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If Tech Is So Important, Why Are IT Wages Flat?
dcblogs writes "Despite the fact that technology plays an increasingly important role in the economy, IT wages remain persistently flat. This may be tech's inconvenient truth. In 2000, the average hourly wage was $37.27 in computer and math occupations for workers with at least a bachelor's degree. In 2011, it was $39.24, adjusted for inflation, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute. That translates to an average wage increase of less than a half percent a year. In real terms, IT wages overall have gone up by $1.97 an hour in just over 10 years, according to the EPI. Data from professional staffing firm Yoh shows wages in decline. In its latest measure for week 12 of 2012, the hourly wages were $31.45 and in 2010, for the same week, at $31.78. The worker who earned $31.78 in 2010 would need to make $33.71 today to stay even with inflation. Wages vary by skill and this data is broad. The unemployment rate for tech has been in the 3-4% range, but EPI says full employment has been historically around 2%."
If you're a competent programmer and live in the SF Bay Area, wages are definitely not flat, to the point of absurdity. There are kids just coming out of college making $80k or more as a starting salary, and quickly rising up to $120k+ within only a few years of experience.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
too afraid to ask for the raise, or to leave when they tell you no
flat is rising.
Does anyone have numbers on demand vs IT workforce size over the last couple decades?
Because the economy sucks. Real wages are down, and it's not going to get better any time soon.
I thought IT wages where higher than most professions to begin with and now have adjusted (downward) to reflect its more realistic value. Also factor in capitalism trying to cut work costs to increase profits.
..so I'll just quickly say, my job sucks!
Because IT stuff is easy. I mean, you just type some things and click a few buttons, right? That's not hard. Why do you need 100k a year to do that?
Long signatures suck.
... why do they earn so little? Nobody wants dirty toilets.
Income growth has been shifting since the late 1990s from middle class to upper-middle and wealthy class.
In fact in many sectors, incomes have been shrinking for those in lower management and below. Meanwhile, incomes of upper management (i.e. CEOs, University administrative staff) - basically people who really don't work or anything productive - have been sky rocketing.
IT is very important... but as a CEO I don't want to pay a lot for it.
Engineers are the dumbest smart people in the world.
How does this compare with other employment sectors? Adjusted for inflation, real median household income in the United States went down between 1990 and 2010.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
and you guys in US (and EU) are way overpaid in the global scale.
Get rid of the guest workers and offshore pressure, then wages can rise.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The median household income in the US is $52,000 USA Quick Facts
Most middle or working class occupations are suffering from *declining* pay. Holding steady is good these days. And think of all the people who were making $50K or $75K a few years ago and are now working for $10/hour or less.
Here, I'll help:
1... 2.... 3... 4... 5... 6...
Count your blessings! :)
It's the economy, stupid.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Management is attempting to commoditise the IT workform however this relates to a fundamental misunderstanding of what IT is meant to do. IT is meant to either replace or augment people. Paying peanuts to commoditise your workforce and using BA to provide the insight is an attempt to apply Taylors principles to this problem. However it doesn't work in practice. Business needs to employ evolutionary models of software and system design and employ capable practictioners.
Rule 1 If you can innovate
Rule 2 If you can copy the most successful innovators.
Rule 3 Don't pay for software unless you absolutely have to.
Look at what google, facebook etc are doing and contrast this to your environment. If you're a MS shop, your doing it wrong because the software is not free. You're paying an overhead that you don't have to and licencing constrains your growth.
Because IT is the new mcjob.
Every kid has a computer degree now. And you are completely replaceable by one. (or so HR says)
Smart companies know better... but how many of THOSE are there... lol
Man I wish I made that much. I make $10.71 hr doing It help desk.
Much more workers, a financial crisis, and the fact that less of the profits reaches the workforce.
Some large companies are paying very low contracting rates. I've seen rates as low as $37/hr presented to me for jobs that require 10-15 yrs experience.
Never take such a low paying rate. You hurt yourself, you hurt the industry. Smaller firms are offering $60-$70/hr contracting rates for the same types of positions and 100-140K for perm salaries. Those jobs are out there, I just secured another one after a 4 year contract and a bit of a break.
Put a price on yourself. Be excellent.
Competition brings prices down. It's not just the salary that's stagnant, the price your company charges it's clients for your work is stagnant too. I personally haven't seen a raise since 2009.
Project are mainly given to the cheapest company who can deliver, quality rarely plays a role. Company that delivers faster/better quality ends up competing with a similar company delivering just as fast and with same quality, and at that tier, price has been stagnant for quite a while.
Whatever IT budgets departments have, they go to never ending upgrades and M$ license increases.
Send Thank You note to Redmond.
My company prides itself on being "competitive" - which I take to mean they don't pay any more than they have to. The economy is in the tank, so they pay less (or lower raises) - you know, to be "competitive". After all, where else are employees going to go in this job market?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Because of capitalism. Those who do the real important work never get what they are actually worth, as it would cut into the profits made by executives and investors. The labor market cannot ensure that people get paid what they're worth--by which I mean the value they produce--because there's almost always someone willing to do it for less. We under cut each other fighting for scraps, and those at the top keep the bulk of what we produce. This is how capitalism works.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I am surprised that it has take the world so long to realise that IT salaries are overpriced. Because the hardware used to be so rare and expensive the people who used it and looked after it were also rare and expensive.Now that the hardware is cheap as chips, and the labor market is approaching truly global is it a big surprise that salaries are flat?
If a bad patch breaks my two year old $500 company laptop or a $200 tablet I am not going to pay somebody to fix it. I replace it and move my data over. There was a time when PCs cost thousands, and servers cost tens of thousands. People won't pay people $100/hr to fix a $200 devices.
I also imagine that it is a heck of a lot cheaper to engage off-shore programmers than using local resources (you can't do that for a truck driver...) - supply and demand in a free market in action.
Information Technology is more important *because* it's cheaper. If IT salaries kept going up, it would be *less* important.
