, ride my bike and play Nintendo at the end of the day.
Does such a job exist? Corporate? Non-profit? Education? Government?
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
From my experience working as a programmer and talking to other people:
Salary levels for a programmer with 6-8 years of experience are around $80K-$90K. This is for large cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle. In expensive places like New York and Silicon Valley salaries are higher. The duties of a programmer usually include writing code using languages such Java or C#, fixing defects, doing some design, writing queries and stored procedures.
Rates for consultants doing the same kind of job are around $50-$55 for a W-2 contract. It seems that it's quite easy to get a better rate if you can haggle well.
Several real salaries/rates:
* myself - $60/h on a W-2 contract in Hartford, CT doing C#, ASP.NET, Oracle development
* my friend who recently accepted a perm position at the same company - $80K + a few thousand of bonus
* my friend who works as a C++ developer at MSN division in Microsoft - $83K, $8-$10K bonus, great benefits
* my friend whose company was bought by a major Wall street firm accepted a job in Manhattan as a team lead/C++ developer - $125K + $75K bonus
The company I work for is great. They pay my internet connection at home even though I live less than a mile from the office. They pay my cell phone and gave me a decent laptop and other benefits.
.NET on Windows.
I get to go to major developer conferences and training if needed. They buy all the software I need to get the job done.
I make about 120K a year + a decent bonus at the end of the year.
I had a chance to go to Microsoft but I decided why leave sunny Califonia and a great job with an awesome boss?
For the record I am a software designer working in C# and
I am sorry if this sounds like bragging. I just wanted people out there to know that there are great jobs and a good pay.
Heh.... I myself pick odd places to be open (though if anyone asks me directly I will tell them).
The last group that asked was when I was doing basic training for the Army National Guard... Many a 17 year old boy (and most of them from the center of the country, so my salary looks even larger to that group (from the DC area)) gave me a look that said I was crazy to take a break from my 95k government job (at least I didn't completely confirm their "the world is unfair" attitude by telling that my job can be really easy most of the time). I actually came to look forward to one of them asking (since in basic training all you do is talk to each other, so every so often one of them would have a hard time believing the rumor and ask me directly).
And I am making 100 CAD/hr doing kernel-level programming for networking devices. Was making rather. Quit few weeks ago to explore other ideas as a separate business entity. A.k.a. a startup :)
Programmers in mainframe and Unix shops make the most, topping $59,000 a year in base salary. By development language environment, programmers in CICS and COBOL shops fare best, drawing average salaries of almost $62,000 for CICS-based development and $59,000 for COBOL.
And that theme was repeated throughout that article
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. Work.
AUTHOR. Me.
DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
01 Hours PIC 99 VALUE ZEROS.
01 Base PIC 99 VALUE ZEROS.
01 Profit PIC 9999 VALUE ZEROS.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY "Enter hours worked : " WITH NO ADVANCING.
ACCEPT Hours.
DISPLAY "Enter base rate per hour : " WITH NO ADVANCING.
ACCEPT Base.
MULTIPLY Hours BY Base GIVING Result.
DISPLAY "Result is = ", Profit.
STOP RUN.
I work for a small mail-order company. I am also the entire IT department. I try to focus my job on programming and delegate or outsource everything else. In the first year of my job, I spent less than 10% of my time programming. I was mostly putting into place policies and procedures that would allow me to program later. Since then, in the last 10 months, I've spent over 80% of my time programming. I was hired at $17 per hour, and now make $22.50 an hour. I choose my projects, priorities and hours (within reason). I'm never on call and best of all, I work with the best people I've ever worked with. That makes a huge difference. BTW, I work 39 hours a week on average.
I work in the Aerospace industry as well, just under 4 years of experience, and make $110,000 (Canadian) or US$92,000, doing user interface design (Java/Swing). Admittedly this is up from when I was fresh out of college, but I was still making a lot more than $50,000 ...
Liberal Ontarians and French Quebecers are draining Western Canada's wealth. Stop them now! Support Western separatism.
... exactly $45k a year in Southern California. I work for a small company and I am the IT dept. I make the websites, handle all the servers, user tech support, planning, deployment, etc. I have about 20 workstations, 6 servers (2 linux, 4 windows) (file, email, web, backup, etc.), and two websites. Both built from scratch. I am also currently working on our catalog. ugh.
My last raise (at the beginning of this year) was 10%. I expect to get that same raise or greater at the beginning of 2006.
I live less than a mile away from the office and have pretty good benefits. I share an apartment with a friend.
I think I have it pretty good but sometimes I want to freak out.
I got "laid-off" (canned) in July of 2004 from my $45K job for a ad agency in Milwaukee where I worked as a web developer. I spent a couple months looking for work for another company before I hung out my shingle and started working for myself. Before I got paid about $20/hour, now I charge $80/hour and snap up the clients my former employer turns away because "they don't have the budget" that can afford their $120-160/hour.
I should hit $100k this year, and I only have to work about 3hours a day to make it work. I spend tons of time with my son, wife, and get to do all the home improvement projects I want. Take it from me, break the chains and go work for yourself. Getting "laid-off" was the best promotion I ever got.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
I couldn't agree more. There is a weird phobia in my place of business about discussing this sort of thing that I have not seen elsewhere. I started right out of school as a consultant at a botique systems integrator, and we all knew what one another made - it was like the #1 popular topic over drinks after work. It was funny to see how much better one guy's offer was just because the HR director and him knew the same girl in college or whatever. And that was in 1999 when salaries in IT would go up whenever the clock chimed. I was hired one month for $48,000 and then 5 months later I got a good friend the same job at my same company and his opening offer was $54,000. Go figure.
I left that firm to do independent consulting for about a year and a half after 9/11. Just due to dumb luck of timing and a great client, I made an absolute killing, as a lot of my colleagues did around that time. I pulled down over $150/hr and plenty of hours over 40. Unfortunately for my nest egg, I burned out on travel and decided to settle down for a while.
Now that I'm in corporate-land, it's like salaries are suddenly a taboo discussion topic. I make a good amount of money ($117000/yr base) for what I do (Sr. Software & Integration Architect reporting to a Director at an $8Bil multi-national company) - it's a huge step down from contracting rates, but there are compensations - health insurance & vacation to name the obvious. But I have no clue what anyone else on my floor makes - not even my direct team members.
I'd be interested to see what other architects out there are making, especially at larger firms. Of course, "architect" means so many different things at so many places that it may not end up being a useful metric of measure, but I'm still curious.
At 50k a year I would much more prefer a nicer working place than say 10k extra.
Gotta love wikipedia :)
You're right, there is a sort of taboo on discussing salary, even with the employer. I know its business and such, but I feel almost rude for asking about money in such a climate. In the few jobs I've had as a fairly young person (25), pay was never negotiated, simply offered as part of the job. No argument or discussion about it, take it or not.
Raises in a corporate environment outside of promotions and the merit increases that usually come with that are nil, except for small increases that everyone gets across the board. How can you ask for a raise when everyone gets a raise at the same time every year? What makes you so damn special?
Building this taboo around salaries is a nice psychological means of keeping wages as low as possible.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
You don't sound like an American, you sound more like a Brit to me.
That would only be true if nobody talked about it. Maroon.
I'm an experienced Java developer in a large US IT corporation. I'm a team lead for a group of developers that produce large, complex web applicaitons. I get paid an excellent salary (105k/yr), have great benefits, and 5 weeks vacation a year. I work from home, and no one cares what my schedule is. Just make it to required phone conferences, deliver high quality work on time, and keep ahead of the curve technically. However, the job is extremely stressful and it requires an average of 60 hours per week. Plus, turning out the next big enterprise app just doesn't interest me too much anymore. I'd be willing to take a big pay cut for a lot less stress, a big reduction in hours, and something I find compelling to work on. I'm saving my pennies, and I'll be making the leap to something else in a year that will pay a lot less, but be a lot more fulfilling and leave me with more time for life outside of work.
I currently write Windows device drivers and do some embedded systems programming.
Im not a programmer, Im a UNIX (AIX/HP-UX/Linux) admin and I bring in over $60,000 with 6 years experience and some college.
I live in South Florida and work for a government agency developing ColdFusion web applications making about $70K. Along with that I have benefits out the ass, and I mean hot chilly pepper out that ass.
