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Annual IT Salary Survey Finds Dissatisfaction
BobB writes "A storm seems to be brewing in the IT job market. Pay raises have continued to outpace inflation, and bonuses are downright impressive — 11.6% on average. Yet, as the 2007 Network World Salary Survey finds, dissatisfaction over salary packages is rampant."
I mean, who is going to answer yes?
It might not be inflation, rather your lifestyle adapts to how much you earn.
I really like my job and the people I work with but I need my salary doubled to even begin to be satisfied with it. I'm willing to give up a lot to have such a great job but I think I should still make enough to support me and my wife without my wife needing to work too. If my salary doesn't go up quite a bit in the next couple years I'll probably be forced to find another job which is really not what I want to do. The company I work for claims that wages it pays are lower than average because we are located in an area with a lower cost of living. That's great and all but I'd still like to make the median income in this state at least. Cost of living may be cheaper but that only represents around 1/4 of my monthly bills. The other bills are just as expensive as they were when I lived in California.
If I could support a family while sticking at my current job I'd probably stay for a long time. The schedule is flexible, the work is fun and just challenging enough to be interesting, there is nobody micro-managing me and I mostly manage myself, my co-workers are friendly, and upper management isn't retarded (they're intelligent, honest, and fun to be around). I'm trying to do my part to earn the company more money so that my position can pay for it's own raise in pay.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
> Sadly, I fell foul of their Gestapo-like HR department, who decided not to give me the job because,
> during one of the interviews over the phone to a woman in Texas, I didn't sound 'positive enough'.
Sorry, that is really rough. I had a similar problem once where I got to the final stages of the interview process, the guys I interviewed with were all ready to hire me, but just because I *asked* the HR interview person if in the future the company would be considering allowing employees the occasional work-at-home day (not that I expected to work at home at all, but was thinking about the future when I might have kids).
I think it's really stupid that technology companies let their interview process get hamstrung by HR departments. They should not have HR interviews at all. If the people you're going to work with like you, the HR department really ought not to have any say in it at all.
I see this more as an indication of wide-spread management failure in the industry than of money per se.
Ironically, (unreasonably) high wage demands typically have more to do with the non-tangible compensation that a job offers than the actual amount of money employees make. That is, when people are happy with their job, when they enjoy the social contacts, when they get to work in a nice environment and, above all, when they have a sense of purpose, then they make reasonable wage demands. When the job sucks, they spend 8 hours a day thinking "I don't get paid enough for this shit." In that case, no wage will be high enough.
One of those things that management should be doing is ensuring that their employees have the intangibles to keep them happy and productive. That is something that our much derided PHBs learn to do in their MBA programs. However, I think that the IT industry is having issues in this arena because the skill set required to perform the job is so specialized that programmers who get promoted to managers never bother to acquire "managerial" skill sets (or they just don't put any value in managerial skill sets) and people who do have managerial skill sets are so wildly incompetent in IT that you would not dream of hiring them to manage coders or SAs.
just my $.02
-mat
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Wow, what backwards thinking.
So nowadays, the mere act of RAISING your own children is "overprotection?"
I agree, children should have social outlets. A morning pre-school for 3 and 4 year-olds is probably a good idea. But your notion that all day childcare is somehow > stay-at-home mom is a little silly to me.
I shouldn't reply, but this is insane....
Following your logic, we should send kids to daycare because 75% of abuse happens from relatives? Sorry, but If you truly believe that your kids are better off in the hands of someone "Not their parents", then you shouldn't have had children. Maybe the percent is high because they spend most of their time with close relatives?
Yeah, I heard that most car accidents happen within 10 miles of home, so I am moving.
The most "fun" work environment for the worker is one of unstructured cooperation where there are no rules.
That sounds like it ought to be true, but IMHO it isn't. I think IT mainly attracts three kinds of people, and if you look at what drives them, it's never really that.
Firstly, you have those who are only in it for the money. They probably took some university course just so they could work in IT, and they probably aren't very good at their job. Most of them don't get very far, because their attitude is entirely selfish, and the only motivator they have is making as much money as possible from doing as little real work as possible. In their minds, they'll have fun later, when they're rich.
Then you have the "journeyman" developers and sysadmins: those who are happy to work in a well-paid industry, but basically see it as just another job. These people represent the largest proportion of the industry, IME. They are typically competent but unexceptional in their skill and aptitude, and approach their jobs with a reasonably professional attitude. The best motivator for these people, IME, is simply to let them get on with their job: give them clear instructions about what needs to be done, and some relevant background information if they're the kind of person who likes to see how they fit into the bigger picture, and then just get out of the way and let them do their work. These people typically recognise the value of good organisation, and respect strong but flexible leadership. They don't go to work to have fun, but they will find their work environment most pleasant this way and rarely demand more.
Finally, you have the guru types. Often, these are the guys who got into IT because they enjoy the field. If they took a university course they enjoyed or they get paid well, that's almost incidental, and just a bonus on top of having a job where they enjoy the work. These guys know their subjects inside out. The big variable — and the thing that separates the gurus who are great people to have in your group from the gurus who are liabilities — is how well these guys do things outside their own development or administration work.
Those who develop people skills, understand the business context for their work, cooperate with management, and give constructive input to these areas from the point of view of the IT guy, tend to go far, though they tend to stick to a technical path rather than moving into management. Motivation for these guys often comes from seeing a good result from their work, and they will work in whatever way seems best to achieve that goal. Again, this isn't usually unstructured cooperation; on the contrary, IME these guys are the ones most likely to want good processes in place, and to appreciate readily whether existing processes are helping or getting in the way. Often, these guys also value honest recognition when they produce good work, and like to know that when they make constructive suggestions they are being listened to.
Of course, you also get the gurus who want to have everything their own way. These are the guys who want their own office and to work in their own style. They want full-time ownership of the code they write (not that it matters since no-one else can understand it anyway) or the final say over any changes to their networks. These guys probably are motivated by unstructured work, but cooperation is a word that doesn't enter their vocabulary. Frankly, you're better off hiring a couple of less egotistical, less demanding, and far more pleasant and constructive journeyman types anyway than you would be getting stuck with one of these guys, who seem to be known as "rock star programmers" in trendy blogs.
So I don't think unstructured cooperation is really fun for any of the major types of IT guy. The good ones tend to appreciate enough structure to do an effective job, while the bad ones will cooperate only as far as is necessary to get what they want anyway, and often would prefer to stay under the radar and just do things their own way. Constructive anarchy doesn't really work for either group.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.