When automobiles were new and wonderful, every rich guy had a well-paid mechanic. Competent mechanics are hardly starving today, but I doubt the wage rate is going up precipitously. And IT guys are hardly starving either. In both cases, they reap the penalties of success: the IT and automobiles get better -- easier to use, require less maintenance -- aka, cheaper. Welcome to the future. If this process wasn't an ongoing one for the human race, we'd get up in the morning and hunt for grubs.
IT is not being picked on, in particular.
Only the rich are getting richer.
Click that link to see
1) Corporate profit margins just hit an all-time high.
2) Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low.
This is common across all sectors and all skill levels.
The corporations have set things up so that the owners and managers capture all of the profit and any productivity gains. They have also bought enough politicians to keep their tax rates low so they don't have to contribute to the "general welfare". Corporate profits and upper management incomes are at record levels.
The situation with tech wages is the same as that with WalMart employees. You are expendable and replaceable and if you make trouble you will be fired so just sit down and shut up and get to work. At least tech wages are above poverty level so they don't have to go on Medicaid and food stamps to survive... be thankful for small favors.
The last time things were this far out of kilter was the 1930s and that gave rise to the union movement (as well as socialists and communists). This time, people seem more complacent and are just happy to have small crumbs.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
NEBS-compliant enterprise- or telco-grade systems still cost tens of thousands of dollars and people definitely pay people good money to work on them.
The company I work for is on-shoring work after figuring out that off-shoring it dropped the quality substantially.
If you'd clean monkey cages for $40 an hour, why aren't you working as a plumber for $120 an hour?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility
It's a free market, kiddos. You want higher wages... form a union and then sit back and wait while your job is offshored to non-unionized third world types. LOL. Suckers.
Writing code is the easy part, and worth $10/hr.
Repeatedly delivering,maintaining, and improving functioning, productive applications/tools/utilities to users and customers is the hard part, and worth the extra $30 or more.
ie the business of tech is a lot more difficult than script kiddie weekend foo in your jammies.
Important != Valuable
The cleaning crew is important. Long haul truckers are important. Neither are high paying jobs.
Every occupation thinks theirs is the most important, and deserving of higher pay. IT is no different.
This study focuses on "tech" positions (a very broad description) that require a Bachelor's degree. Here's what I'm left wondering after reading this:
Are they adjusting for the fact that a low-skilled tech position (tech support) in 2000 paying $12/hr did not require a Bachelor's, but in the current workforce climate, the same low-skilled tech support job at the same pay rate commonly requires that applicants have "at least" an Associates, but preferably (read: we won't hire you if you don't have) a Bachelor's degree? If this was not adjusted for, then the reason they're seeing diluted wages vs. what they expected is because with that one little change in the requirements for a position, a lot more jobs fit their description now than did jobs in 2000, which adds a lot of low wages to their data set and reduces the overall average wage across the entire IT field.
A lot of other people can do the same job, and they will accept a low wage. Food is even more important than tech, but farm laborers make much less than tech workers.
That's it - the economy doesn't figure out who 'deserves' the most pay, it's supply and demand ... only.
Use to be a hot topic, but now it's just an accepted practice. Wages are down because no one in the US wants to actually employee anyone. Stems from much larger problems with our country as a whole IMO.
There is a difference between "writing code" and software engineering. If you want half ass hackish code, you can pay someone $10 an hour to do it. I did that before college for several small businesses. However, the skills have I have now dwarf what I could do then. I'm worth what I make. Also remember that medium include for the US includes the middle of no where like alabama as well as silicon valley, new york and other high cost of living areas. For someone in michigan to move to california, they'd have to almost double the salary to break even. When you see numbers, you have to consider WHERE too.
I've had to change employers to get raises the last few years. I'd rather stay somewhere a long time, but they make it so difficult.
Writing code is easy and frankly kind of fun.
Writing code in an enterprise environment is usually difficult and frankly kind of a pain.
2000 was the top of the Dot Com boom, a gold rush period for computer professions that we may never see again. If average wages have improved in real terms at all from that starting point, it is actually kind of impressive.
Throw 65,000 workers who are willing to work at sub-par wages without bitching or complaining into any narrow industry segment and wages across the board will go into the toilet. This happened with the textile industry and the meat packing industry. It is happening with IT.
Had Congress not just allowed companies to say, "wah, we can't get a CISSP for $25,000 a year, we need a gastarbeiter", the IT industry in the US would be a lot healthier... mainly because in any industry you get what you pay for. You want someone who will work cheap? You get that type of work out. You want someone who has been in the industry 20 years? You might get someone who actually knows the difference between FCoE and iSCSI.
Had Congress actually told companies to perhaps see about helping with education so there are more people hitting CS/MIT as majors (as opposed to now where high school counselors tell kids to avoid the STEM industry in general due to offshoring and hiring low-wage foreign workers), the US mighty actually still have an economy.
What was the supply and demand for IT labor like 10 years ago? What is it like now? Therein lies the answer.
There's no longer any need (well: almost no need) for a code-writer to be present in any particular geographical area, so long as where they are has reliable internet, stable government and degree level education. After that, it's simply a case of who is willing to do the job for the least amount of money.
The wonder is why there are still SO MANY programming jobs in costly, western countries - not that they pay so little.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If the unemployment rate is above historical rates for Tech jobs, that would suggest there are more workers than jobs to fill. Even if demand for tech workers is high (you suggest it's high by calling it 'so important'), wages should be flat if the supply of workers is meeting that demand. It also makes sense given the availability of substitutes (i.e., out sourcing).
..because the rich man has been engaging in price fixing for wages for the last thirty years across all areas of the economy except executive compensation.
Seriously guys, are we complaining that wages are back up to .com levels? Am I the only one who remembers that as a few years of obscenely wasteful spending? Hell, I was a 16 year old making $40K a year back then.
Could you imagine a banker complaining that they aren't back up to 2006 level salaries?
Plumbers and sparkies require licensing because when you don't you have live pipes and only a single colour of wiring for active, neutral and ground.