Recently I have had numerous job offers for doing what I do for about $100K, I have turned them all down. Why you ask. Benefits, can't beat them. No matter what you make if you don't have benefits, you're screwed, they are worth their weight in gold. If you think I'm joking, about a year ago, my fiance had to into the hospital. Thank God she made me get a domestic partnership with her the week before. That bill alone was about $30K, it would have wiped me out. But because we had the benefits we did, I ended up paying $150.
Do yourself the favor, forget about making $150K a year programming, it ain't going to happen. If it does, you're one in a million. Go for the jobs like mine that give you benefits, a pension plan and decent pay. Make some extra cash on the side doing side work and you're set.
living in western PA but getting work from a friend in Manhattan, I feel I am underpaid at $25/hr or $35/'urgent' for php/mysql. I've heard even outside nyc that ~$50/hr is not too much for someone with mediocre skills. Since taxes take out so much for the self employment tax (I pay the share of SS and Medicare an employer usually does, an extra ~7%), 25 seems too little. I also only work 15 or so hours a week so maybe I'm just a slacker. 40 hour+ work week is way too much work for people to do their own work and have a life besides their job.
Im a web app developer and have about 2 years of C# experience and i'm still in school. Just started a job at 53k a few weeks ago. My firm is planning on hiring a few more people too, guess the supply of qualified .Net people in vegas is pretty slim.
I make 30K per year, but I only work 3 days a week. OTOH, I'm in New York, so that's a fairly tight budget for me. OTOH, see point 1 above about 3 days a week...
/.); my company's too small to have real titles. Right now, I *am* QA. I play with Bugzilla and Perl and try to break stuff.
I do "QA" stuff (yeah, and I read
--LWM
Just graduated with a BSCS, 1 short previous job's experience, 2.75 GPA overall, 2.50 CS dept. GPA, currently working for a big financial company making $49,000/year.
Nobody is answering the how much question. I'm not in web development but what the heck -- I've got a lot of experience but make very little because I've got my own 5-year-old company. Worked very hard (too hard?) to get here and will continue working hard but we'll probably succeed and some day I'll make a decent salary by industry standards. Even so, I'm moving from big expensive city to small affordable town so my life can be a bit easier. All this underscores the depends-on-where-you-are-and-what-you-do posts that are repeating themselves over and over rather than answering your question (but at least I gave some actual data!)
how many times do programmers get laid?
4 years experience, $120K + bonus + full benefits (health, 401k with match, ESPP, options, life insurance)
I agree with another poster here, people should freely discuss their salaries. It can only help to raise the average drone's salary and keep the grossly overpaid CXOs in check.
A systems analyst in India/China is paid $50000 at most with around 15 years of experience. And then you wonder why the jobs are moving here....
Ok economics boy, as I understand it the purpose of an efficient market is to drive the cost of goods down. As my labour is the product we happen to be discussing, why would I want to co-operate in creating an efficient market?
How we know is more important than what we know.
I make in the low 6 figures, work 40 hours a week, and am primarily a senior PHP developer. I have 14 years of development experience, and am fairly active in the open source community.
You can often make good guesses as to where people fit in their respective ranges (based on grade level), but often the range for each grade is large enough that you can't guess any closer than 10-15k or so.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
salaries in SD for this position are from $100 to about $130k
I guess life isn't all that bad, but no, I don't play games all day and, no, I don't really enjoy the current job all that much. To tell the truth, I rather enjoyed getting paid $90k and working in a smaller town with people I liked to see every morning. I think I've come to appreciate that beyond the lifestyle that is comfortable to you, extra money doesn't improve how you live. At least for me. I still live like a college student, more or less, at 31, except for the wife and kids, and I like it that way.
I'm a fresh software engineer and I get $36,000.
:P
This might sound too little, but I pay NO taxes what so ever, and I don't have concerns for medical insurance (it's free). Of course, I live in Kuwait and the system is vastly different from the US, but salary isn't just a number, it depends on the expenses you have to pay for a good style of living.
Since most services are subsidized here, $36,000 is probably equal to $80,000 is some midwestern states.
One more thing, I can never lose my job
I don't live in a super expensive area. I'm a C++ developer and I make just over $100,000/year. My last two jobs paid the same. ...and I've been thinking lately that I should move to California to make more money.
I have a lot of experience (10+ years) and I do most of the technical designs for our group.
I took a hit this year and took a job making only 50k a year but of course that's just my day job... I have already made an additional 20k this year on side projects.
Last year I was on unemployment after being laid off from a salary position making 60k a year but no side jobs to speak of... I held that position for 4 years before being laid off. I took my 9 months of UE pay plus severance and used it to plan and coordinate my wedding + honeymoon and help my mother buy a house.
All in all I've seen a net gain and I seem to be working about the same number of hours (the previous job was over 40 hours/week and my current day job is 40 flat w/ side jobs rounding out an even 50/week again).
The new job is supposed to give me a raise soon as they are a relatively new firm, just moving in to decent office space and finally enough employees to just do 40 hour work weeks and still make profit.
I'm a designer/web developer w/ some okay flash + actionscript know how and enough business acumen to sell some decent projects outside the day job...
but I'd like to start a Biodiesel refinery operation here in Orange County if anyone out there is interested in a joint venture... I'm a good speaker and can market the hell out of stuff... need someone with PhD in organic chemistry and someone else with MBA to satisfy the loan officers.
unh.. yeah, so anyone think biodiesel could be profitable in California???
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Posting AC for obvious reasons.
I just graduated college last June and started working for this small company in Southern California. I was told that I would be traveling "sometimes." Out of the past seven months, I've been away from home for two months. I also don't get paid overtime rates since the head honcho classifies all of his workers as exempt (illegally, mind you). Sure, he pays for frequent company lunches (at the same three places, rotated each time), and sure he says that we're on the fast track to success, but when it comes down to it, the work sucks, and the experience just isn't worth it.
We do contract work without the contract pay. This, of course, involves working with this absolutely horrible API with an equally useless tech support team. Yes, we get to "own" our projects, but some of us are happy just being there, doing our 9 to 6 (no paid lunches, of course) and going home. With the horrible support and work we get, most of this turns into 9-10 hour days. Most everyone in the company (it's a small company) seems to be workaholic. It's not healthy, I tell you. I've managed to work overtime around 80% of the time I've worked at this company, and my hours have been cut a few times by the middle manager and immediate supervisor. This one week, I worked ~110 hours and got paid for only ~90. I got those hours back later, but not at the overtime rate. That's not the best part, though--the environment is such that it's looked down upon for leaving on time!
I've started broaching the issue of overtime pay with the middle manager, and I'm quitting soon so as to put my talents to better use somewhere else. The head honcho obviously doesn't care about his workers (quick to anger, doesn't close the door when he goes off on a client/employee, calls people "resources" to their face), the middle management is useless (plays solitaire all day and generally leeches off the company), and the immediate supervisor just loves to micro-manage. I swear, he's a Starcraft player or something.
Oh, yeah. I make $15/hr in 40-hour workweeks (I started at a paltry $12/hr), and my next review is due to put me at a mere $20/hr, tops. My current rate of earning is $31.2k gross, for those who don't want to calculate it out. No amount of "experience" and "projects I've owned" is worth this horrible work environment (low morale across the board) and crappy pay. Did I mention that the head honcho actively recruits H1B visas so that he has a practically indentured-service workforce? Yeah, sucks to be them.
I'm glad that I'm leaving this sinking ship. At least I can put enough on my resume to bump me up to a more senior position at my next company. How's that for silver linings?
I'm a Tech Controller (3C2X1) in the Air Force and work network infrastructure (mostly Cisco stuff) and WAN type links.
t /0,13964,49020,00.html
21,445.2 Base Pay http://www.military.com/Resources/ResourcesConten
6,948.0 BAH (allowance to cover housing costs)
3,206.16 BAS (allowance to cover food costs)
That comes out to 31,599.36... 26.3k after taxes, more if I'm in an area where I draw Hostile Fire Pay/Imminent Danger Pay + combat zone tax exemption. After taxes, I should make about 27k this year.
Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness
phfffttttpp
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Not great, but not horrible for entry level work. I work at a smallish ISP with 6 other help desk techs. Free $150k life insurance. Raises every December (or maybe it's twice a year.. dunno).
I'll be happy with this for a year or two until I can get more experience/degree to go elsewhere and make more.
After 5 years, I make $78K (started at the bottom). But, oh yeah, I haven't worked more than 35 hours/week in a couple of years. They love my work, and it all happens in a compact window between 10 and 5. It feels pretty fair, for the moment.
Okay, I make around 52k a year and live in BC, Canada. Work on many different tools/technologies (Crystal Reports, JSP/HTML, Oracle, SQLServer). Cost of living is moderately low (not in Vancouver) but I feel I could be making 60k without raising eyebrows in the company. But salary and perfomance reviews always result in the same old excuses.
I studied computer science for 2 years, dropped out, started working full time at a company which previously had no programmers and now I'm managing a small team of just-out-of-school programmers to design and build medical applications. I'm the only application designer and the most highly skilled programmer although the least educated. Nobody on the team makes more than me and I make $12 an hour.
as a programmer working for a company on salery I made about $45,000 / year.
As a programmer working for freelance clients in my own company I make about $45,000 / month...
gee, I wonder which one Ill stick with.
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm seeing a lot of comments about regional variation. Honestly, I'm not sure I agree with it.
I make just a touch over $100k after bonus for being a senior web developer in San Diego, putting in 40 hours a week - occasional but very rare crunch periods. (I'm going AC because I know a lot of people I work with read this).
At $100K, for all San Diego's one of the most expensive places to live, it's really not an issue. Manage your money well and I can put my wife through state, have two cars paid off and can have a house paid for in a touch over ten years.
Sure, on $50k, in the mid west, I could likely do about the same. But I spend those ten years not living in a truly beautiful place and I retire with a small 401k vs. a maxed one and a house that I can sell for $150,000 not $350,000. At that point, I can move out to the mid west, add the $200k difference to my 401k and never work again (not bad for 40) or I can stay in San Diego without the cost of living difference anymore.
That's the thing... Once you clear a certain point, the essential cost of living doesn't go up. If you want acres and acres and many thousands of square feet, sure, it does still go up. On the other hand, simply gaining somewhere comfortable to live doesn't need to go any higher than about $350k anywhere in the country. After that, with sensible economizing, rather than getting the biggest of everything you can afford, the rest is all a bonus and so different salaries make a bigger difference than regions.
On a similar note, I look at my parents. They are looking at retiring to Turkey. There, $20k a year is plenty. But, once 80% goes on cost of living, they have maybe $4k/year left to travel internationally to see family, get emergency medical treatment, new boats on the European markets, etc. Sure, $4k is a lot there - but it's nothing in a global economy - which is why they're taking a few years extra to ensure that's not an issue. So, unless you want to get trapped in a cheaper region, considering global costs is just as important.
Lead developer of a team of Perl heads doing web stuff.
But I'm either very good, or very lucky.
I think I've played the ol' poker hand reasonably well. And tried to teach others on shitty salaries how to play that game.
It's all bullshit. The market's getting better. Don't stick with your dot-bomb salary if you have talent - we've already had a couple of great people turn us down at 95k starting.
If you think you're underpaid:
- research local market
- apply for a couple of positions
- find out what they think you're worth
- if significantly more, either take it or give your company a chance to match it (if you like them).
DO NOT change your mind after accepting an offer either way. Your trust level will get hit badly.
For example what I make, just wouldn't fly for sys admins in, say San Francisco. Here, it's fine, not great, but fine. It's enough to own a house and have a nice life. There you'd be sharing a one-bedroom to make ends meet.
BEfore my dad retired, however, he made about the same as all the other execs of the same level. Where he lived it went farther than where some others lived. As far as the company was concerned, that was up to you (the job was all travel so your location was largely immaterial).
However for a lot of job you do discover that pay varies a fair bit based on region. They don't want to pay their employees in cheap regions more than they have to and they cannot find skilled workers paying their people in expensive regions what they do in cheap ones.
"Building this taboo around salaries is a nice psychological means of keeping wages as low as possible."
Exactly. Why should a company pay any more than you're willing to accept? They know that most tech types don't counter-offer. Women in particular seem to think it's rude, but I've noticed techs in general seem not to want to mess with it.
Several years ago a female friend of mine (Masters degree in CS) was excited about an offer she got from a Fortune 500 company. I told her she should counter-offer. She hedged, she paused, she said it would feel uncomfortable. But I made her promise. A few days later she called me over, thrilled to report that they had accepted and she'd be making several thousand more than the original offer. In her mind it was like the Magic Money Fairy had just made an appearance, but it's just common business sense.
I just switched jobs - the new company made me a reasonable offer, but I thought I was worth more. So I made a counter-offer in good faith. The result? An extra $2.5K/yr plus a $3K signing bonus. Money that I never would have seen if I hadn't asked! The job I just left? Same deal, asked for a few thousand more than offered originally. They accepted.
You have to sell them on yourself, and then you have to deliver. Plus you need a set of marketable skills (I do C++/networking/GUI/DB in niche markets). With that in place, I think a counter-offer shows them that you've got some self-respect and ambition. If they don't budge, it's not like their original offer goes away. And in the rare instance they withdraw it, you really didn't want to work there in the first place. Trust me. Assuming you made a reasonable counter-offer, otherwise you come off sounding like a tool. Know your target company, know your perceived value to them.
Switching jobs every 3-5 years is key as well (with some exceptions). At least 3 years shows that you stick around to get things done, and your salary will grow much faster with each jump between companies than by staying on and hoping for those COLA + 1% raises.
The company I'm going back to? Several years have passed, I've expanded my skills, and I'll be making about 40% more than when I left. There's no way I could have gotten 40% in raises in the same time period had I stuck around. But I left with a good reputation and came back in with solid interviews, good reputation and personal references from my latest employer.
Tend that career garden well. Any broken chain of good references/reputation can cost you jobs and tens of thousands of dollars in unrealized salary boosts. Never burn bridges. Let me say that again - NEVER burn bridges.
I'll get off my soapbox now and get back in my rocking chair by the back porch. :-)
I used to make $60K/yr doing extremely high pressure, fast paced, outsourcing contracts. Very complex, stressful work, demanded a very high technical competency level, required Lots of high pressure unpaid overtime. In hindsight, I'm amazed at how much work I did for so little return; basically a nightmare job.
Now I make $40/hr. The worker skill level is very low and management's expectations are low. Workers come in late, leave early, take long breaks. Management is very lenient. Weekend work is always fully paid for and usually optional. Overall, a very cushy, nice place to work.
I see workers at my current job with a fraction of the skill set doing a fraction of the work getting paid more than workers at my older job who had a much higher skill level, work ethic, and productivity output.
This seems so intrinsically illogical. The best explanation I have is that pay often has very little to do with skill set or job performance or work output. It often has much more to do with basic negotiation issues.
Also, salary level is not the primary determinant of job satisfaction. That has more to do with the nature of the work and the prestige and satisfaction associated with it.
$49440 yr w/o bonuses, 37.5 hrs/week
BASc, MASc, PhD in EE. Basically just out of college. San Jose / Mountain View, CA area. Developing very specialized software. $120k USD / year.
Technically, job pays me for 40 hours/week -- realistically, I'm always working. (Such is the life of the PhD grad -- you never quite stop thinking about the problem you're working on or ways to make the project better. You come home, and you might eat, you might surf the web, but you often write some more code to try out that cool new idea you had.)
Money isn't an object -- time is. I'd love it if they invented a procedure that allowed me to forego sleep (so that I could get 8 more hours of productivity per day...).
The Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) kicks in below a certain amount, our buddies in the gov't want their cash.
