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IT Salaries Edge Up Back To 2008 Levels
tsamsoniw writes "A soon-to-be released salary survey finds that the average salary for IT professionals in the U.S. is $78,299, putting overall compensation back at January 2008 levels. More heartening: Midsize and large companies are both aiming to hire more IT pros. The midsize are seeking IT executives (such as VPs of information services and technical services), as well as programmers, database specialists, systems analysts, and voice/wireless communication pros. Enterprises are moving IT and data center operations back in-house, which means greater demand for data center managers and supervisors."
The average is going up because all the lower end IT positions are over seas mostly now, at least that is my guess. I always found these 'average' salaries to be very misleading. Because I always seem to be making below the average.
Now I just wish that *my* salary would move back up to 2008 levels. To be fair, I was laid off in 2009 and needed to change specialties in order to find work. Fortunately, I have an immediate opportunity to move up, and may be able to get myself back where I was within a year.
Please let my boss know.
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
And my compensation package in 1999 was roughly $80,000/year. Things have improved how? Those numbers are still LESS than I made 13 years ago!
Wasn't it in 1984 that someone was told to say the government increased the chocolate ration to a lower number than previously?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Yeah, with two caveats.
1) That assumes you have a job. Lots of unemployed IT people and IT people working in other professions aren't counted.
2) A lot of these jobs are in high cost of living areas like New York City or Silicon Valley. When a 1BR apartment costs north of $2000/month, $80k/yr gross doesn't seem like so much.
Your boss isn't going to go out of his way to pay you more than he thinks he needs to in order to retain you. The only person who will always have your best interests at heart is you. YOU must ask your boss for a raise and present evidence that your market value has risen to justify it.
If he doesn't pay up, jump to a new job that will. Apparently, there are some openings now.
According to the inflation rate calculator I used, the consumer price index (one measure of inflation) has increased 5.08% from 2008 to 2011.
So, on average, IT pro's are effectively paid about 5% less than in 2008.
I've noted two trends in the job market lately: the jobs are paying a good deal more, but there are a lot fewer of them. It seems counter-intuitive because an oversupply of candidates would tend to drive wages down. However, what I see happening is companies almost *want* to pay top dollar...but only because they want absolutely stellar, walk-on-water, can-do-no-wrong, all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips candidates. I'm making *more* than I was during the dot com bubble. I'm also working my ass off managing projects that would've taken a team of people to do a few years ago. They're certainly getting their money's worth, but I have no room to complain because I'm making top dollar. And that's just how they want it: I have no incentive -- and no opportunity -- to jump ship for something better paying because I'm already way above the average wage, and a less stressful position would pay me so much less that it's not worth searching for.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Porn cam working out for you then?
i dont know what happened! we payed like 1000 guys top dollar to run society, and then all of a sudden these unwashed masses show up, screaming about 'food' and 'medicine' and 'water'. the fuck? maybe if we just payed them MORE, they would do a better job, and all the masses would shut up.
Arg.. Just pisses me off even more about the federal pay freeze. I'm a lead developer and project manager making $10k less than the average developer, who has no management responsibilities. It's getting harder and harder to justify staying in the public sector..
What did Canada do to screw up their economy?
The value of the basic unit of currency has little to do with economic strength. (If you doubt this, consider that a Mexican Peso is worth 7 times a Japanese Yen).
The Canadian dollar, and the Australian dollar, have a correlation to commodities. As commodity prices went up, so did the Canadian dollar.
That's not the only thing that affects the exchange rate, though. It's a supply/demand thing. Over the last 6 months, demand for the US dollar has jumped, because of the European crisis. So it isn't the Canadian dollar that has dropped so much as the US dollar that has risen.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you are a programmer in the San Francisco area, you can easily pull down $100,000 - $150,000. Cost of living is more expensive too, but you can still save a LOT of money if you are careful.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Exactly why this type of survey is so absurd.
Comparing a work from home sysadmin's salary with an enterprise architect's salary is like trying to get an average salary for lawyers (add one public defender to a credit default swap lawyer, divide by two.)
IT jobs cover a lot of space. $78K/year is just a silly summary statistic.