This article could just as well have been titled "Tech Wages Now Higher than at Peak of Dot-Com Bubble". Choose two points on a wildly fluctuating curve, find the slope and make whatever conclusion you want.
If you are capable of software development, why the hell are you working a job with manual labor for $10 an hour? There are lots of software development jobs open out there. Go beat the pavement. Walk right in the front door with your resume dressed up. Make it happen. I'm not sure if this article is about "IT" or "Development", the media tends to confuse those things. However, if you are capable programmer, go make a living out of it.
Now, you might have a bit of learning curve to go from "coding" to getting the skills to be a good developer. However, you can find a place that will pay you less to start since you have no real world experience. Learn fast, and move up. It's not going to happen unless you try!
Just as an aside, "Plumber" hourly wages are a little different then an employee's hourly wage. It's like a car mechanic garage's "hourly rate". It's a business rate, out of that comes expenses before anyone gets paid. That said, they make a good living.
you people like to think of idiotic repetitive tasks like configuring mysql clusters as
somehow more challenging and socially important than writing novels, or butchering pigs, or cabinet
manufacture, or teaching...maybe its just not
If you do not compare it to other things, numbers mean nothing.
Please give numbers for other professions.
And the wages INCREASED almost 2USD. As the increase already included adjustment for inflation, this is an increase of almost 19%.
So you keep using that word flat, but I don't think it means what you think it means.
Again: adjusted for inflation.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.
Some professions are somewhat easy to assess:
you can test pupils before/after, and know if a teacher is good or not (not that teachers like that, mind you ^^)
you can value sales rep (that's me) by... sales, or margins, or new accounts
Devs for example are much harder to evaluate. You obviously can't rate by quantity of code. Quality is a pain to evaluate (takes time, is too "soft" to have a firm yardstick, is often voluntarily compromised to get products quicker...). Goal-oriented evaluation is warped: "implementing such and such backend" can mean beautiful code that will scale, is well documented, and easy to maintain, or spaghetti crap that'll break in 6 months.
Plus there are lots of cross-dependencies. A good Java programmer may suck at database stuff, while a very good Java+DB coder may not be very good as a general purpose dev.
If you can't evaluate, you can't value.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
When you go to work for one of these narcissistic pinhead tyrant CEOs it is your job to make them, their company, and their shareholders rich, NOT you. This is why I believe those bastards should be taxed as high as conceivably possible. When you slave away your talents, year after year, helping to make others rich, you should be able to share in that wealth.
Consider a person who makes 10 million a year. Most normal people dream of making 1 million over-their-entire-lifetime, and even then they won't end up with that in the bank. So the normal person ends up buying things on credit, having mortgages, having to may extra over long periods of time to get things. The rich? No, they can pretty much pay for things all-at-once. Why pay interest on your $60,000 car, or on your $2,000,000 dollar home? Just flat out buy it, and own it right then. A person making 10 million a year is really making 10 lifetimes worth of money than a normal person... IN-ONE-YEAR, and they rarely pay a thin dime in interest towards anything. And with all that money, they don't even need to work anymore. They can quit real-work any time they want... lazy ass slackers. Not to mention the peace-of-mind that comes with being rich. Why are we protecting these people?
The rich hoard large amounts of our economic money pile themselves, so the government ends up "printing more money" to keep money flowing in the system. That's another bail-out right there. The whole scheme seems geared upon moving more and more money into the hands of the already well off, and protecting those people at the same time. It's nuts. Wan'na make a new iPad like device? Forget it, you can't compete. Want to grow organic crops? Forget it, Monsanto holds all the patents.
And while we're at it, why is social security an 'entitlement'? ITS MY MONEY! I WANT IT BACK.
Stop working for companies. Just give up. You can't win.
We geeks generally have a rather low self-esteem. We put women on pedestals. We think we are bad at socializing. We notoriously don't unionize. We let others walk all over ourselves.
So it's no surprise we, despite being highly skilled, and having no trouble getting well-paid jobs everywhere just by mentioning we’re available, let companies treat us that way.
And don't hate me because I said what everyone was thinking, but nobody wanted to admit to himself. It took me long to realize this too. You know it's true.
Doesnt take much to tell someone to turn off their caps lock key or to reset their password because of the overly draconian password policies some companies have.
Lets get this over with... Fuck Off
Two (related) reasons that I have heard as to why IT isn't valued as much as it should be (I myself am not in the IT field, so this is more like hearsay):
Clueless PHB: This is partly the fault of those who work in IT not educating those higher up in the food chain. PHBs don't look on IT as producers, but as cost centers. So they try to skimp on hiring competent people. And the IT people don't have direct relations with the clients (in most firms), so when it comes time to decide bonuses or raises, IT is generally at the back of the line. While IT is what allows everyone else to raise money, the PHBs would rather look at a $60k fresher vs. a $120k experienced admin and ask why they shouldn't just outsource it for $45k. They don't see the downside in having a poor IT team even after it bites them (just fire one newbie and hire another in his place).
One admin I know used this solution (based on "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming) after most of his team were outsourced (not because the team was bad, but because the PHB saw cost savings): everytime the outsourcing created a problem and someone tried to scream at him (he was their internal liaison to the external contractor) he told them to go tell PHB "we lost/cost $X extra because the contractor screwed up." Only when the PHB saw how much the "real" cost of outsourcing IT was, did he reverse the policy.
Taking Credit: As an old saying goes - the competent IT admin fixes problems before they happen. And then the PHB wonders why he is paying $X for new servers and infrastructure when the current system works fine. IT people should be more proactive about boasting about what they do. Sure, this is distasteful to lots of technical people. But guess what? Everyone else brags and lets their manager know (in a not so subtle way) of why they deserve more money: "I sold $YYY to MY clients". So the IT team needs to take credit for sales they help with. If an employee used a lot of resources to construct a portfolio for a client, it isn't all to the trader's credit. YOUR software and hardware helped him run simulations and generate the portfolio. So add THAT to your pitch. If one of the IT workers stayed up half the night so a client could get some figures/data - he should get credit instead of letting the suit tell the story. A knight wouldn't have killed the dragon unless he had a magic sword - but the armorer doesn't get any songs written about him.