The mortgage deduction is not a slam-dumk by any means. I know some folks in CA who got slammed by this, with their mega-mortgage payments.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Good luck with that man! I started a web design/development company in late '97. It took my seven years, but by the time I (mostly) closed shop and left for Japan I was pulling in about $50k annually, after expenses and taxes. It was really hard at first and I really took it on the chin financially, but I managed to pay off all my loans for undergrad plus all but $5,000 for grad school. Just keep pluggin away and things will look up for you.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to ensure their safety and that they work as advertised. All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer's medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance - now Joe gets it too. He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe's bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry. In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for the laws to stop industries from polluting our air. He walks on the government-provided sidewalk to subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor. Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe's employer pays these standards because Joe's employer doesn't want his employees to call the union. If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he'll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn't think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune. It is noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe's deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe's money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression. Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime. Joe also forgets that his in addition to his federally subsidized student loans, he attended a state funded university. Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards to go along with the tax-payer funded roads. He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers' Home Administration because bankers didn't want to make rural loans. The house didn't have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn't belong and demanded rural electrification. He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn't have to. Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn't mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day. Joe agrees: "We don't need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I'm a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have."
EE Times puts out a yearly salary report which is a good gauge for engineers.
9 00112
. gif. gif
http://www.eet.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=30
The following charts are especially enlightening:
http://img.cmpnet.com/eet/news/04/august/SALARY_3
http://img.cmpnet.com/eet/news/04/august/SALARY_2
The best thing for you to do is to improve your language skills.
I'm 31 and have been working in Tokyo for about 9 years now. I'm not completely fluent, but I got a job as a translator and I make about $75,000 US. I don't even have a degree! But I studied and made myself as useful as possible to my company. I do everything, translating, programming, network admin, web developer, and whatever else.
And not just the language, I think its better to open yourself to more fields. Companies will pay more for a person with a broader range of skills. Also, if you make yourself indispensible by being the only one who knows how things work, they will pay you more to stay.
Good luck at your interview, gambatte!
Good point. I consider myself earning about an average salary around where I live. I'm in Europe, and currently make around EUR 33000 a year. That is *before* tax deductions and benefits, health insurance etc. I receive around EUR 20400 per year clean on my bank account.
Compared to US salaries this may seem a pretty ridiculous amount so let me put things in perspective. I'm currently receiving the highest pay I ever received, even compared to the dotcom days, at which time I could live very comfortably on my income. Currently my salary affords me a mortgage and allows me to support myself and my wife (who wasn't around in the dotcom days).
O.K. $99k + 5% cash bonus + raise + 7.5% stock bonus. Health coverage with no copay and no drug copay and unlimited max. benefits. I told 'em I did not deserve an increase this year -- still got one. I see no need to share a name to compare salaries. OTOH, here it is 12:30 AM and I'm still at work, catching up on a few things. I think it's a fair trade.
I started out as a web app developer, but my boss felt my knowledge was wasted there (which it still is now that I work as an admin too) -
I earn about 31500USD a year, from which 20250USD are left for me after tax, health insurance,... (btw - this is in Germany)
You (and I) code because that's the best we can do.
You could've hired me.
I pull $65k/yr doing C#/ASP.Net. No college, been working with .Net since Beta 1. Was working at a bank a year ago for $45k doing the exact same thing, so I was pleased with the $20k increase. I'm in Indianapolis.
I rate 5 kilo rice pack per 1 site.
I don't have a salary. I'm in on my own, running my own show, with my fingers in a number of pies. (One of those pies, growing nicely, has me in a 25% partnership in a company with 3 excellent partners, though I'm the only one with 25%)
I work as a generic programmer/CTO/CIO/sysadmin, in a number of capacities, supporting a wide variety of OSS-based solutions for a wide variety of clients.
From Schools and school districts, to ISPs to job-placement agencies, E-commerce, website hosting, etc.
My income varies widely. My wife (AKA the CFO) gets to juggle incomes where in one month, I gross $6,000, and the next month $16,000. It's quite a feat, and she plays the numbers well.
Last year, after expenses, I earned $86,000. I think I've already exceeded that this year so far, but I'm not sure. Things are well up, though. The last quarter this year looks like it might be a little tighter than the year so far.
My location? A small town in central California. Housing prices are reasonable, but not like the mid-west. Typical house around here costs $250-350,000, big ones about $650,000, and $1,000,000 buys a mansion. I paid $76,000 for my house some years ago, it's worth about $300,000 today.
Hours? Sometimes 20, sometimes 80. I have lots of "work-vacations" where I work 4 hours per day, in some other city, using the DSL service from the lobby of the hotel. I tend to travel alot, probably averaging a trip every 2-3 weeks or so in the last 3 months, about 1/2 by plane.
The last year has been very busy for me, and nicely enough, much of that business will result in a good, residual income - after the next year or so, I may never have to work for an hourly wage... ever again.
I usually work at home, on the couch, wearing a cotton T-shirt and a pair of shorts, no shoes, cordless phone in one hand, laptop in the other, either chatting or typing furiously. I work hard to keep relationships strong, and seldom lose a client. (in the past 6 years, I've lost exactly two, out of about 2 dozen groups/people I work with)
No, I don't have the stable income of somebody with a "job", but I prefer the stability of knowing that I can't get fired, and that everything I create, I own outright, and that my income is only based on my ability to sell and get the job done.
Does this help at all?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
you should upgrade your highschool degree online
tech "web programmer" to a real engineer degree
and give yourself a raise of $45,000
As a "Trainee Software Engineer" in britain I work 37 hours a week.
My salary is a bit more than £26,800/year.
This year's bonus was about £800.
I got 4x 41 hours overtime earlier in the year, which is 4x £720 = £2,880.
Total remuneration: a gnat's over £30,500.
According to xe.com's UCC that's $56,260
So that's what the bottom-rung of the UK is getting. Of course, we pay more tax than the US...
I'm a jack-of-all-trades programmer/analyst. I basically just solve problems. I don't like to label myself (well, except for "Code Monkey") but I suppose if I had to, I would categorize myself as an applications programmer.
;-)
I suppose I was solidly at average for the SF bay area (97K), but I recently absorbed a 10 K/year pay cut to take a job closer to my home (close enough to bike to work).
Fortunatley the new position pays regular bonuses. I figure if they keep paying them the way they have been over the last few years, I should end up somewhere around 100K - 105K, which is okay pay for the SF-bay area. As a result, I can afford a modest house and car (complete with the occasional gas tank refill), and the odd splurge at Fry's (anything electronic with knobs and blinky lights will do), but I still have to be careful.
That said, I cannot say that I am entirely comfortable with my career right now. While I truly love programming (and I'm good at it), I am keenly aware that my value is dropping as outsourcing becomes more prevalent. If it were just me, I wouldn't mind, but I have a family to worry about.
I'm sure it'll all come full circle in the end. Foreign programmer salaries will eventually rise to the point that they are no longer as attractive to software development firms and the domestic job demand will improve. Until then, it'll be a bumpy ride.
YEah, I know, since when has the US gotten back jobs that went offshore (stell workers, auto workers, etc). Just leave me to my fantasies already!
Germany in general is a mess. We've got 5 million unemployed, an advanced federal election coming up because of that and no relief in sight. The politicians just don't 'get it' and population is generally fed up of it.
I choose to go freelance two years ago. As, amongst other things, a web developer, with a thourough focus on OSS. Which is a growing market and closing in on critical mass here in germany. Everybody (and I mean everybody ) and his brother is using Typo3, people consider Linux as an alternative and demand for OSS consulting is growing. My partners are in with pharmaceutical corporations - which, naturally, have licences to print money. I'm building myself a reputation and even have a small business contract with a small agency in Florida im doing CRM for.
I'm flying under the radar, earning barely over minimum wage, making any comparion with those popular 'yellow press' salary lists utterly pointless. But I have liberties fulltime jobbers can only dream of and don't have to fuss around with superiours who don't take me for granted. I've learned to trust no one but myself (learned the hard way) and feel fairly safe even though I've currently got zero finacial backup and the german federal pension will be a joke when I'm old.
IT is growing with 5% aprox. and OSS is growing a little faster. I can bill aprox. 60$ an hour and have 2-3 hours a day that I can bill. It just covers my expenses. The upside being that I can spend a notable portion of my time at my favourite lounge sipping Latte and studying O'Reillys. In a nice indian summer these days. Oh, and, btw, how was your work day, my fellow slashdotter? *wide grin*
The downside being the tax Uber-paperwork, which is beyond insane in Germany.
Bottom line: I don't earn very much, but I'm surviving on my own. Which means I can't complain. If I keep on track and gain in efficiency (my main focus at the time) I might even have a small company with a handfull of employees some day. Who knows...
