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IT Security Salaries Expected To Rise In 2011
wiredmikey writes "IT security professionals in the United States can expect starting salaries to increase in 2011, according to a new salary report released today. The guide suggests larger increases in base compensation expected in high-demand segments including information security related positions. According to the report, companies are hiring security professionals to help foil fraud, prevent network breaches and comply with new regulations, to keep confidential information safe and secure."
Time to raise my rates! I'm sure my clients are going to be thrilled, but if they took my advice about security they'd only pay for my advice and not pay me repeatedly to delouse their PC's.
bodes well for the article's accuracy that its based upon actual placements rather than a "salary survey." Here's to a slightly higher salary in '11! *clinks rum & coke glass with the slashdotter next to him*
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
I got a raise a month ago for the first time in two years since I started this Security job and not a token raise either. There is demand there for Security officers from Security Admin jobs to Pen testing jobs and everything inbetween
There is no -1 disagree
And that is why we require degrees around here for all but the sharpest tacks. Too many know-nothing test takes. If you do not know how it really works you probably can't figure it out when it breaks.
"Industries forecasting particularly strong demand for IT professionals in 2011 include business services, transportation and healthcare."
"There is a strong need for IT professionals in healthcare in particular. We've seen a strong demand for IT professionals, from developers to help desk, to assist with the conversion to electronic medical records," Reed noted."
Pfft. Only corporations will steal medical information, through regulation. And breaches will still be whole databases left in a taxi on a laptop. Transportation? Business services? Keeping safe the growing gambling gold, posted just below, is a more likely source of a spike in salary dollars.
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
Rum and coke? With that higher salary, I would expect some single malt scotch...
Palm trees and 8
Nope, note I said we exclude the sharpest tacks. It just happens to be the normal way for folks who actually know how spanning tree works, or where broadcast domains should be split or how to script their way out of wet paper bag. Sure the test takers can tell you the vendor approved method, but they sure as hell can't tell you what other methods might be better or why the vendors docs are wrong.
Actually, one of the most amusing security breaches in history was when a General left his laptop with Top Secret info on it in a taxi.
I'm farming Cataclysm. They pay in Yuan for archeological items.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
/me searches for his bottle of Caol Ila
/me realizes he hasn't bought it yet because HIS share of the higher salaries hasn't come through yet
/me frowns in consternation and turns to his bottle of Jack in the meantime
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
I went to a technical school for my Comp Sci training. The bulk of the courses was what you'd expect (databases, programming basics, languages etc..) but there were 3 mandatory courses on "business" or "communications". This included things like how to write your resume, a simulation of a project manager dealing with consultants, how to write a proposal, actually communicating with people etc... Also, the final project of our last semester had people in groups developing a new application for a client from scratch - most schools have a co-op program in place like that
So if you learned everything in your mother's basement and I learned it at school, maybe we have the same qualifications for a job. But they're going to hire me because there's a better chance that my writing and communication skills are superior. You don't learn how to deal with people by teaching yourself to code and your writing skills probably need some work (ever wonder why English 101 is required for your university degree?)
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
There may be 9-10% people who already have a degree looking for the same job you are. You picked a lousy time to graduate. Go back in for a masters, you can get four more years of beer drinking and racking up the loans.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
I hate farmville to...
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Now if there were any actual IT security jobs around...
Yeah, there's also an increase in demand for physical security, more funding for anti-terror tools/research, etc. The western world is currently more scared of nothing than it's been for decades, and IT security "experts" are the latest in a line of technically mediocre conjurers who manage to charge a lot to turn people from feeling scared to feeling slightly less scared while achieving absolutely nothing.
You know who you are.
And why is it at the bottom of a list that otherwise includes IT professions that I can recognize?
I hate farmville to...
FrontierVille is Zyngastic!
Don't hate the player, hate the cow-clicking game. Now excuse me while I click on these dragons.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
But they're going to hire me because there's a better chance that my writing and communication skills are superior. You don't learn how to deal with people by teaching yourself to code and your writing skills probably need some work (ever wonder why English 101 is required for your university degree?)