The flipside is to be realistic about what you are doing - this isn't the dot-com boom. Don't expect riches for trivial work. If you do good/tough work, expect to be compensated as well (and let your bosses know why YOU are better than everyone out there). But if you just make a CSS/HTML page, don't try to claim you are God's gift to the firm.
One very important point that you may have missed is this -- tech IS very important. Even organizations who don't care about IT beyond basic file and print have a stake in making sure things they use work well. But, IT is one of those fields where you can still cover over massive, huge, big balls of fail with money to the right vendor or cheap labor. Because of this, companies don't like to pay for competent help, or if they do, they squeeze every last nickel out of it that they can because they feel it's a waste.
Also, "tech" is too broad. The desktop support guy changing toner cartridges, the help desk person changing passwords and the systems architect trying to make sure everything doesn't come crashing to a halt when you put it in the same room have very different jobs, skills and responsibilities. On the simple break-fix support/part-swapper side, the work is getting easier and more automated. This means that you can hire fewer people, and those that you do hire don't need to have as much specialist knowledge. I'm a systems engineer, dealing with Intel server boxes every day -- the vendors have resorted to putting an extra "Don't pull this drive out!" light on hard disks so that part swappers don't pull a second drive out of a failed disk array and cause data loss. Even though the failed drive has a big blinky red light on it. That tells me that customers have complained about this happening enough...so you can draw your own conclusions about skill sets. On the higher end, you just run into wage pressure, companies trying to get away with as little as they can.
I think part of the reason for flat wages across the board is just the overall impression that "computers are simple" now, so why do we need to pay these geniuses to run them? Anyone in corporate IT is keenly aware of the "consumerization" trend, where everyone expects all systems to be as seamlessly integrated as their iPad, no matter how complex.
So at least in "big corporate IT," there are a few things putting wage pressure on:
Things like this make IT a very difficult field to work in. I'm not stupid enough to call myself a rock star IT god, but I certainly feel I'm competent and do a good job. Fortunately, I have an employer who appreciates that (for now) and I do OK. The other class of people who are making serious coin in the IT "racket" are the nomadic consultants. How many places have you worked where these guys seem to parachute in out of the sky when a very narrow specialist problem needs to be solved, charge hundreds an hour for months, and are off to the next place requiring that same specialty just as quick as they came in? I know a lot of these guys personally (can't do the lifestyle if you're married or have any sort of ties to any one place or thing) and they're definitely not hurting. For those of us tied down by one thing
New tech seems to be paying well. As a person that keeps up to date on a lot of technologies, I've worked from networking, to coding, to security, and now full time DBA. The pay is good for what I do since I stick to newer "hot" technologies (or smaller unique high pay one-off jobs).
I am currently working in a fortune 50 company for the last year, and IMO - I can tell you that the reason that "tech" people are not getting more money is because, quite literally, 30-50% of the staff is off shore people trying to get green cards. And I am not talking about small number of people. Instead of just offshoring things, people are bringing offshore workers in locally to say that they don't offshore their work. The local foreign workforce, along with fresh-out-of-school types, are doing all the "old timer" jobs like java development, xml parsing, db2 and mssql work. The high pay people are now team leads, architects, or using new fangled technologies like nosql, and html5, and python (not perl for command line), and all of those other "brand new" technologies to the industry. (note the sarcasm with "new fangled technologies").
Add a bunch of people who are EXCITED to get paid $30,000 to the workforce ... and it brings the average down
If your plumber fucks up you can end up with thousands of dollars in water damage. If your electrician fucks up, your house can burn down. That's why we pay them fairly well and insist that they become certified.
I don't know why you think coding on a large project is easy either. The skillset required is not easy to find, and there are a whole lot of assholes who can make a total mess of your project and cost you thousands in delays and additional work because they don't know what they're doing. That's one of the big reasons you don't see as much coding outsourced these days. 5 or 10 years ago everybody was doing it, and also discovering that the product they got back was of poor quality compared to stuff from their in-house coders. It is very expensive to fix bad code.
I read the internet for the articles.
is that it's hard for a lot of managers to figure out who's valuable. Most smaller shops hire IT staff because they don't have the expertise in-house already. It's not like a cook that hires an assistant cook and can watch them and know if they are skilled or unskilled. I think most IT for smaller organizations are easy marks for unskilled IT, that can be incompetent and still appear valuable because the people doing the hiring and the managing can't properly assess a person's skills before OR after the hire.
And I think this hurts the average pay. I've seen this happen a lot around here, where idiots are working IT for someone and the idiot moves on, leaving behind the managers to think that they need to find a replacement "as good as Tim", and are completely astounded to find that their new hire Jason actually knows what he's doing and is a massive improvement. Leaves them wondering "were we paying Tim too much, or are we paying Jason too little?"
So now at least they know that good IT is worth paying more for, but the rest of the hiring pool out there that hasn't learned that lesson yet doesn't consider their IT all that valuable because they currently are employing an idiot and just have no idea how much more they could benefit from quality IT.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Doing a shitty little web site in Wordpress for a local business is not the sort of coding we're talking about here. The idea that you don't have to write efficient code is quite frankly hilarious. I bet your websites are a real joy to use.
Want to cry in your soup?
For the middle class, real wages haven't risen since 1978. (chart). Of course the upper class has made out like gangbusters.
In other words, your buying power is the same as your Leisure Suit-wearing predecessors, whereas the rich have accumulated whole closets of never-been-used ivory-handled backscratchers.
Yeah, right.
I feel this if then statement is oversimplified. The answer is probably external factors making the competitive wage for the jobs remain flat in a recession economy. But that's not sensational enough for /. is it?
Perhaps if we got Rob Enderle to declare something dead, that'll get a shitload of clicks.