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm charging the equivalent of ~$95/hr for .Net architecture / development.
In Bulgaria:
A beginner programmer takes about $350 per month.
An average programmer (2 years of work exp) takes about $750-$875 per month.
A senior developer takes $1060 - $1500 per month.
A project manager takes about $1930 per month.
That is cache, not the officially declared salary, which is usually lower to 'save' some costs for the companies.
These salaries are usually given by outsourcing western companies, German and American mainly. Bulgarian companies pay similar or lower salaries, depending on how well they manage to attract clients.
And we are happy with this, as the average salary in the country is lower than that of a beginner programmer. The good thing is, the TOC of living in Sofia is just a small fraction of that of living in, say, Norway or something.
Now, we all hope one day the salaries will reach their western counterparts... but the opposite could happen.
> We are giving good raises to our employeesMicrosoft certifications are drawing the best compensation,
I'm in Denver, Colorado. Here, there are asking for MCSEs for helpdesk, and deployments (setting up PCs).
> security is going to be a big boom in the next few years.
I've been hearing that for at least seven years now.
Well, then I don't give a fuck. Thanks for asking.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Matsuya and Yoshinoya to the rescue :D
what P J O'Rourke said about Germans, that they are just like Americans only they speak better English.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
The reason people shy from talking about salaries is because it prevents the employers from paying based on ability - they have to pay everyone well/equal so that nobody feels bad. If you trust your employer to be fair, don't talk about it. However, I often talk about my salary with friends who do not work in the same company as me. Then its a case of helping friends out.
Here is the ad:
http://denver.craigslist.org/eng/89900924.html
Don't everybody apply at once.
no offense intended.
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
Am I the only Database Programmer that reads /.?
Unix ksh scripts; very simple perl scripts; Oracle; mostly doing ETL for a bank in Wilmington DE.
25 days off per year, plus 10 preset holidays.
Best health benifits I have ever had, and a boss that let me value my family more than work.
78K base plus @8K bonus based on my and bank's performance.
Plus the whole time that you're in college racking up debt - you're *not* in the work force gaining valuable experience, and climbing the ladder.
These articles about not enought BSCSs are idiotic, nobody is asking for BSCSs, what employers want is experience.
If you are going to go to college for something technical, get a real engineering degree, that is at least worth something.
Glad I only went to college for seven years and got degrees in math, comp sci, and business. I lot of friggin good it did me.
itai.
Make sure you have a visa, learn java and look around... you can probably bag 50-100 grand a year pretty easily.
http://www.jamesharvard.jp/
(among other evil headhunter peoples)
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
and most likely will welcome death after 30
"Every takeoff and landing, when the plane banked too much to 1 side, I prayed for a crash. That moment cures my insomnia with narcolepsy when we might die helpless and packed human tobacco in the fuselage. [...] Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip. I prayed for wind shear effect. I prayed for pelicans sucked into the turbines and loose bolts and ice on the wings. On takeoff, as the plane pushed down the runway and the flaps tilted up, with our seats in their full upright position and our tray tables stowed and all personal carry-on baggage in the overhead compartment, as the end of the runway ran up to meet us with our smoking materials extinguished, I prayed for a crash"
the sun is god
I don't understand why people won't disclose their salary data. Here are mine:
.com in Seattle, WA. Lasted 3 months before the company went under. Did C/C++ database work.
-- Bachelor's degree in Compuer Science from a good university
-- First job: Software Engineer, $40K, stock options, health insurance at a now extinct
-- Second job: Software Development Engineer I, $60K, underwater stock options ( forget the details ), health & life insurance, free unlimited bus card, $60K at first, $10K hiring bonus. Got a raise to $68K after 1 year review. Amazon.com, Seattle, WA. Worked writing C/C++ code for custom application which interfaced with a big-ass database. Lots of on-call work, stressful, late-night, early-morning catastrophes.
-- Third job: Software Engineer. US$850 a month (no typo), worked off the books, no stock options, no health insurance. Considered a very high paying job. Writing C/assembly code for embedded application. Lots of professional independence, got to do high quality work. Small company in Latin America.
Okay,
... I've spoken w/ friends that live in less expensive parts of the country. And they seem to be at about the same salary w/ about the same experience.
I'm far above all of these numbers.
I also live in a more expensive part of the country.
The numbers quoted in the article didn't seem to take any of that into account. This is mostly why I don't believe a word of it.
Further more
Moral of the story.
Negotiate your own salary.
But if you don't feel that you can. I'd be more then glad to sell you a few sheets of paper w/ over-inflated numbers on them.
I am a web application developer living in the DC area in my early 30s. I graduated from a rather small, "no name" college in 1995 with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science.
My first job out of college, which was as a network admin for private engineering firm, paid me $27,000/year (in a smallish town). I worked a few similar jobs then switched to web development, always taking an increase in salary along the way.
Here 10 years later I am working for a non-proift and am paid $83,000/year (near DC). I run a fairly popular website on the side that makes me $70,000/year additionally in ad revenue.
It was a wise career plan, it seems from where I'm standing.
How much wood would former propgramer chuck if former programer could chuck wood?
There you are, staring at me again.
I work for ILM, who cares? ...I wish I could be saying that :_(
...I do embedded software for digital television. I'm currently earning about $63K. I live in the north so my salary will be lower than the south east and London.
The only time I have got a real raise in sallery is when I have changed jobs.
Most of the jobs I have had have not allowed me to develop my skills, and have them recognised by the company with more cash. The job position is still "Developer", or "Programmer", and has a fairly fixes sallery for that postition.
As I developed my skill set I had to go to another comnany and join as an "Architect", or "Systems Programmer", each time getting a nice raise.
Some companies will allow you to progress quickly, stay with hands-on fun stuff, and get rewarded for it. Some just want 5 "Programmers", and if you leave, they get another. If they give you the extra 5k you diserve, the other 4 guys will start bitching, why would they want to do that?
End of the day, it's supply and demand, if you want to make more money, build up your skill set, talk to your boss, if you dont get what you want, get another job.
The worst thing you can do is sit on your butt reading slashdot, complaining, getting demotivated, and not focussing on developing your skill set.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
$30,000/year for Web Development in a small town.
Actually the reason I don't talk about money (not just my salary but how much things cost) because, as unfortuate as it may be, people make judgements based on what you are earning - much like they judge you on the kind of clothes you wear, or the car you drive.
This has nothing to do with a phobia, it is an unfortunate side effect of the way our society is today because of the value we put on material things. I can't make people think what I want them to about me so I just don't give then the chance to make an incorrect judgement.
You also assume that all employers at the same level in a company earn the same salary for doing the same job. This is not true in real life and discussing salary just causes resentment between co-workers if there are differences. Especially if one employee thinks they work harder/longer hours etc etc than their co-worker who earns more for the same job. There are many reasons why this can happen and many reasons why employers do this.
Not everyone has the luxury to negotiate a salary I understand, but there is are differences between getting shitty pay for a job you love, great pay for a job you hate, shitty pay for a job you hate or great pay for a job you love.
IT Manager / Lead Tech Person for a global defense contractor. I make about $65k/year + benefits + get to work from home about 1 day a week.
This is with about 8 years experience in the field, a BS degree in Comp Sci, 1/2 way done with my MBA, and I'm only 24 (yes, I had a full-time help desk job for a Fortune 50 company back when I was 16. It was through a temp agency but it still "counts" as when I started in the IT field).
Good luck out there.
@$130,000/yr, excellent bennies.
Ok a lot of you are driven by the amount of $$$ or £££ you can make, but I hope that some of you will realise, as I did, that there is more to life and jobs than money.
Me ? Well I was stuck in a normal IT shop, you know 100 users, a few servers. Straight outta uni but I got burn out after a few years and hated it. So much so I got signed off ill. It was at that point that I realised diversify is the name of the game.
By this I mean I have my own little pron empire im building, which brings in decent $$$ so i'm going part time, 3 days a week, Tue - Thur.
This means that I can still work and keep my hand in 'doze support etc but I can work on my side projects during my time off each week or just do it later. Its reduced the stress and boredom ten fold as well as being my own boss, do my work when I want to do it (ie evenings, boring weekends etc) and even take a long weekend each weekend, provided I get all the shit required to be done, done. It provides a bit of variety and breaks the week up too !
