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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."
Get the head hunters to contact IT geeks every 6 to 8 months and offer absolutely plumb jobs. When you get em on the phone, "refresh their job details" and then tell them that plumb job is gone, but you'll keep an eye out for them.. just what salary range are you looking for? Oh, well, with your skills you should be getting paid a lot more than that.. etc.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What amazes me is the difference between average IT salaries in Europe and the US. Here in Europe, an average 30-year-old IT worker could expect to be making about 3000 euros before taxes every month (i.e. 36,000 a year). Reading that article, I gather the average US IT salary is about $80,000, which is about 56,000.
Can anybody explain this huge difference? Is the cost of living in the US just so much higher than in Europe? Or does IT just pay a lot more in the US?
Coca-Cola, sometimes War.
Chances are if your wages are really increasing by that percentage, your spending or consumption is up (did you buy that iPhone..?). Inflation has recently been around 2.5-3%, realistically around 2%...so if you're exceeding that in salary increases, it's probably not due to inflation.
I graduated with a degree in Computer Science in 2002, and have had awful trouble finding a well paid job. Most of the jobs advertised were web development, which were always badly paid (my first job out of university paid barely above minimum wage). These jobs usually ended before 6 months, once I'd completed a couple of projects for them and before they would be legally required to give me redundancy pay.
There were a couple of good job openings (I was once approached by a recruitment agency to apply for a job with Google in Dublin) but of course seeing as I was not the only desperate compsci grad in the West Midlands competition for them was pretty fierce and I didn't get them.
I was trapped in web development, but I was pretty good at it. I constantly taught myself new technologies as I developed sites, worked on projects in my spare time to expand my skills, and had a good eye for front end design from a job I had in the print industry. Despite this I was never paid more than £12k a year for web development. My current job is pays £14k, doing office admin work for the police, and that is the most I've ever been paid for anything.
Then it seemed to be looking up. I'd gone for a support job at a large US company, and at the interview they had been so impressed with my aptitude scores and my general IT knowledge they recommended me for a better paying job (£20k) with their programming department. 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'. I'm not sure how positive a man from Yorkshire is supposed to sound to a Texan over a transatlantic phone line, but there you go.
This is why I'm now starting a Physics degree. Fuck the IT industry, it's not worth it. I slaved away for cockle-picking money, and when my talents were finally recognised I was rejected because of some idiotic HR impression of me, rather than the evidence of my aptitude tests. Hopefully, physics is a field where people are rewarded for their knowledge and intelligence rather than whatever smarmy 'people skills' HR are after. Perhaps I'm being Naive, but it can't be much worse than being in the IT industry.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
you can talk about figures all you want, it makes no difference at the end of the day when my pay check is all gone and i have nothing extra to show for it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Inflation is probably not outpacing your salary, all those reasons inflation is overstated are rock solid. Compare your spending and consumption with last year. If your taxes increased (property taxes often do) factor that in. Unless your salary remained constant or you took a pay cut, it is impossible for inflation alone to account for a decline in real income, probably taxes and new purchases.
Yes. The US has been lying about inflation for a few years now. When the price of steak skyrocketed, for example they took it out of the equation and substituted ground beef.
Recently they took out the cost of energy because it it went up huge; their explanation was that they didn't want it to 'distort' the numbers. (despite the fact that everyone in the country still has to buy gas for their cars and heat their homes so it -should- be reflected.)
Even worse, they have a fucked up system of computing negative inflation. If you bought a single core 1ghz computer 3 years ago and it cost $1000, then today, because you could get a 2ghz quad-core for $1000, you are getting $8000 worth of value; so in the index, the cost of computers has dropped by 75% over the last couple years... despite the fact that the price hasn't really dropped... its not like that 1ghz 1core computer is sitting at walmart for $125, even if you wanted it.
Similiarly if this years model of your car has had standard side airbags, and an improved emissions control system and costs $1000 more, well again inflation is negative, even though the car costs more, becuase they factor in the new features as 'increasing its value more than its cost'; so in some warped bizarro world the cost of buying a new car is deemed to have gone down.