I hate sigs.
Did automation make IT easier? It seems to me that the tools for IT are easier than they were 10-15 years ago.
Most tech jobs include health insurance. The total cost of health insurance premiums paid by employer and employee has been steadily and significantly increasing for a decade, and much of the increase has been covered by employers. There's your raise! (At least it's tax-free . . . for now!)
You think being an average non-trial lawyer is that hard? or the daily grind of your average family doctor is all that taxing? Most non-manual labour, or so-called "skilled", jobs are only as hard and/or as fun as you make them, and only as taxing as the years of qualifications/learning that you require to not be in over your head.
Most coders (probably yourself included) are sitting on a lifetime of experience tinkering and working with systems. That's why coders are generally well-ish paid. Most people would be in way over their heads if thrown into a coding job, because most people are not coders in their spare time.
If coders were able to organize of a larger scale, or if forced into profession-hood through the kinds of personal liability that earned lawyers and doctors their status, then we'd probably be able to demand even higher compensation.
How about an estimate for changes in physicians income over the last decade. Presumably you would see a decline as most medical work in this country is paid by medicare or third party insurers who have a lot of leverage in reducing what they pay out.
Incidentally in some countries like the UK, most physicians are government employees.
There are a lot of tech people out there for not quite as many jobs. The market's saturated, so pay doesn't need to rise. That's my take...
Everyone else's wages have gone down over the last 10 years. If your wage has remained flat, you are one of the lucky ones! The article mentions that STEM workers have a 3.4% unemployment rate. That is less than half the national average, they are doing well in that area too! This is like a billionaire complaining that they are *still* stuck as a billionaire.
I work in this field. We're not adding more value and we're not lowering costs therefore compensation isn't increasing. Consulting rates on the other hand aren't flat.
If the average is actually up from the end of the dot com boom, even through the bust and the current down economy, I think that's actually doing pretty good. I would have expected average salaries to have gone down during that time. I and a lot of my associates are not making anywhere near what we were making during the boom. The difference isn't some paltry .3 percent, either.
But besides all that, if you're looking for a reason why IT salaries haven't gone up, it's because we're competing against offshore personnel with workstations balanced on card tables. And *that* situation is due to companies still not realizing the true cost of outsourcing, factoring in the added cost of doing business.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The use of the year 2000 distorts the argument as it was an abnormal high point for earnings. In 1999 and 2000, IT salaries benefited greatly out of all proportion to the productivity gain the workers provided to companies due to the scramble for Y2K compliance. A longer baseline going back to 1997 and treating 2000 as an outlier would provide a very different picture that is more likely to reflect real trends in hourly rates etc.
In 2000 there was an IT bubble. Now, not only is there no bubble, but there is a large supply of IT workers and a small supply of jobs.
Supply and demand.
1.) There is an artificial ceiling in the US (at a certain price point, outsourcing becomes more relevant, and for seemingly dirt cheap.. these numbers are US based only... the expansion of tech in a shrinking global economy, must reflect a significant boom in other nations. E.G. Ukraine, PI, and India)
2.) Tech is somewhat self defeating, it's about driving effeciency, which cuts out waste, and renders one another irrelevant. Eventually for instance, all Windows OS will be served on VM and be 'just add internet' - why have 1 skilled helpdesk per location fixing local issues, when you can have 1 sysadmin fixing everyone's issue everywhere and throw away devices.
If you'd clean monkey cages for $40 an hour, why aren't you working as a plumber for $120 an hour?
Plumbers charge $120/hour but they don't make $120/hour.
Real wages for most Americans have been declining for the last 40 years.
I don't get out of bed for under $65 an hour programming now and I work in a lower than average wage area. I get paid a lot because someone hired a bunch of $40/hr programmers who screwed it all up and need someone to fix it. There's plenty of people making twice what I make out there, especially in the larger markets.
Indeed
the "Quit complaining and count your blessings" demands are what we've been getting told for decades by those at the top, "Cry me a river", the sad part is now we repeat it to eachother, ignorant of the fact that they were merely telling us that crap to protect their own raising income. Look at the year-over-year income rise % since the 60s, it is amazingly ridiculous how much CEO income raises have gone up in % over the years, not in total. Also look at the % of population in the middle class vs. % of population in the lower class since the 60s. Come back when you think we should all just keep sucking it up and aren't convinced if we continue to "Quit complaining" the middle class won't be gone altogether.
Last quarter the economy's profits grew quite a bit over previous quarters, however hiring remained flat. Quit complaining and work more hours, at least you've got a job right?
Because most people in the boardroom, HR, Fiscal, and other non-IT departments don't "get" IT. So we're the red-headed step-children for any non-IT company, and they expect us to do more with less. They cut the budget to barebones, all while asking for more and more PC's to be installed in offices with people that already have three computers in their office, all with dual 24" top of the line LED monitors, and a "personal" printer that's designed for use by at least 20 people. We also have to go from one "emergency" to another, only to find it was usually the fault of the user, which we can't say to them under the threat of getting written up, suspended or pink slipped, then have to break away because someone in the board room just had to get that new mouse and because they left a thinly veiled threat of a pink slip if you're not there in 10 minutes, only to have him complain to your boss about how you've got dust all over yourself from doing a wiring job in a glorified broom closet that hasn't been cleaned since Woodstock, only then to get scolded by that boss for not getting the wiring job done fast enough. When something breaks, everyone else just expect us to magically fix things, regardless of our budget, how many Red Bull's we've drank on our fourth double shift this week on little or no sleep, then they expect us to come over to their house to fix their personal IT problems because their kid got some song off an iTunes knockoff site in Russia, and complain when we say no (also under the occasional threat of a pink slip), especially when we haven't had a meal in a week that doesn't involve Hot Pockets, pizza or McDonald's, a full night's sleep is a thing of the past, and we've only got vague recollections of that thing called "a life".
And people wonder why IT technicians have one of the highest burnout rates of any white-collar profession, frequently leaving their doctor's office with prescriptions to treat stress, anxiety, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, insomnia, and whatever else...
