Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
Well, that, and working for one of the few companies that can afford large pay increases. Ones level of skill really has very little to do with ones salary. I had a job working as a one-man IT dept making something like 30K/year. I wanted more money. My boss said 'you're not worth it', so I quit. Seven month later, after a string of weirdos and losers who would work for that salary, I was offered my job back for nearly double. Three years later I was at 66K/year. But I quit again for another job offering more. Now I am at about 80K/year. New skills needed to 'climb' in this way? Zero.
It was all timing, luck, and playing against the 'unkempt, slovenly IT' type in job interviews.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
What's paid overtime?
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
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
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?