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2010 Salary Survey Highlights IT Woes
CWmike writes "Trapped between flat salaries and ever-increasing workloads, IT professionals are about to explode. That's the top takeaway from Computerworld's 2010 survey of nearly 5,000 IT workers. 'Bonuses and benefits are way down, and workloads and work hours have increased. Meanwhile, salaries are stagnant (rising just a microscopic 0.7% on average), and — not surprisingly — satisfaction is on the wane.' Another finding of note is the shrinking female IT workforce. Have a look-see at how IT fared in your neck of the woods with this smart look-up tool."
career experts say you have to take a strategic approach to your job search and application process. The best candidates are always taking steps to manage their careers...
I fully agree. If you sit passively and wait for your next raise, you may be waiting for a while... But if you are proactive, good things eventually happen to you. Contribute to an open-source project. Become the co-founder of a cool iPad app or whatever cool idea people are trading nowdays...
It doesn't pay off instantly, but a year or two later, your resume stands out from the crowd, and more importantly, you may not even need a resume anymore to get a great job!
Maybe they are going into a better paying industry.
http://newsone.com/nation/news-one-staff/more-women-considering-stripping-in-struggling-economy/
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Really?
What jobs are you talking about?
Most of the jobs that actually pay a salary don't give a rat's ass about any F/OSS projects you've worked on. Recruiters want to know what your paid experience was. If you're applying for your typical corporate IT department (read a MS shop), no one really gives a shit. They want their laundry list of skills and at least 2-3 years experience with each.
I would be astounded if someone post a job description that says FOSS experience a plus.
This is exactly what happens when you have non-technical accountants and marketers making technology-related decisions. Look at the executives for nearly any American company. You'll find the number of technical people at or near the top is virtually none.
Accountants are concerned with one thing: the next quarter's numbers. Software and IT infrastructure, on the other hand, often takes longer than that to properly implement and to see their benefits. So these accountants ignore IT, and often do what they can to deny funding, especially if it won't result in a near-immediate balance sheet gains.
In the past, when America still had some manufacturing base, engineers often had a prominent place within the leadership of most companies. They could think beyond the next quarter's financial results, and saw how technology could make their companies more efficient in the long run. Unfortunately, these people have retired or been forced out.
America now generates its "wealth" not through the creation of tangible goods and improving productivity at existing enterprises, but rather by creating and selling a variety of bullshit financial instruments. Things won't improve until technical folks are making the calls, rather than accountants and marketers.
On the other hand, after a year without a job, I decided to just take whatever was offered (i.e. $30,000 below my former salary). In 2011 I'll look for something better but for now, having a job is better than not having a job.
I'm also working lots of paid overtime to make-up some of the loss.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
As long as your wages increase faster than inflation, then your purchasing power is going up.
Not quite. While your salary might beat out the rate of inflation, other things need to be considered. For example, I was notified my rent is going up starting next month by 9.8%. The actual amount happens to coincide with the exact amount of my monthly pay increase. In other words, I'm treading water because my pay increase will now go towards my rent increase.
On top of this, mother nature decided to force my decision on replacing my 12-year old car, I'm taking classes to (hopefully) get out of this urine-soaked hell hole (thank you Krusty) which are costing me over $1,400 per class and whose prices are also going up in the coming semester and my electric rate just rose by 30%.
So, while my pay increase was higher than inflation, it is completely overwhelmed by everything else that is going on.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Not really...
If your pay goes at the same rate as inflation it means your value in the company even after an other year of experience hasn't increased. Normally you should expect a 10% increase in your pay per year until you reach 15 years of experience then it will slope down as your years experience is having a slower rate of return.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
My pay nearly doubled in 2010. Maybe it has something to do with me working on my skills portfolio for over a decade and pent up demand for those skills.
One thing for sure - if you want to make more money, you need to ALWAYS be thinking on what skills you could acquire to achieve that goal. Any retard can poorly code up a web page - why would anyone pay a pretty penny for that?
Another life's lesson - if you want to grow, you need to move. Don't sit on your ass in the same job for a decade. Change teams, companies, industries, roles. If you don't do this, the best you can hope for is a 5% merit raise, and that's in a fat year.
>>>it is undeniable that healthcare is the wave of the future in the United States
Except that the U.S. government is paying LESS than actual cost of procedures, so many doctors are quitting the profession due to increasing losses. You're better off to stay in a profession that doesn't have top-down price fixing (i.e. commercial, engineering or programming).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The nursing crisis isn't going to change because people going into nursing misunderstand where the need is. The whole reason the nursing crisis exists is because we have a bunch of aging baby boomers who need someone to take care of them when they get old and decrepit. A whole ton of people have heard about the nursing crisis and decided to go back to school for nursing. The problem is, most of them are going into Labor and Delivery nursing, which is not where the need is. Nobody wants a career cleaning up incontinent old people, they want to take care of cute babies. So, I predict you're going to have a bunch of disgruntled nursing graduates complaining that they can't find work while nursing homes and other providers of geriatric care complain they can't find enough qualified nurses.
If you want to be guaranteed a job for the next 30 years or so, go into geriatric nursing. Unfortunately, you'll be spending the next 30 years changing diapers for 90 year olds, but at least you'll always have steady work. Depending on whose IT department you work for, this may or may not be an improvement over your current situation.
What's paid overtime?
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
As someone with several family members in nursing, one of whom does research on the factors that are driving nurses to leave the profession, I wanted to correct some of the misconceptions in your comment. First, there's still bullying in nursing, sometimes from patients, sometimes from management, sometimes from co-workers; second, there's plenty of stress, since most hospitals assign enormous patient loads to their nurses to cope with the nursing shortage or to keep costs down; and third, there are definitely long hours, with shifts that can last twelve hours or more. Don't think the shortage will necessarily improve pay or benefits, either, which are currently on par with salaries in IT. Nursing jobs don't go to India, but hospitals fill the gap by importing nurses from overseas.
I have. However, all my "raises" came from changing jobs. It's simple: if you want more money, you need to find another job. Employers these days NEVER give out pay raises, unless they're a pittance. However, in their utter stupidity, they're more than happy to give new hires much more money than the people who've been working there for many years. My advice is to stay in a job for about 2 years, and then go looking for a new one. You should be able to get a 10-20% increase.
Watch as some trolls try to refute my comment. Of course, if job-hopping were such a bad thing in the eyes of employers, they wouldn't be hiring, now would they?