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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.
What was the inflation rate last year? Zero? Slightly negative? As long as your wages increase faster than inflation, then your purchasing power is going up. And .7% is better than the 0% raise I got.
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.
My sister has been a nurse for many years. I once suggested to her that more men would be willing to work as nurses if they just changed the named. The name "nurse" (also a synonym for breast feeding) is clearly emasculating. There are plenty of men in every other of health care. My sister actually agreed.
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
I love this survey. I write software; it's what my degree is in, and it's what I do.
I can choose "Software developer", "Software engineer", or "Programmer/analyst". I like engineer. It sounds fancy; that's what the concentration was in school.
Salary went up in my region by 6.3% -- that's better than I've seen in 3 years. But what if I choose developer. That's what I call myself on my resume. My salary went down 1%.
That's why this survey is laughable. And they use average. Everyone else in the statistics community switched to median years ago. Where's your sample size per category? And seriously, 10 years experience as the first hurdle? No standard deviation either?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
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
brb, blocking that piece of crap misinformed survey site from our HR/CxOs. According to them, my salary is right on track.
The report there lumped where I am now (Alaska) with the job hell I just left (Oregon/Washington). I'm looking at an 18% raise for next year and I still get almost three months off.
I moved up here and had three offers within a month of getting here and had one of the places I turn down call me back and offer 5% more.
I figure by 2011 I'll be able to get another 20-25% in salary.
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.
Firstly, IT workers != computer programmers. In there are support staff, data entry people, helpdesk, admins and so on. For some of those, the writing is without doubt on the wall and your pay/conditions per work unit is going to carry on dropping. For others, the annual pay rises may have slowed but the trend is accelerating. What else would you expect from a still infant industry heading into its teenage years?
:(
If I were a betting man, I would say that anything which isn't tied to locality and is not specialist/niche in nature is doomed to become as crappy as any normal job. Locality is real important because boilerplate services which are not niche such as auto maintenance are highly localised to the customer, and hence a mechanic or plumber in a rich neighbourhood will tend to earn loads for identical work done elsewhere. Compare auto maintenance costs between Berlin and Addis Ababa for example.
As my daddy said to me many, many years ago, the secret to high earnings and excellent work conditions in the free market is to be perceived by those with money as being able to do something valuable which is perceived as hard to find elsewhere. I know a guy who fits spiral staircases - he's good at it, but his talents are hardly unique. Yet Elton John had him fit a spiral staircase in one of his houses a few years ago, then the other celebs saw it and suddenly he's putting in spiral staircases all over the world and charging six or seven times the normal cost. In the end, it is cheaper to pay seven times the odds and avoiding finding your own worker when your opportunity cost per hour is like US$500!
The second thing my daddy said to me is to leave the free market when you start thinking of having children. The free market will throw you away if you get sick or you lose your reputation which someone influential can easily cause. He suggested a highly unionised public sector job where if you feel a bit peaky you can just go on sick leave for twenty years. Personally, I wish there were some middle ground between excellence being rewarded and the dead but safe hand of guarantee, but we as a society are still too torn between the old Babylon myth even after all these millenia later
I would also say that from my personal perspective as a specialist IT consultant, work is still paying US$750-1000/day upwards but the recession means that there is simply a lot less of such work, so much so that you have to find other sources of income which are usually totally unrelated to IT as so to prevent reputation damage. However in my subjective opinion there is certainly no pressure to reduce payments for high quality specialist work, if anything in some fields the rate is actually rising as more skilled professionals quit permie jobs for their own IT consultancy business. At the top end things keep on getting better, and at the bottom they keep on getting worse. Just like the wage gap in all Western countries since the 1980s!
Cheers,
Niall
Wow, seriously? Do you know anything about nursing?
If you're female there is no reason to go into IT... nursing pays better, comes with better benefits, better hours, way less stress, no bullying from male coworkers, no worries about your job going offshore to Inida, more respect from the general community, just a better future period.
There are plenty of reasons to not go into IT. Nursing pays worse (IT 5 years experience = 50k; nursing 15 years experience = 50k), the hours are usually worse (no such thing as 9-5s or holidays, and everyone is "on call" almost all the time), constant bitchiness and "office politics" cattiness (if you want to hear someone lie about someone else, listen to an orderly...), and (very likely) increased hours + shifts with decreased pay in the very near future (on account of the increased burden that will be put on healthcare due to recent legislation).