I'm pretty happy with my salary. I never really understood why people cared so much about money. It just sits there, piling up. What on earth would I do with more money?
I don't smoke, I don't drink. I don't own a car (gotta love europe), neither do I want or need one.
My monthly utility bills amount to 15% of my paycheck, and food perhaps another 15% - I eat lots of fruit and veggies, and enjoy cooking stuff from scratch. Processed food is harmful and expensive.
Most of my entertainment is found online. Building stuff in Second Life, IMing friends, reading web pages and playing the odd flash game. I also enjoy cycling on weekends, and getting together with my RL friends for a chat over a 60-cent cup of coffee.
I do not own any consoles, CDs, DVDs, and buy maybe 1 or 2 books a year.
I end up taking my girlfriend to the fanciest restaurants in town for lack of a better idea of what to do with my money.
I realize that some people are addicted to the status symbol treadmill, but I find that an exceedingly frivolous way of life, and I do not personally know anyone like that.
I guess engineers lean strongly towards Make rather than Buy. We keep ourselves entertained through things that other people would consider "zomg too much work".
Actually virtual all economists agree that the inflationary rate is overstated by around 1%.
The article you quoted says $1 in 1976 bought what $3.55 does today. If I divide my present salary by 3.55 and compare it to what I was making in 1976, I see a 7% increase. From all the people I've compared notes with, I don't think I'm far from the average pay, although my work has been far above average. Bear in mind, I'm considerably older than most of my coworkers and to stay employed in technical work, I've changed jobs and careers. Nonetheless, it's apparent that my wages have not outpaced inflation over the long run. Perhaps if I had been management material, I'd have made better money but I wanted to continue doing technical work.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I think BS articles like this that continue to use salary numbers from right before the tech bust are a large part of the dissatisfaction with salaries you see now for those of us who have joined the industry since then. I think the memory of the good old days when those numbers were a lot closer to reality is the killer for those who've been in the industry all that time. Personally my biggest consideration is HR deciding that the people I've managed while performing all of the same duties they do deserve more money than me for 3 years running. I haven't had a REAL raise[higher take home pay] in that entire time either. It gets frustrating to be in that sort of environment for 3 years. especially when I am afraid to leave because I feel like I have more job security because I know about how long it will be till they lay me off, not looking forward to picking between job offers trying to guess who will keep me on board the longest.
thats right, I rarely use capitals. deal with it. but don't mistake my laziness for stupidity
Hate to burst your bubble, but a few years ago the NSPCC in the UK published a report showing that 75% of all abuse of children in the UK is carried out by close relatives or close friends of the family. I'd be very surprised if the situation in other developed countries is much different. The vast majority of violence and murders of children are also carried out by family members and friends. The idea of crimes against children being mostly carried out by strangers is a myth - it is more rational to be worried about leaving your kids with family members or close friends than sending them off to daycare.
As for it being better for your kids in general, that's something that's definitively up for debate. It's pretty well accepted that kids in daycare tends to get better social skills from higher levels of interaction with other kids, for example.
I think you are on to something. The problem partially stems from IT being a very young component in business. Consider that Accounting has been around for hundreds of years... there is an established relationship between various types of businesses and accounting professionals. Yet IT has only been around for a few decades. I don't think businesses nor the profession itself knows how to deal with the problems of succession and management of talent.
The most "fun" work environment for the worker is one of unstructured cooperation where there are no rules. This is not the ideal since that freedom can potentially lead to disaster in the wrong coworker's hands. Eventually management will get paranoid about waste.
The most "profitable" work environment is where nothing goes to waste and every key stroke leads to profit. This is not the ideal since that efficiency means a loss of adaptability and a high burn out rate for employees. It turns out that the highly profitable environment can only exist in sprints.
There should be a sustainable happy medium that works well as a company grows. I don't know what that is yet. I haven't seen it in my work history.
[signature]
I answer only to this since I got to go in couple of minutes.