Anyone interested in continuing economic increases have been sliding in their career now. I left IT 6 years ago for Smart buildings and High end Corporate AV. I'm in high demand and can dictate my job perks and salary. I'm starting to learn something else as a lot of IT and CS people are now eyeballing my industry.. So it's time to learn and start the slide to something else before this field becomes a mess like IT has.
And no, I am not giving details, if you cant figure this out on your own, you are not smart enough to do the job.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Where you have to make a decision to try and move up from the ground level or not, the truth is that working at ground 0 and being good at it, you can hit your cap pretty quickly. You can become a contractor to try and earn somewhat more, or go fully independent as a consultant at which point your running your own business. Or you can try for that masters and try to move up into management, IT Mgr is typically around 100-120k, which is quite a bit higher than most techs make, even the higher up ones. Senior developers can make about that, I've heard of senior admins making more than that, but management is almost a guarantee (unless you hook up w some sub-par employers, but that applies to all tiers of IT).
The formula isn't as much skill for pay as responsibility for pay. The more you "own" the higher your pay should be, owning a team of engineers is more responsibility intensive than owning your code parts of a program. The personality types that best manage are different form the personality types that are the engineers, so that probably contributes to some of the "flatness". Especially since most companies no longer promote from within (every 2-3y job turnover theory), it's becoming more important to be able to sell yourself as a tech. The worst decision anyone can make in the current IT industry is a 10 year gig: your skills will be outdated 90% of the time, and your pay relatively flat.
I think the question is absurd. If something important, should wages keep rising? Is there a case where this has been happening (or nothing ever has been important?).
Y'all are making excuses for a much larger phenomenon. The implosion of the middle class. Here's a comparison of wage growth for Americans from 1967 until 2011. Look at the various jumps in the curve. You can see the big jump in the late sixties of the lowest quartile, the clear results of the war on poverty. The economic doldrums at the end of the Carter Administration. The sudden increase during the Reagan first term, but take special notice of how the rise benefits the upper quintile and even more so the top 5% (and if you could see the top 1% and top 0.01% I think you'd see something shocking.) The subsequent fall during the senior Bush Administration followed by the boom of the Clinton years (and make no mistake, the booms during both Reagan and Clinton involved huge economic expansions in industry, heavy industry for Reagan and information industries for Clinton. Then junior Bush's Terms, and here's where it get's interesting. Notice the steady decline in advancement. The majority of Americans are seeing their wages crashing towards stagnation or worse. In fact looking at the lowest quintile, over the last 10 years they've had a 20% drop in real wealth. Even the first quintile has remained stagnant with extreme fluctuation. So this is not just an IT thing. The only folks to see dramatic increase in personal wealth over the last 10 years I in a group smaller than the top 1%.
While that was going on, the real wealth of Americans at large has been disappearing. Here's a brilliant lecture on the looming collapse of the Middle Class and the economic forces responsible for the situations we all face today. Contrary to pundits conversations Americans spend significantly fewer inflation adjusted dollars on food, clothes, appliances and cars. Where they are getting killed is Cost of Housing, revolving credit and loan debt, Medical Insurance and drugs, Child Day Care, Cost of Fuel/Energy, that and there are new expenses surrounding electronic gadgets that have been a steadily growing part of the cost of living since the late 80s.
The Banks (both in banking, loans and real estate), Big Medicine/Pharma, and Energy have put the American Family in such a precarious position, that any small disruption or disturbance results in almost immediate financial collapse. The critical events facing Americans are Death of a spouse, Injury or Serious Illness, Divorce and extended Unemployment. Any of these (singly or in combination) are enough to initiate a cycle of debt, penalties and ultimate bankruptcy. Add to this growing inflation and the erosion of our savings and investments, and you can see that the American Family is under extraordinary financial stress. The American dream for a growing population is just being able to get by.
Because corporations lobby government every year to issue more and more H1B Visas in an effort to keep wages of all types of engineers down. They claim there are not enough of them however it is a viscous cycle, the more depressed the wages are made to be the less young people are drawn to the field and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Same here, fun times making what was great money as a lad, but what I knew how to do then was an absolute joke compared to what I know how to do now. There is a definite scale to this shit and making stuff last and reworkable takes a skillset all it's own only learned through years of practice, and frankly many people with years of practice still can't do it. The extra money is because it's bloody hard to find someone who can do this stuff well and won't be a bigger pain than they're worth.
And *THAT* is the sole cause of the stagnation of IT salaries. The current economy is just a scapegoat.
In my state it takes years to get a plumbing license and in order to do that you have to work as plumbers assistant for years etc. I'd much rather write code for $40/hr or even $10-$15/hr. Not that that is an option for me. My aging degree is in EE not CS.
I've always loved coding. Mainly c/c++ and assembly. I've always imagined that if I were to go back to college for a CS degree and somehow manage to get a job as a programmer that I would start to hate it anyway and I didn't want to learn to hate programming. Actually this was based on some persuasive posts over the years from professional programmers right here on slashdot.
Also, when I graduated in the early 90s it simply wasn't possible, as far as I could determine, to get a job with only a CS degree where I lived. Even getting a masters wasn't enough. You needed a minimum of 2 years of real world professional programming experience to make it past HR. Period. I've never been much good with people and don't do well selling myself at job interviews. So it is and was beyond hopeless.
For the next decade after college I would search the job market from time to time, but if anything the situation just seemed worse, requiring experience and certifications of all kinds in languages that I didn't like or respect in addition to the other requirements that seemed impossible. It just seemed that there were already enough experienced programmers in the market. I guess there just wasn't any need for inexperienced ones, regardless of what degrees they had earned.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Because tech has been just as important over the whole period over which IT wages were observed to be flat, and because wages across the economy have been flat in the time period studied. So, the results are pretty much what you'd expect.
well IT / tech needs apprenticeships / trades schools and not theory based degrees.
Capitalism, woe is us.