Don't delude yourself... They will probably hire you because:
- The CVs will be filtered by a non-technical HR employee who will blindly search for buzz words and academic qualifications.
- Then those filtered CVs will be reviewed by someone who don't want the hassle of trying to find a "hidden gem", so that person will pick the safer options (academic qualifications and formal experience with the exact very technologies they want you to work with) for interview.
Quick! Increase the H1B quota!
Only half serious on that one, folks: you know they're going to push for it. It doesn't matter if they think they can get someone for 10%-20% than they could've 2 years ago if they can get someone for 30%+ less on account of statistics.
I'd not be surprised if this statistic is somehow funded by industry groups which want the IT wage to go down further.
I suspect part of the reason why there may be increased demand is healthcare. There are huge demands on healthcare IT right now on account of the spending the government is requiring to get hospitals (particularly rural healthcare) 'compliant'. If they're not compliant, they won't get any compensation for procedures, so spending $1-5 million on some updated EMR package seems "reasonable". Even for a 20 bed hospital.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Asking Robert Half if IT salaries are going to go up, is like asking a Century 21 agent if it's a good time to buy a house. The answer is a forgone, agenda driven, conclusion.
These sorts of surveys are always meaningless. Did anybody predict the massive layoffs of IT workers in 2009? How about the total collapse in 2000/2001? Do we ever seen any sorts of warnings about massive offshoring, and/or inshoring, from these industry puff pieces?
The industry propaganda is unwaveringly optimistic of the future for IT workers. But, reality often tells a very different story.
Well, I would say you learn basic IT principles, or how things work, in the first year or year and a half of a university degree. After that, you go into specialization and schools have a tendency to lag behind compared to the industry because things move fast and teachers just aren't available for a technology that is only a few years old. I found that my first years in university were the most interesting ones. After that I started to learn cutting edge stuff by myself because no teachers were available to teach it.
So, you are both right, the actual truth resides in the middle of your respective points.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
So, was it a good thing I just recently got my Security+ certification after all? I trust it was not a waste of my time?
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Is there someone I get to punch when this ends up not happening for the 5th year in a row?
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Maybe for IT workers overall but not right now as far as security talent. Not enough talent right now for people with information security skills.
I love the phoney American optimism that the economy will soon "turn around."
Guess what, guys? This was the recovery!
Both true, and nontrue. Yeah, universities aren't teaching the newest-and-hottest in Programming 101. But nor do they need to.
Thing is, the fundamental concepts do NOT move quickly. Not at all. To the contrary, if I had a dime for every Ruby on Rails app I've seen that, for example, essentially re-implements the filesystem - poorly - I could probably afford a bigmac by now.
They tend to repeat ALL the mistakes too. Some examples ? If you're organizing stuff in a tree-structure, what do you do about stuff that logically belong 2 or more places ? Do you reinvent windows "shortcuts" (which don't work well), or do you engineer your basic structure to allow an object to have more than one place in the tree (i.e. the unix-way). If the latter, do you allow hardlinking to directories, and if yes, how many of the 17 problems that causes, does your app have ? What about locking of resources ? What about permissions ? Deadlocks ? Cache coherency ?
Thing is, problems tend to show up again, at different levels. Several of the problems I've mentioned above go deeper, in some cases down to the hardware-level. (SMP-systems with separate cache for each core, needs to deal with cache-coherency) then it gets repeated at each layer. The OS needs to deal with cache-coherency. As do various systems for speeding up high-level scripting-languages, say the Zend-Optimizer for php. And lastly, you'll discover, the very same concepts are useful, indeed required, if you're (for example) caching objects in memcached way up in the stratosphere of a webservice.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
If you think modern web-apps, have nothing to learn from the time-sharing systems of yesteryear, you'll end up solving the same problems they solved back then, the painful way: by repeating the same mistakes.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...