I also luckily have a very local employer so if i want to I can cycle too and from work in the sunshine on the country roads. There is more to job satistaction than dollars.
Having multiple revenue streams and combining them to create what you want work wise is the way to do it. It just aint about pure $$$
By not divulging salary information, I avoid painting a lucrative target on myself for scams.
Talking about salary across diverse areas (e.g. on Slashdot) is not as useful as talking about it with people you trust in the local area. A better source is something of a salary survey. My preference is for IEEE's Salary Survey (I am a member). My reason for this is that IEEE is a non-profit organization which includes engineering managers, tech writers, and various engineers. Because of that, I beleive the bias is lower.
Various other places often have alternative reasons for reporting a salary as low or high. For example consultants looking to hire often report high average salaries to increase an employee's dissatisfaction with the current job. Alternatively, in-house salary reporting typically report low averages for the opposite reason.
Accessing real salary information is typically expensive. Though IEEE offers access for an individual through a model to some data, obtaining more advanced access to the data for more significant statistical analysis (to aid HR in making salary offers, for example) is more expensive ($400-$600 depending upon need). You will find similar trends at other places, too.
Whenever I see salary surveys, I notice that I am way above the average. This always dissappoints me, because like everyone, I want more. If I was below the average, then it would be (relatively) easy to increase my salary, but when you're near the top, the law of diminishing returns sets in, and there's little I can do to get paid more.
This comes from working for a top investment bank in London, on contract. London is a very expensive city, so salaries reflect that. Investment banks are very competitive, so salaries reflect that. Contracting is less secure than permanent, so salaries reflect that. If I could find what other people in my situation earn, I'd know whether there's any room for me to increase my take-home, or if I'd need to change careers for that.
Frankly, if my salary was down below average, I'd celebrate (as long as I didn't see myself as being below average) as it should be really easy to increase my salary...
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
If I dont make at least $100K, it doesnt make sense to wake up in the morning.
I'm a "Beltway Bandit" (read: DoD contractor with a clearance) living and working in Arlington, VA. I make $90K a year. I was making $73K a year 7 months ago. I was doing a lot of work and felt I was underpaid. I decided to find another job. My current employer found my resume and decided to proactively give me a raise to stay (to $78K). Then three months later, things hadn't changed and I was still unhappy with the work conditions. I put my resume out again, and again they found it (I gotta work on that!) and gave me a promotion (better work conditions) and raise to $90K! That may sound like a lot, but the average cost of a house in this area is pushing $400K. And when my resume was online, I was receiving 10-30+ emails a day with job offers (when I was asking for $85K).
So, I agree, it's all relative to where you work. Everywhere from Arlington out past Dulles, VA, houses are crazy expensive (my brother's 1940 duplex is worth $450K).
Computer architecture Ph.D. candidate. Currently working in the NY area as an intern/co-op at a big blue computer company that should remain nameless. Currently making $90K, should probably increase a little bit more after graduation.
Company Policy on discussing salary and all, and I know others around here read slashdot.
Anyway ~$70,500 as a Web Application/Ad Hoc Utility/Scripting programmer.
when you say you 'have a pool of "stars" whose work I [financially] appreciate at levels incomparable to any industry "average"', is that to say you pay them at levels incomparable to industry average? or are you just a slimeball?
When I was salaried, I got around $80K a year, but when I was contracting I got $85/hour ... roughly $160K a year but I lost huge chunks of that to taxes and paying for my own medical.
Agreed.
But property is how the REST of the world knows you.
And in this country, it also "weighs" how much your vote is worth. You can argue whether that's right or wrong but it really doesn't matter. It is what it is.
Good idea. OK, I make $14,000 a year.
If you count your 'official' wage, based on 1-year of work before taxes -- then I would say that the numbers are slightly low.
If you take into account how often people in the tech industry get laid off, spend a couple months in transition getting unemployment before their new jobs -- then maybe the numbers more correctly line up.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Where can you look to get a list of standardized job titles and descriptions? I don't know whether I'm a senior programmer, a junior systems architect, or just "guy in dark room with computer". I tried a (cursory) search at the ACM's web site, but didn't turn anything up.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Man, I'm barely a high-school grad and I'll make $63k this year after bonuses just by running a small business network. I do a little programming as part of my job but mostly I babysit 3 servers.
;-) Not to mention I can walk to work.
I work 35 - 40 hours per week, and live in a small country town where the average household income is $22k according to the last census. Think about how much bigger my house is compared to one of those programmers in CA... I have a 4BR two story 2000 square foot house and a $600 mortgage payment. That leaves a LOT of income for computer gadgets
Yes, seven figures is obscene, especially when you're just taking a commission on other people's disagreements/misery/frivolous suits.
Fucking lawyers, about as useful as professional sports players, except more dangerous....
With the first link, the chain is forged.
You TOO can be a programmer and, like me, make only pennies a day!
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
You can never lose your job in one of the most volatile regions of the world? How long has it been since kuwait had a complete government turnover exactly?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I think it's reasonable to assume that you put yourself at a disadvantage if your employer has all the information regarding salary data and you have none.
http://joshstaiger.org/
Baltimore. There is a relatively low cost of living here too.
Consultant, business application development, 8 years experience, non-engineering college degree with some technical degree grad work.
In my experience you have to be willing to take some risk and have some self respect to turn down crummy job offers, but also understand that each job is worth something to a particular employer and what you are offered is more directly based on the requirements of the job and not your worth as a person. Don't take it personally.
Keep up with technology, but don't bs your experience out of desperation. However, independent software projects, or your work on open source projects are applicable experience and good ways to improve your background. You should highlight those experiences and the technologies that you used on your resume if they were important to you.
Speaking of resumes, you should review your resume for each job you are directly submitting to and tailor it to the type of job you are applying for. If you want a technical support position, highlight the aspects of your previous job that dealt with people and troubleshooting problems. If you want a software development position, emphasize the types of code you have written and the languages and methods used. If you want a QA position, make sure they know about your attention to detail and for god sake don't let any mispellings get through. If you want a more senior business analyst or architect position, then you should enumerate your experience with different Software Development Life Cycles, architectures and your take on them.
Your reputation is key, so treat everyone with respect in all aspects of your life. Your ability to work with others, even bad people that really try to get under your skin, is a reflection of your professionalism. I have many friends now that I thought were complete pricks when I first met them.
And don't treat technology as the end, but rather the means to an end and you will better relate to those that hired you.
One other benefit of owning a home: you know how much your monthly payments are going to be. You won't suddenly be hit with a 20% increase in rent, or be told you need to move out within a month because the landlord wants to sell the place.
(Of course, that's assuming you do the smart thing and go for a fixed rate mortgage.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The hardest part is just getting the job.
Most company's never higher outside people for the top salary positions. They tend to higher from with-in.
Even with tons of experiences and schooling the best you can get sometimes is a junk ass entry level job and then hope to apply to an internal position 6 months later. Although most company's will not higher you because they think with that much experiences and education you will jump ship as soon as a better job comes along.
It is best if you're an idiot with poor education but have tons of charm. Charm can take you to the top... as the real world business works: the less you know the higher you can go!
Case in point: A friend worked really hard so they got a temp to help them out. The temp was a cute little girl with just a grade 12 and 20 years old. She heavily flirted with everyone in the office (husband hunting). 6 months after the temp showed up the manager of the area took an early retirement. One guess you got the job - the new temp. As an added bonus the company had several long term employees quit in protest (oh the savings in salary's they thought). Now two years later it looks like she will be the area director with a base salary of over $100,000 plus a bonus that can equal that. I am sure her bonus will be greater than that with just the salary savings that will result when more long term employee's quit in protest. Apparently you can get very far on charm!
Waste of time to study - go the bar and socialize - work on that Charm skill! Spend you education money on getting plastic surgery so you can look young and beautiful (even if your just 24 years old). That is how you get a job and get ahead.
I did (still doing) consulting with a 3-man co in the Chicago area, and saw my salary zoom then implode. We lost client after client after client and no amount of faith and hard work ever brought things back to the good old days.
My working conditions & lifestyle were very good - working at home etc.