Nurses get no respect, either. Orderlies get more, from what I've observed. It's a similar situation to IT (not programming, IT), where you're in the position to have responsibility but often have no ability to do anything about it. Doctors treat nurses like shit, typically. Administrators are similar to IT management: they haven't a clue what's going on but damn it, they're going to tell you what to do. Except with nursing (unlike computing) the balance of life (or health) and death often hangs in the balance, and stupid mistakes made by others often do directly fall on your shoulders.
In fact males should also go into nursing, but constantly being made fun of (such as being called Gaylord Focker) might be too much to take for most men.
No, the biggest problem would be having a predatory and/or inherrently bitchy (female, not that it matters) jerking you around for stupid political reasons.
There's a good reason why nurses have the highest percentage of illicit drug use in the country by career. Their jobs suck. I'd rather go into law enforcement.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Really, what is this IT sector. Does it include EA? Id? IBM? The guy who fixes the printer? The help desk retard who tells you to reboot?
If you read some slashdot posts, you might almost think that programmers do not belong in IT at all. Or at best are a minor influence.
So, whose job is going down the drain?
I can only speak from my own experience in Holland (un-employment rate 3.9%, that is socialism for you, suck it yanks) and yes, some people are loosing their jobs and finding it hard to find new ones. But having done my fair share of interviews, I am not entirely sure these people belong in the industry anyway.
Come on, what developer can't answer the question of what a join is? What debug tools do you use?
I got jobs from intern to senior but I expect you to be worth your salary. Don't come to me demanding a senior salary if you fail questions I knew when I was a junior. And no, I don't care if you don't know every function or the correct order of parameters. I want to know you understand the concepts behind the tools you use and that you know how to test that what you build works works as it should and how to start tracing problems.
Is that to much to ask? Well, yes, for a lot of people it seems to be.
So I am not surprised with current situation in the US. We had this before, in a recesion the dead wood is sorted out and salaries for the barely adequate settle down. The rest, the few who actually are any good at their job do fine. My own salary has been steadily rising. Not because I am a genius, far from it, but because I am an above average coder. And yes, that does mean that I am on occasion dealing with outsourced work, testing it and fixing it. Can't blaim them. It is not that we don't want to hire western developers, but there just aren't any. Not good ones.
Please tell me that expecting a medior web developer to know what a join is, is not to much to ask.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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?
Maybe you are not as fast on the subject as you thought you were. Or the project takes longer then 20 hours a week because of X,Y, or Z.
I was honest about what I could do; they were not honest in how well this project had been documented in the past. And the price they are paying is $25/hr LESS than what I was paid for similar work in 1999 in the same city; they're just trying to cut corners.
And yes, I will not be making the same mistake in negotiating again. I will insist on seeing *ALL* project documentation up front AND a full code review with former developers before agreeing to take on the work of an entire software team alone for part-time pay.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
'Computer professionals' are exempt from FLSA at certain salary levels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act http://www.dol.gov/whd/flsa/index.htm
meep
I had one guy I worked with in the early 90's go around the office and ask everyone what they made when they first hired in and the year. Most were proud of how little they got '20 years ago when I started here'.
Then he'd ask them if the number on his spreadsheet was close to what they made today. Jaws would drop - it was always so close. It was funny but instructive. The company (most large corps are this way) would give existing employees a standard 'performance variable' increase, more standard than performance based. Meanwhile the outside world was seeing real wage inflation. So to get new hires out of college it would cost 15% more than a five-year experienced current employee.
Between that and seeing all the 52-year olds getting early retirement 'packages' - I knew then not to try keeping the 30 year career with one company route. So I took the path of more adventure and changed jobs every five years (two as noted in the prior post seems a bit too short).
The key though is to keep your expenses low early on - so you can have a cushion and an FU account built up.
I'll give my little anecdote. My wife went to the hospital on my son's due-date. The wanted to do an NST (No-Stress Test) to make sure the baby was fine and perform a quick ultrasound to make sure fluid levels in the uterus were ok.
The NST consisted of a nurse strapping a heartbeat monitor and contraction sensor or something like that to her belly. They came back in after 30 minutes, looked at the charts and said we were ok. Walked to the ultrasound room, guy does a 20 minute ultrasound and says all is well and we could go home. We were there for an hour tops.
The bill? $1600!!!!! $700 of that was the NST. THEY LITERALLY JUST PUT TWO SENSORS ON HER STOMACH AND QUICKLY GLANCED AT THE RESULTS!!! Insurance covered all but $170 of it, but damn! People don't pay attention to the true costs of these silly little procedures. I'd love to see the price breakdown of those two procedures.