Techie Pay Approaches All-time High

Stony Stevenson sent in this ITNews story which opens, "Techies were paid nearly record-high hourly wages in the third quarter, according to a new report released Thursday by staffing firm Yoh. Based on data compiled from 75 Yoh field offices and 5,000 technology professionals contracted in short and long-term projects, pay increased an average of more than 5.5 percent for the quarter ended Sept. 30, compared to the same period last year."

Comments

Well duh

[Reason58]

McDonald's workers were also paid more than any other time in history. If you are going to a study like this without adjusting for ever-present inflation, then of course you will constantly see new records.

Re:Well duh

[Fallen Kell]

Has the dollar inflated 5.5% in the last year? Sounds unlikely to me, but IANAEconomist.. or even informed..

No just 9.4% against the British Pound
13.2% against the Canadian Dollar
11.1% against the Euro

Need I go on? A 5.5% raise is still a 4-7% DECREASE in buying power verses the world economy.

Re:Well duh

[Anonymous Coward]

As your currency goes down, you are in fact more poor: Wealth, income and purchasing power are all lower on a globally defined basis. Your domestically defined purchasing power is indeed higher compared to other countries domestically defined purchasing power, but given the rather grotesque trade deficit you're carrying, net-net it means you're gonna pay more for stuff overall.

Granted, it also means that your assets (including labor) are cheaper on a global basis, and other countries will buy more of them when the bloodletting starts to end. But, you can't have it both ways. They will buy more of you and your stuff because, indeed, you are poorer.

Re:Well duh

[tyrione]

We have nearly a $1 Trillion trade deficit. We import more than we export. So yes, either our domestic goods aren't selling at advantageous prices/value or we indeed are seeing a Drop in Buying Power. The fact is, the cost of Goods and Services in the US for US only services exceeds the cost of living adjustment. With our trade deficit we aren't seeing inflation because most of the offset in corporations comes from the investments abroad these corporations have heavily invested within the past decade. Take a look at the 10-K of most Global Corporations that originate in the U.S. They've heavily invested OUTSIDE THE US.

Please Read: http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/JubaksJournal/OurBiggestExportInflation.aspx

Article Excerpt:

A pain in the wallet

That's how a falling currency is supposed to work. A cheaper dollar encourages exports and discourages imports, leading to a gradual climb in the value of the dollar. Ultimately, a high U.S. trade deficit hits you and me right in the wallet. Here's how:

• When the U.S. is running a big trade deficit, our trading partners wind up holding a larger number of U.S. dollars every month. A trade deficit means we're importing more goods and services than we export, and we wind up exporting dollars in order to pay for the excess goods.
• As those dollars build up overseas, governments, companies and individuals recycle them by buying U.S. bonds and stocks and other assets.
• This increases the exposure of these overseas owners of dollars to the risks of the U.S. currency and U.S. asset markets. If the value of the dollar declines, their dollar-denominated investments will lose value as well.
• At some point, these overseas owners of U.S. dollars start to demand higher returns -- higher interest rates on Treasury bonds, for example -- to offset that currency risk.
• Some may sell off a portion of their dollars, producing exactly the kind of fall in the currency that they had worried about in the first place, which leads again to a demand for higher returns.
• The higher interest rates demanded by overseas dollar holders finally start to slow economic growth in the U.S. That slowdown, plus the higher prices consumers have to pay for imported goods because of the weak dollar, takes a painful bite out of family incomes. (Or it halves or eliminates the family income, if one or both family breadwinners get laid off because of the slowdown.)

In other news...

[Tackhead]

From TFA:
> Compared to the same months in 2006, hourly wages for techies in 2007 rose 6 percent in July, 4.64 percent in August, and 5.79 percent in September.

Compared to the value of the US dollar against every major currency in 2006, hourly wages for US-based techies are still down 5-10% year over year.

Re:In other news...

[Bill Dog]

For that reason, yes, the falling US dollar is about to make a 2008 $75,000/year paycheck feel like a 1995 $26,000/year paycheck.

I made $28,000/year in 1995, and remember what it was like, and can assure you that unless your tastes and/or family has dramatically expanded with your salary, $75K currently affords a large amount of disposable income, and is nothing like the former circumstances.