Now I'm a physics lab manager at a local University making a fraction of my peak but it's a lot more fun, and doing what little consulting is left to us on the side. It was a real heartbreak working my effing ass off for less and less money, seeing my peers going to work as Real Estate Agents, Home Depot clerks, etc.
I don't give a shirt what you pay me, I won't spend my life in a cramped cube, wearing what somebody else thinks I should wear, fighting traffic 2x a day. Even a long life is too short.
Very funny quote indeed. I should mention though that I am a former american citizen (yes, I know, even few germans believe that) but there actually are a lot of germans that are just as good a writing (RPG player and computer geeks - lots of english book to read) and quite a lot at speaking. I'm in the fortunate position of being able to speak accent free german and accent free english (well, it's actually texican/american english). A nice asset I'm gratefull for.
There is a simular joke in Germany:
What is the difference between a Turk and a Nazi?
A Turk speaks correct german, works for his money and pays taxes.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
-e troll -i offtopic +pi funny +1 insightful
I'm a web developer (titled Application Developer), working with ASP.NET/SQL Server/JavaScript/CSS. I make $55,000/year in suburban Philadelphia, working 40 hours a week.
It's anti-union sentiment. When the employees have better information, it's easier to bargain as a collective. Employers can pay less when they can divide and conquer.
My name is Elmer J. Fudd, Millionaire. I own a mansion and a yacht.
After the dot com bomb, I lost my cushy job (html, php, mysql) with catered lunches and had to work at a book store for a while.
Eventualy, I got myself in at a mortgage company in orange county, ca. Officialy, I'm "the IT guy" but I'm also developing a web based software (PHP - MySql) which they use (but I have the rights to it). For this they pay me just $36K. I know I could probably get a straight programming job elsewhere for more $ (after years, not since the dot com boom, I am getting calls for job offers).
But, I stay, because my boss is flexible with my hours. I can take wednesday mornings off with my new baby, leave early whenever I need to, etc.
And I can work on my web based software which I am leasing to other mortgage companies (so far, this is netting me another $9k/yr, and that's just one client leasing monthly).
There's something to be said for making less $ but getting flexibility to work on other things. With any luck, in a year, I will be making 10x what I make now..
PS. anybody with some knowledge of the mortgage business and who is a good salesman, in the orange county ca area who wants to make a monthly residual on a software lease, feel free to contact me. We need salesmen and trainers for our software. Or if you are a mortgage company, check out our lead management software. Shameless plug! http://www.imlts.com/
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
I had been seriously researching moving from expensive orange county back to my roots in the cheap northwest. In my research, these numbers are outdated and wrong. It seems most of the data is from 2002. Personally, I found this calculator to be better than most: http://houseandhome.msn.com/pickaplace/compareciti es.aspx {yes, yes, msn... I know}. The have an interesting survey of the attitudes of the areas, but thats very dated (like 1995 info).
Back to the point - I traveled to the places I was considering moving to, and the numbers are wrong. The numbers are wrong in bad ways too. For example, housing prices were much higher than reported and salaries were lower. Many of the incidental things (food, power) were cheaper in cheaper areas, but that's hard to balance against less selection. For example, if I go to buy a car here, I have a hundred or so dealers to shop. More competition and greater turnover equals lower prices on many things. However, if you're moving from more affordable to less, you're in for a very big sticker shock considering how insane real estate is currently priced.
Now, to be clear, I hate California. I moved here for my wife and her family. There are two major reasons I stay here. 1) Some of my debts stay the same no matter where I live. Thus, to service such debts, it will take a much greater share of my income in an affordable area than in an expensive area. Thankfully, I'm about to pay those off, because... 2) High cost of living areas are expensive in large part due to high demand to live in those areas. As a result, better than average returns on real estate. (even without the crazy real estate bubble currently going on).
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
"You've got to keep in mind that for a lot of people, especially in this economy, they're lucky to be on an interview at all."
That's exactly what they (the companies) want you to think. And to be flat out honest, if you're a junior sysadmin and/or and an MS certified tech or whatever, then they're actually probably right. (Sorry, but that's been my experience seeing the incoming resumes at least.)
Moving beyond that, read this part carefully - It's getting hard to find good computer scientists/software engineers! If you're a skilled developer with a professional attitude and work ethic, and reasonable communication skills, I can assure you that you cannot be easily replaced and are a valuable commodity. Weasel management teams exist that don't believe this, and they lose good people only to spend years cycling through posers. When you're sure YOU are not the weasel (look hard inward, be honest) get the hell out.
My previous employer and new employer have both been having hard times finding the qualified candidates they need. And I'm not talking about "buffet line" job listings with every past, current and future technology listed as a requirement. I'm talking fluffed-up resumes and weak interviews for basic skills (C++ or Java, OOP, DB/ODBC) and I say this from direct experience as an interviewer.
If you're a software engineer who actually loves the field, that passion shows. Those folks who thought a degree in CS (or even an MS Cert or a 4 week course in HTML) sounded like a way to make a lot of money are screwed. The Dot Com bubble and outsourcing has forever ruined that pipe dream. Genuine enthusiasm for the field, however, shows. As does professionalism. And not being an arrogant dork. (Not talking to you directly of course, just speaking in general terms.)
There are a lot of sectors and applications that will simply never be outsourced. Small companies lack the resources to effectively outsource (note that I said "effectively"), financial and gov't (direct or contract, fed/state/local) sectors aren't likely to outsource key functions, etc.
We've all read about the lack of Americans pursuing CS/CE degrees. The crash flushed all the opportunists out of the pipes. Now is the time for those truly interested and passionate about computer science and the art of software development to charge ahead as always.
"IT sector"? That's always been far too inclusive a group for me to discuss accurately as an employment sector. Sysadmins (actual network engineers or specialized CS types), MS Cert techs, software engineers, systems engineers - those are all very different fields with different driving forces.
The MS Cert crowd will be brutalized for the duration. Good sysadmins have fewer jobs to choose from but the opportunities are there, good software engineers are only several years away from being able to write their own (realistic) tickets. Truly skilled systems engineers will actually benefit from outsourcing - after all, someone has to produce the blueprints to build from.
And remember the core point - "Good" doesn't just mean technically excellent. Solid communication skills, professionalism, work ethic, and not being a weanie are ulitmately equally important.
But hey this is just a generic Slashdot post. Any random Penny Arcade is likely to have just as much insight if not more. ;-)
While I agree with your main premise, I think it requires further clarification. The reason the MBAs make more is because they are typically in administration. Administrators will always make more because they make the decisions (opposed to doing the work). What salary to pay someone is just another decision.
Counting unemployment which equals employment in this business, you should expect only $40,000.
> open source projects are applicable experience
Only if the open source project is less substantial than the project your future boss is managing and you drop it after you join. If you outgrow your boss, it's unemployment heaven 4 U.
I am a application developer for a company that writes software for the energy industry. We use all the latest stuff discussed in slashdot. This is for 25 years of experience.
Yes we are making hand-over-fist this year. Plus were are downsizing and outsourcing to south Asia.
Very few high tech companies have such these days. You are supposed to save 401K and stock options and crosss your fingers for the big IPO.
In the case of more flights... the cost of a crash means you're exiting in a large ziplock bag, not a stretcher. That is if anyone finds enough of you to fill a ziplock bag.
If it was just an injury that was at risk, autopilot would probably be used. The random events that can cause a terrific crash combined with the risk of death make full-auto non-feasible.
... are currently around £450-£600 per day, typically £500 / day. Of course, a UK contractor lives in interesting times with IR35 tax laws. Channing
If you're making $70k a year with a high cost-to-live index, but managing to save up $15k of that, it might mean something.
For example, let's say that in city X, a house costs $150,000, whereas in city Y, a similar house costs $300,000.
Obviously in city Y you will either have to save more or work longer to earn a house. So let's say at the rate above you save for 5 years at $15k/year... that's $75k... still a long way away from that $300,000 house.
But here's the kicker, if you are saving more towards the biggest cost (the $350,0000 house) and then move to city X, suddenly you doing very well by city X standards.
So now you move to city X and you're only making $52,000 per year. But you've already bought your house, and maybe you have a car and a few other of the major purchases. Say that the lesser expenses in city X are only $27,000/year... no mortgage, no other major costs. You're now accumulating $25,000/year as you aren't paying into higher expenses and/or a mortgage, etc.