So, no families?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Salary surveys suffer from the worst of all maladies that surveys can suffer from. Everything from self-selection bias to mis-reporting. Face it: compared to other kinds of surveys, NOBODY reports their salary accurately. Even worse, many who have low salaries never even participate.
I'll believe it when it hits my own pocketbook.
But do heed the advice: get off your ass and change jobs every now and then. I changed jobs twice during the crisis. Good people are always in demand. If you want more than sub-inflation raises (or no raises at all), get off your butt and see if you can find something better. With luck, you will. If you don't try, you definitely won't. As simple as that.
could also factor those forced out of IT altogether since the massive downtown around 2002....imagine a government shooting half the poor people. then saying, yay average income just went up!
And you can make more outside of the San Francisco area (or, at least, I could - YMMV). Don't get me wrong. I loved living in the Bay area, but when I got the offer for more money (and a more interesting job) in a place where I could buy a house twice as big as my Fremont house (and for less money with a much shorter commute), I couldn't pass it up. I always thought that I'd gotten premium pay for working in the Bay area, and putting up with the high prices and long commutes, but it turned out not to be true.
Salaries going "back to 2008 levels" does not take into account the benefits that you have all lost. Every one of you is paying more for health care, higher deductibles, higher co-pays. Your employers don't contribute as much to your measly 401ks that won't be nearly enough to retire on anyway.
Don't get me wrong, it's good that there are signs of life in the economy, but we've got 2 percent growth and 4 percent continual federal stimulus. If the federal government should stop the stimulus, you're going to lose ground in a hurry. This isn't going to change in 2012 or 2013 or 2014 no matter who is elected. There are structural problems in the US economy, in the WORLD economy that aren't going to change and there really isn't any path to improvement as long as a relative handful of transnational corporate entities and bank holding companies continue to act as a self-appointed world government.
You are welcome on my lawn.
WHich is why trying to use the term "IT" for all of these different jobs is stupid. They're completely different categories with no meaningful relationship. Break it into two groups (programming/architects and network admin/system admin/help desk) and you at least break it into functional groups that do the same thing (although still only marginally useful, as help desk is usually paid so much less). But doing anything across both groups at once is pointless, it only serves to confuse people.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Not to mention practical inflation. If you take the cost of living into account, rather than using flat dollar numbers which don't change, you're still at a loss.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
IT jobs and pay seem to be booming in the Atlanta area and it seems to be a market where corporate jobs are paying as much as riskier consulting jobs. Folks with average to good skills are finding work easily and companies are loosening the purse strings on long delayed IT projects. Our small consulting firm of 75 has brought on 8 people in the past 6 weeks. This observation is based on what we see on the job boards and in the hiring process and what we hear colloquially from other firms.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Did I miss whether these are "real" (inflation adjusted) figures? It's the critical factor as the salary squeeze is coming from inflation reducing the value of money which has not been offset by salary increases.
The article also errs significantly by using inconsistent terms for almost every single figure. "average boost", "average total increase", "total pay", "salary increase", "earn more", "total average compensation", "total salary", "take home", "make". I suspect the author is trying to avoid being repetitive with words but all of these words either mean different things or are vague and could mean many things.
Sure, I'm an accountant and maybe most people are quite reasonably going to interpret as intended, but it shows the author does not have knowledge of what he is talking about. "Salary" means the top number on the payslip, "take home" means the bottom figure in your payslip that goes into the bank, while "compensation" is the top number plus all benefits and bonuses. The differences on the basis used can be substantial, especially when you're analysing small movements of around 5%, never mind the 0.81%. A 5% salary increase could easily be wiped out by cuts in non-salary compensation and is a cut in real terms if not adjusting for inflation.
The relevant consideration is remuneration or compensation, in real terms. These account appropriately for benefits in kind, deductions and bonuses. You can get away with ignoring that in normal times by assuming there isn't much movement, but in current times it's a widespread way to cut payroll costs without hurting the headline salary rate.