Its called your in world economy and the tech you worked on, those who worked on it before you, has enabled nearly anyone in the world to compete with you.
Face it, most of IT people have jobs someone else can do elsewhere in the world and do it as well if not better and cheaper. Yeah there are some fun horror stories with off shore, but guess what got some local stories too.
It really comes down to this, the internet provides the means to make your work mobile whereas many "factory" jobs have to be done, well at the factory.
Lastly, labor usually vastly over estimates their worth. I know because I am labor and I do,
Your idea of how capitalism works is so jaded but it fits with the herd mentality race to the bottom mentality of this site.
staying flat while profits CxO compensation skyrocket is not "good" it's just less bad so far than other employment sectors are doing
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
1. if there is an over-supply then wages will be low.
2. A lot of non-IT people that influence hiring decisions don't know anything about IT and just see it as an expense and think that it's not hard. They don't know that there's a difference between a good IT staff member and a bad one.
3. If the economy isn't doing well then less people have extra money to blow on attracting good employees.
4. Because people undervalue the work that IT does. It's only when it goes down that people see the difference between a competent IT staff member and an incompetent one.
5. Competition - outsourcing, cloudsourcing, etc..
Because IT people are terrible negotiators.
a field is important, that doesn't mean the people who work in it are.
During the industrial revolution assembly-line workers were the most important employees in the world, but that didn't mean they were on massive salaries.
IT is a field with almost zero barriers to entry. Any mook can get an MCSE and be a "IT professional". And you know what? Any mook does.
I'm not a script kiddie. I have an EE degree and absolutely loved writing assembly code as a teenager and writing C++ code with inline assembly, making small games etc. I got an A in every programming course I took in college and spent way too much time writing code to the detriment of my math and physics courses. Writing code is fun. It's like playing. I am of course jealous that you get payed to play.
What I want to know is how you got your first job out of college? Did you know someone? If I had graduated with my pathetic EE degree (worthless for actually getting a job IME) and found that there were programming jobs all over the place that only required a BS in CS I would have just gone back and got a CS degree and then landed myself a job writing code, and maybe I would be making 80k/year now instead of 10k. I tried everything I could think of but there was just nothing available for someone without professional experience. I looked both in Florida (where I went to school) and Boston (where I'm from), but such jobs simply did not exist as far as I could tell. Or if they did exist they certainly weren't being advertised anywhere. You had to know someone and I didn't know anyone. I was utterly defeated by the whole, "Can't get a job without experience and can't get experience without a job" situation. All of you seemed to have overcome that somehow. I'd love to know what your secret was.
I guess it's those sorts of experiences that have made me a bitter, cynical "life sucks; then you die" kind of guy. Or at least more than I would have been. Actually if someone had told me that getting a job right out of college without experience was pretty much impossible, well I would have still gone (I liked it), but I wouldn't have been so disenchanted with the pointlessness of job hunting afterward and I might have come up with some plan for actually making a living in a way that doesn't totally suck. Maybe ideas for starting a business. Although before the internet that was quite a bit harder. Now it's the only form of work that seems worth doing anyway. Wage slavery tends to suck.
The two most imporant lessons I've learned in life. These aren't universal. They just apply to me.
1. Getting a job doing something you don't totally hate is impossible. Getting a high paid job is impossible. At least if you have to rely on someone actually hiring you. Starting your own business is another matter. For that you just need money. Before the internet quite a lot of money. Not so much now for certain types of businesses.
2. Getting a girlfriend is impossible.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
>Writing code is easy and frankly kind of fun
If coding is easy, you aren't challenging yourself. If you aren't challenging yourself, you won't make the high wages. It is fun though.
>Now I think I understand why prices in the US are so absurdly high.
Yes, cost of living varies from country to country. That's why it's a gold mine when someone comes over here to work, where a decent burger costs $5-$10. They save their money, bring it home and live like kings where a burger still costs a buck.
>when you aren't even expected to know assembly language or heavily optimize anything
I think assembler is only still required for boot loaders, but I could be mistaken. Optimization is important in many cases (at least the high dollar cases).
>Just write clear, well organized, easy to understand code
You should always do that. You'd be surprised how many people won't follow the coding standards that are in the damn unit they are working on.
>I would *definitely* write code for $10/hour. Maybe even $8. I wouldn't need $40.
That also generally requires getting up in the morning, paying for decent work clothes, going to the office and writing what *other* people want you to write. You can't just write 10 goto 10 all day.
>Of course plumbers don't deserve to make $125/hour and electricians don't deserve to make $75/hour either but they do.
Depends on if they are a good plumber. I'll come over and do your plumbing for only $100 a hour but I don't know what the hell I'm doing. They also have to be certified and insured.
So obviously this is a troll. If you actually knew how to code enough to earn $40 / hr, you wouldn't be doing a job that makes $10-$12 an hour, "when I'm lucky."
It galls people to pay a living wage to people they don't respect. It doesn't help when so many "in IT" work so hard at earning that disrespect.
That may all be true, but the fact is there are people talking about getting 80k jobs right out of college. I'm still not convinced that they are not aliens from another planet. Or at least another country. But, if true, it cannot just be what you learn from working in the field for years that makes them worth so much.
Keep in mind that intelligent people tend to get better at anything they do every day. So your argument applies to every intellectual pursuit. Not just programming. People with experience are worth more. I don't doubt that. What I doubt is that anyone is really worth $40/hr for anything. Maybe doctors. In some countries people, intelligent people, will work for a whole month for less than $40. Even doctors in some cases.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
You may find some interesting correlations if you compare that wage to the hourly wage at which one is exempt from overtime pay.
flamebait? hardly.... Just telling how it is by me
what mode doesnot matter but by either train (10 min drive to the train station) or car (an hour on the thruway)
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I live in a developing country and salaries are definitely booming. The problem is that americans and europeans make just about what the market can bear already. Eventually salaries will flatten out here too and move elsewhere until there is some sort of parity in the world.
Then you and your friend either suck, or live in a shithole. It's really that simple.