The big picture not only counts how much you make at a given time, but more importantly how much you save and where you plan to spend your future. A small savings in one location can be quite a lot in another, after all... and lower cost-of-living doesn't mean a bad place to live (some nice places have low wages but low living costs as well).
unlike the lawyers, business executives, and other criminals that make one million dollar yearly salaries.
They cheat, lie, and steal their way to the top.
My Mom was told by an a judge (you know, one of those greasy ex-lawyer types?!?), in a court of law, that just because she was in the right didn't mean that she still shouldn't pay the opposing party damages.
Why? To save time for the court! In the judges words, "sometimes, you can still be completely in the right, and it still makes sense to 'settle'". She doesn't have $30,000 to pay the lawyers to defend her case; so she might have to pay "damages" for something she didn't do.
Her former lawyer completely misrepresented her case in her case file; there's evidence to suggest collusion between him and the prosecuting side, but nothing she could prove in court, even if she could afford to sue an attorney (which few honest people can ever afford to do!).
That's two cases of corruption of the highest order, and it's endemic in business and in the legal system. My ex-boss physically threatening the staff for daring to suggest that they'ld quit! Sexual harassment by the managers towards the working girls. Exploitatation of foreign workers. Blatant violations of health and safety code: I once working in a warehouse full of paper, which caught fire. They put it out, and we continued working in the same conditions as before.
The people who make it rich are the people who commit and profit from treating other people like shit, in both legal and illegal ways. I'm unwilling to treat my fellow man that badly. I code because it's means less work done by humans, and more work done by machines, which is as it should be.
We all have an obligation to make the world a better place than where we found it: by building systems to automate work, by improving literacy and communications, and to increase our knowledge of science and technology.
These millionares are shirking their duty to mankind while the rest of us suffer for their selfishness. Instead, they lie, they cheat, and they steal: and they get away with it, because they've got the money to protect them.... and they blame our bitterness at their lack of ethics on "jealousy", rather than what it is, a condemnation of a corrupt and criminal worldview.
--
AC
I'm making about $48k a year, which I consider low. But it's a small company (13 people or so), and the money isn't there right now (I see exactly what we get paid for our work). Still, it can be frustrating -- if we were doing exciting work I don't think I'd be bothered, but we aren't.
Everyone works hourly, so if I work more than 40 hours I'm paid accordingly.
My base salary is $92k. I'm a cross-platform C++ developer that also has a Java and web development background. I work pretty much 40 hours a week most of the time and almost never travel.
Yes, I know I'm overpaid.
Hahah.... big surprise, another Devry "graduate" giving a handjob to another one, convincing each other that their degrees are somehow relevant or comparable to an actual degree.
get over it boys. The individual doesn't matter when your "degree" won't even get you in the door to an interview. You have to deal with having a vastly inferior credential that almost every employer looks at for the rest of your careers. The end.
FYI, If you want your open source software to be even remotely relevant, you have to work for someone else. Someone else decides if your program does what it should do. Someone else decides if your architecture is what it should be. Someone else decides how much support you need to provide. If you don't involve so-and-so in your decision making, he'll call you a bad team player on all the blogs.
Instead of getting fired, it disqualifies you from getting hired because your work is out there for everyone to see, including people you never met who come out of the woodwork blaming you for not doing it their way. The only fully creative programming is programming that no-one will ever see.
years in the industry: 15+
starting salary: 1989-ish, $28K --- not Kb, more like kB (think hard drive :-)
Salary & position rose like a rocket after that. leveled off the last 5 years though (I wonder why...).
Here's another hint: a survey requires people who answer surveys. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that people making on the high end do not generally go out of their way to answer salary surveys, whereas people paid average or less than average might be a bit prone to worrying about their salary and therefore filling out surveys and looking them up.
Boner's Corollary: those with self-perceived sub-average penis size will not permit independant [1] third-party measurement of said member whereas above-average penis size gleaned from jock showering will invariably be exaggerated.
[1] "pendant" mispelled intentionally.
Tricare is good when you need it, and the two times I've had to go to a military doctor they were competent and professional (the horror-stories are about the inexperienced dentists and surgeons
Heh, if my Free you mean "Mandatory", then yes
I haven't had a chance to take advantage of this yet, with Barksdale being an ACC base the only thing that comes in and out regularly are B-52s and A-10s... not what most people would want to catch Space-A on! I've heard it can be great if you're at an AMC base, I know someone posted in Alaska who would take a few days of leave to head down to southern California and Hawaii.
Barksdale didn't get more than a bit of rain from the hurricane, but a lot of people who did manage to get out of New Orleans are in Shreveport/Bossier, so a lot of the hotels are full and Red Cross is calling for volunteers. I "missed out" on that, I'm currently overseas and am drawing HFP.
Overall, I've recieved excellent training in the military. A few years of good on the job training with a lot of TDYs for training courses gets me approximately as much practical knowledge in my job as I would get from a degree, but perhaps without as much breadth. If a degree's important to you, there're several more benefits that relate to education.
So, not a line of total bullshit, but I've yet to meet someone who didn't have at least a minor gripe about what they expected from talking to their recruiter vs. how things ended up being. I came in on DEP too, just keep your eyes open and take everything they say with a grain of salt
Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness
I was told this recently, and it still applies to me today.
I am currently doing work suited for someone one level above me. I know this because I was on 'higher duties' for 1.5 years.
So, after 1.5 years we 'find out' that a big project that's blown around 5 billion dollars and failed (Accidenture Conslutting was involved) and we have to 'pay back' the money lost.
So, how do you get money back fast? You 'let people go'. Right now we are hemoraging staff and knowledge badly and management doesn't care. 100 people have gone.. more are yet to go. It seems like they are shutting down Medicare Australia.
And me?
I have a job.
I can't get HDA because if HDA was 'offered' then someone from the 'talent pool' or 'resource pool' would get it before I did.
So, I am here, earning 10 - 15K less than I should for this work. Not much I can do but leave.
You're right, there is a sort of taboo on discussing salary, even with the employer. I know its business and such, but I feel almost rude for asking about money in such a climate. In the few jobs I've had as a fairly young person (25), pay was never negotiated, simply offered as part of the job. No argument or discussion about it, take it or not.
No.
Of course they're not going to say to you, "Hey! Here's our offer, but if you want more money, we'll pay! Our maximum threshold is $X! Now how much money would you like to make?"
If pay was never negotiated, it's your fault. They make you an offer, you say, "I'm sorry, I can't take that, but how about this?"
I've done that with every job I've ever had, save one. It was my first job, in fact, and it was good pay, but I still could've gotten more. I've never been that stupid again.
Be prepared. Cite reasons why you're worth more. Have average salary statistics for your area and career and experience in hand (SAGE SALARY SURVEY!).
Of course, if you aren't "that damn special" and/or don't believe you are--then take their lowball offer.
And to those of you who are afraid that the company's going to say, "Well, screw you for asking for more money in a business transaction! We'll bring in Candidate #2!"--remember that if you get an offer, you get the offer because you are the best candidate. They have taken the time to call your references, put you through X rounds of interviews, possibly drug-screen and/or background check you, and they have decided that you are who they want, or they wouldn't be making you an offer.
Basically, there's three outcomes. They may say, "Okay," and you've got your money. They may say, "Sorry, we can't do that," in which case you have to decide whether the previous salary was good enough, then either accept or continue to look. Or they may say, "Well how DARE you make us a counter-offer! Out, heathen, out!", in which case you are better off NOT working for that company.
But companies don't normally say "Out, heathen, out!"
I have to ask. Where the heck do you live that you can buy a house for $45 and sell it now for $60k?? I know the market is overinflated in my area, but you can't even get a studio condo for less than $200k in a really, really dangerous neighborhood around here. I've heard stories of friends' relatives and acquaintances buying for like $120k in places like Mississippi, etc, but you're talking even half that!
:)
Agreed with the principles of what you're saying, though. I suppose it's all relative to where you live too, since while I make well over twice what you do, my house also cost me a few times more than yours. My dream is to find a way to keep my current salary while moving to wherever the heck you live.