First of all, my english isn't so good so sorry if there was some rude or offending language :)
Second, I wasn't aware that childcare and family life is so different in USA (I assume that's where you live?). We have socially funded childcare system here in Finland. We pay something like 120 euros a month to local community and goverment pays the rest. We don't have nannies who come by to care the children or anything like that or at least it is not a custom. It is also not a custom to mothers get together with their children on dialy basis. It is considered almost rude. Something like every once a week is OK though :)
But my totally uneducated personal opinion on the matter from what I've seen is that kids who do not go to daycare tend to be not so socially skilled. But now when I come to think about it, those kids are at home with their mother almost 24/7 so they don't get much social contacts besides their mother and father. And if their parents are raised the same way I don't think they have very extensive social skills either.
And after all the yada-yada I don't and won't consider that taking my kid to daycare is a bad thing. I wasn't at daycare when I was a child and I had huge difficulties to learn social stuff at the later age. But now I'm almost "normal" though I don't like to meet strange people very often :) Hopefully my son come up better than I ...
You don't know what you don't know.
I've had several of those wonderful personalities. No, I'll take an asocial guru over an average people person anytime.
:-)
:-)
Get a decent guru interested in a project, and he'll deliver more, better and faster than a half dozen regulars. I've worked with enough regular programmers to know that you need at least one week of heavy testing by another team for any noteworthy development. I've also worked with barely a handful of really good guys, whose code I had no qualms about dumping straight into customer acceptance without thinking. Those very few held themselves to a similar standard as me: sufficient pride in your work that when you deliver something as finished, you take it personal if someone finds a bug.
If your projects are so big that you really NEED a big team, then it's up to the team leader to also be very good at his job, which is to interact with each of them. He should be the one making sure they keep motivated (which requires a high degree of empathy), divide the project into manageable chunks (which requires both decent tech knowledge and an ability to interact with project managers), and keep marketroids and similar as far away as possible from the guys doing the actual work (which, aside from buzzword-compliant communication skills, also requires a firm hand, a thick skin and occasionally a stick with nails). Yes, decent team managers are as hard to find as decent tech people. A demonstrated ability to herd cats is a good starting point
I'm sick and tired of non-tech people trying to tell tech people how they should behave to be fit for their jobs. HR should be kicked back to doing payroll & benefits. Shirts and ties are NOT required skills for a programmer or a sysadmin. If anything, they get in the way because they restrict bloodflow to the brain
A very interesting hiring procedure would be a roundtable with the majority of the prospective co-workers. You only get hired if you manage to impress more than half of them.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
F-you money is where you have enough to live the way you want to live without EVER having to go back to work. Until you reach that point, you still have a long road ahead. It's where you are financially independent enough that you can tell your employer "Fuck You". You might have "piles" of money right now but if you are smart, you are investing those dollars so you can reach F-you money as quickly as possible. After that, you can do whatever you want to do.
I used to be just like you. I'd look at my paycheck and wonder, "how the hell am I going to spend this?". But, from experience, as you get old into your 30's and 40's -- you quickly realize that, unless you are sitting on $2-$3mil US minimum, you are still going to have to go to work. Maybe you can delay it for 20 years and live off your savings in the meantime. But what happens when the money runs out? You'll have to work. You'll work not because you want to...but because you have to in order to pay the bills. And the bills get bigger as you go on. House, cars, kids, wives, new businesses, insurance, repairs, vacations, etc.
In America, this is one of the reasons you see people work so hard and put so much into it. They are all after the F-you money because they know, once they get it....everything else from that point on is optional (except death and paying taxes). And I am talking about normal people who work because they have to work. If you work (truly) because you enjoy it, then good for you. But you must realize you are in the vast minority.
Imagine having such a large "pile" that you could pay yourself $100K, $200K, $300K, or whatever per year -- just from the interest your pile generates. That's F-you money. And, no offense, but I doubt you are there yet.
Processed food is harmful and expensive.
Hm, interesting statement. Isn't pretty much all food processed in one way or another? (Iodine in salt, pasteurization of dairy products, vitamin C added, etc.) Most of these processes are in place specifically to make the food less harmful-- less likely you'll drink spoiled milk, less likely you'll suffer from iodine or vitamin C deficiency, etc.
Whether it's more expensive to buy iodized salt rather than non-iodized salt, I dunno. But saying processed foods are harmful strikes me as simply wrong.
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