Except in Broadcast Engineering...

[Newer Guy]

Pay there is DROPPING about 5% a year-both in actual pay and in the amount of responsibility for the same pay. As (clueless) broadcasting groups buy more stations, they expect the existing tech. staff to assume the burden of the extra work-with no more pay or assistance. The pay used to work out to about $15K per station. Then it dropped to 12K. Now it's at about $9K, which means that the average radio broadcast engineer makes about $60K for servicing 7 stations. This many stations means that all he's doing is running around putting out fires all the time.

I don't think they said USA wages

[walterbyrd]

They may mean USA, or maybe they mean wages in India?

The hottest skills sound about right. But, if you don't have 5 years recent experience already, you can forget about those area: SAP, Project Management, database administrators.

-shameless plug-
Please feel free to view my research on IT wages, collected in the Denver area, go here:

http://it-careers.pbwiki.com/

And click on "IT Salary Survey"

The Loonie is worth more than a US Dollar

[MichaelCrawford]

Thanks to the war in Iraq - it's being funded by selling Treasury bonds.

XE says the US dollar is worth about 96.6 Canadian cents.

Re:Too bad that doesn't keep up with inflation.

[OakLEE]

Just to address a few specific claims.

Housing: Housing prices are not increasing? Did you see the losses all of the banks took this quarter? It's because of all of the people who defaulted on mortgages they could not afford to pay. Those people cannot afford to pay because they have no equity in their homes to refinance. They have no equity in their homes because property values have declined by as much as 15% in the last year in some parts of the country. Those houses they walked away from; they are now being repossessed and sold further depressing the housing market. This isn't inflationary at all. It's text book deflationary pressure, and based on the losses some these banks are taking I predict its going to result in a net decrease of at least $40-70 billion in the money supply of this country. This is only going to show in the form of these people decreasing their spending since they won't have that home equity line of credit to draw from.

Fuel: Sure oil is hitting $90 a barrel, but that's still below the inflation-adjusted all-time high of $100 that we saw in late 1970s. Source. And most of this recent spike is due to overblown concerns over Iran and speculators (i.e., people who are just buying oil because they think it is going up in price, not people who actually use it) who are going to start dumping oil in the next few months. I bet you oil is closer to $70 in January than it is to $100. (And as an aside, as someone who wants to encourage renewable energy, I want $100 oil because at this point solar, biodiesel, ethanol, geothermal, and a whole bunch of other alternative energy sources become economically profitable. That'll never happen until oil is legitimately scare though because OPEC will act to keep longterm prices below this point to avoid letting the genie out of the bottle. Source.

Health Care and Education: There are legitimate concerns with respect to inflation in these two areas as their cost increases are far and a way outstripping regular inflation.

Re:The new tech economy

[pla]

our only real skills are memorization, problem domain reduction, patience, discipline, and critical thought

I would agree with that completely. Anyone who focuses on specific skills such as language-X or web-platform-Y just doesn't "get" it.

However, at least two of those "skills", critical thought and problem domain reduction (I like that term - Your own phrasing, or the newest buzzword for the same ol' idea?), not everyone has the capacity to learn.

Not a matter of dedication or intelligence, I've known plenty of dedicated, intelligent people who simply can't grasp the idea that my job consists of nothing more than reducing big, seemingly-intractable problems down to a set of small, easily-solved ones (much less do the same). No amount of education (or at least, no amount of time in our current education system) can remedy that.



Once I come to that conclusion, I can't help but wonder if I even want to be so rare.

Agreed completely... It often disturbs me how little critical thought most people put into everyday tasks. Even the absolutely basic "does this make sense in its own context" slips past unasked.

People fight over politics, without noticing that the elephants and asses do the same exact things. People fight over imaginary lines on a map. People fight over which fictional group of "warriors" will win at the stadium this week, as though it matters in some way. People beg the government to save them from a 0.001% chance of death at the hand of flashy "bad people", while daily facing almost the exact same risk of death or serious injury merely getting in their car and driving to work.

We, as a species, have problems.