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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?"
How much money will a typical programmers make when the offshore/outsourcing trend levels out matures?
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.
You mean they PAY for this? I thought the only renumeration was /. mod points....
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
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?
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
Sure, everyone knows what you mean, but in this world you can't just be competent, you have to be seen to be competent.
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.
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.
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)
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 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?
Give us a call when you turn 18 :>
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 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
That is the attitude of a Computer Science student or recent grad.
Look at any company. Find where the money comes into that company. See how close or far your position is to that money entering the company. That determines your salary right there.
A company doesn't mind paying salespeople (who perform well) plenty of money because it is clear what they are worth. They are bringing in the money that keeps the company alive.
MBAs are closer to the money. They are in a "profit-center" of their companies.
The programmers are pretty far from the money. In most companies they are in a "cost-center", ie: they are a cost that the company grudgingly pays as a cost of doing business. They would be eager to lower that cost.
At one place I worked a few years ago there were programmers who worked in the "back office" servicing the company-wide infrastructure and there were programmers who working directly for a "front office" department, ie: closer to where the money is made. I worked for a front-office department and made $120K for doing the exact same thing programmers in the back office were paid $60K to do.
Just follow the money...
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
...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!
...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.
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 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.
Competence is irrelevant in corporate America. You just have to seem to be sucking up. (via)
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.
May 2004 Metropolitan Area Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Find your city, find your occupation.
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oessrcma.htm
Applicable Occupations:
15-1021 Computer Programmers
15-1031 Computer Software Engineers, Applications
15-1032 Computer Software Engineers, Systems Software
15-1041 Computer Support Specialists
15-1051 Computer Systems Analysts
15-1061 Database Administrators
15-1071 Network and Computer Systems Administrators
15-1081 Network Systems and Data Communications Analysts
Social engineering? Is that what you guys are calling living in your parents basement now days?
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
90% of the time, the robot autopilot can do a better job (smoother flare and touchdown; closer to the center of the runway etc) landing the plane than a human can.
The last 10%, the unexpected cross/head winds, the emergencies, obstacles on the runway, mechanical problems with the plane... then having the best means the difference between walking away vs being carried off on a stretcher.
There's no way to know, in advance, which flights are going to be absolutely routine and boring and which ones will have cause for excitement. Hence, two pilots on every plane.