Even then, if your pension is a money purchase scheme we're only looking at pensions in terms of the employer contributions. You personally are very likely still much worse off due to the fall in the current value of your plan and the fall in it's expected growth rate. Usually this will be through no fault, action or inaction of your employer, but nevertheless you're losing out due to the economic conditions. Furthermore this should put upward pressure on salaries as workers seek to increase contributions while maintaining their take-home pay. Even if all else was equal except that salaries were increased to exactly offset increased contributions which were set at a level to exactly offset the pension plan decline, the figures would arguably be misinterpreted because while yes they would accurately show an increase in compensation offered by employer, there would be a nil change in compensation enjoyed by the employee. This matters when you start calling people "winners" when actually they just lost less than the others.
... than I did in 2008. I left a good, but boring job to go to a company that hired me to manage a big ERP project, then a week after I started they canceled the project and 7 months later I was laid-off. I was an idiot that let a weasel of a CIO completely fool me. It took me almost 5 months to find a new full-time gig and a 20% lower salary was the best I could find in Southern California.
Companies are using contractors and temps more than ever before, and because of the number of people still out looking for jobs, they are paying less for those resources than they have in many years. So, the placement firms are offering much less to the contractors - with absolutely zero insurance & benefits. From the perspective of your average CIO, he doesn't need to invest in his internal staff - he can just bring in contractors that he can swap in and out based on the specific tech skills he needs. When the project goes wrong (which it will when it is staffed by people who know nothing about your business) he can blame the contractors and the project manager.
Even the small internal IT staff that is kept for maintenance & local sysadmin duties is not immune - there is no reason to invest in their training and career path - you can just swap them out whenever you decide to change technologies. If you are replacing Goldmine with Salesforce.com, don't bother training your current staff (that has given you many years of excellent work) on Salesforce - just lay them off and hire people who already know Salesforce.com, then repeat & rinse in a few years when the next shiny new toy is released.
Bottom line: Now, more than ever before, IT employees are considered tech monkeys that can be swapped out and "traded-up" (a term used by my last weasel of a CIO) just like the HW & SW they work on. That might be OK for young, single IT geeks - but not for people who are trying to provide for their family. Get out now, while you can!
1. Employment levels are down, so you have to factor in all the IT workers who are either making $0, or delivering pizza. The article states that companies are continuing to replace full-time workers with contract or part-time hires.
2. Self-selection bias - those who make less are much less likely to report how much (or how little) they make;
3. Venue bias - this survey covers only mid-sized and large-sized companies -- whole swaths of people working in both smaller businesses (the majority of jobs in the economy) or the lower end of the industry are not included in these surveys, so they don't "drag the numbers down."
The first link - notice what they call an "IT JOB"? See the pretty picture on the left side - they consider selling cell phones as an "IT Job" because it's somehow it-related. They're pulling their numbers for future expectations out of their collective rectums, based on things like the number of job board postings, which is a negative, not positive, correlation, as I will explain below.
The second link quotes the same dice.com survey. And it adds one necessary data point - that the reason for the "shortage" is money. In fact, it's because companies now want to pay even less than they did when job cuts and salary cuts started a few years ago. Sure, there's a "shortage" if you want to pay half price for twice the experience.
The Dice one is the most bogus of the lot - the fact that there are more job postings on a job board in this case correlates negatively with the employment figures - especially when you consider that last month's government stats say that hiring in IT declined. When the population is increasing, even maintaining the same numbers over the years, when you throw in the new entrants, is actually a net loss due to basic economics 101 - more people competing for each job.
So employers downsize, and/or hire new people at lower wages - hence the increase in job board postings. Keep in mind, these are not jobs, just job postings - and a lot more of them are just duplicates than even a few years ago, as more recruiters post the same job offer. Whereas before you might have seen 3 recruiters post the same job, now you'll see 10. That's not an increase in underlying jobs - to the contrary, it reflects the weakness in the entire IT sector, because now recruiters simply cannot make $$ except by using the shotgun approach.
Do you really want to count two part-time Hell-desk workers getting hired and one full-time developer getting laid off as a net gain? Because that's what it's come down to, same as declining salaries and the continuing trend (noted in the original article) away from full-time hires to part-timers. The type of jobs you hire part-timers for is NOT the type of jobs that you need a full-time worker for - so devs are $crewed for the next 20 years.
Who 20 years? Because people continue to enter the industry, even while the higher jobs are disappearing.