Either that or you are just overpaid and very, very spoiled.
Where in the hell do you live? Arkansas?
A suburb of Boston.
Which doesn't mean you're any good at it.
Never said I was, but the fact that you make shitloads of money doing it doesn't mean you are good at it either. In fact it doesn't mean shit except that you are one rich motherfucker.
Blah blah blah. Spoken like somebody who hasn't done jack shit in the real world. My projects range from 4 to 12 million lines of high level code. I'll give you complex. Yeah, I was writing my own assemblers and tools (and making good use of them too) back in the day.. but anybody who works with current production level code in anything but the most trivial system knows what a pain in the ass so-called "high level" code can be. And yea, there are times when you can't just throw more hardware at it.
Depending on how you define "jack shit" it is true that I haven't done it. I took the only job I could find outside of college. It wasn't manual labor, but it sucked and only paid $7.50/hr. I was just happy that I didn't have to spend the rest of my life waiting tables or working at a gas station or some shit like that. That I didn't have to clean toilets or deal with the public in some kind of retail job. What have you accomplished in your life besides huge stacks of 20 dollar bills that would reach the ceiling of your fancy house? Sucking corporate dick and doing what you are told working on someone else's project doesn't impress me all that much. Still better than my situation but not all that impressive in the scheme of things.
Care to tell me why they shouldn't? I think it's just that you're such an inbred, lazy, arrogant little fuck that you couldn't do their jobs if your life depended on it.
Actually I have done both plumbing and electrical work. Residential stuff. It's easy. In the sense that it isn't intellectually challenging. So I do know what I'm talking about. $125/hr to glue PVC pipe and solder copper joints is beyond ridiculous. I am lazy, but I think you are the arrogant one. I wasn't lazy when I graduated from college though. I had no problem working 12-16 hours a day and often did, but I wasn't able to work in any field that interested me. All of those jobs had already been taken by people with experience. Apparently a minimum of 2 years, but more typically 3-5.
I'll bet you're fat
Well since I'm an American that can be pretty much assumed. I'm about 30 pounds overweight, but I'm also in my early 40s. I wasn't more than 5-10 pounds overweight until my late 30s. In my 20s I was in very good condition. I ran, cycled and weight trained at the gym.
... that you masturbate quite a bit..
Fuck you. Rich fuck like you whose had everything in life handed to you. You've just been lucky. Nothing more. At one time you also had no experience, but you probably knew someone and got hired that way. Not on the merits of your abiliites.
and that your IQ, though you believe yourself to be brilliant, is within 1 std deviation of the norm.
I never claimed to be some kind of genius. I just wanted to be able to get a job working for someone else after graduating from college doing something that didn't totally suck and ideally something that made use of all that studying I did in college. I took a bunch of IQ tests when I was around 18. IIRC I think I scored something like 137-139. So you're right. Not that great, but not below normal either. What did you score? 170 or something? That would just prove that being smart is unrelated to being a cunt.
You just don't want to admit that luck had anything to do with your success and that you are the only one in the world
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
2000 was at the height of the tech bubble. So any comparison to it is horribly skewed.
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
From reading your posts, it appears you have the social skills of a small woodland creature.
You should probably work on that instead of thinking that the "right" degree will instantly get you a job. It's also quite helpful on that "girlfriend" problem.
My degree is in Biology. I used to get paid quite well to write code, but now I'm getting paid well to tell other people to write code. (No girlfriend though. Got a wife instead)
When we interview people, their social abilities are actually quite important. We're hiring someone to join our team and work closely with everyone else on the team.
Not the world's best programmer? I can probably work with you on that. I'm already expecting any entry level employee will need additional training.
Poor social skills? I can't really fix that.
If you can write readable, efficient, well-designed code, test it well, and do it reasonably quickly and without a lot of supervision, I'll hire you right now for some part-time work, at significantly more than $10 per hour. I don't care where you live; we can communicate over the Internet, and I'm sure I can find some way to pay you.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Never done any web programming. So I wouldn't know. Web programming bores me. Well except maybe for coding a torrent client that uses some kind of exchange system like fairtorrent. That might be fun. Does anyone code web sites for anything other than the money?
I prefer to code in C/C++ or assembly. I think Lisp and Scheme are kind of cool though. And Smalltalk and Objective-C and some functional languages like Haskell and Erlang and pretty much anything that compiles to tight, efficient machine code. I'm also interested in GPGPU languages especially as a way to run neural networks / connectionist programs.
My original interest in programming was because of my interest in AI. I chose EE instead of CS because back in the 80s I thought that brain emulations were more likely to lead to AI than gigantic commonsense programs like Douglas Lenat's cyc project. And also because one of my EE profs persuaded me that the future of AI was more in hardware than software. He was working on an interesting massively parallel AI project of his own at the time and I respected his judgement.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Yup. My social skills suck. No question about that. But I never even got an interview to prove how much my social skills sucked. Because I didn't have the experience that was required by 100% of the ads I saw. And yes, after maybe a decade of working in an unrelated field I finally gave up hope of ever getting paid to do something I liked.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Is Tech really equal to IT. No technology beside IT ??
Blame open source. Software should be paid for. Not given away for free !!!
Well it's not manual labor at least. Are you just being optimistic or do you know for a fact that it's possible to get hired as a programmer with no experience? It wouldn't help me anyway since I don't have a CS degree, but it is interesting.
It's not really possible for me anymore. That ship has sailed. For many reasons that I don't want to get into here. But I do appreciate the advice, especially if you are not being overly optimistic. I was overly optimistic too when I just assumed that I would be able to find a job in my field after college. Eventually. I mean Electrical Engineering is not like studying anthropology or something. I figured there must be some need for Electrical Engineers right out of college. I had thought it would be at least someone practical. But I was wrong. I don't think I ever made the mistake of being overly optimistic about anything ever again.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
So come over to the Bay Area or Puget Sound and find yourself a job where they'll snatch you up for $20/hr in a heartbeat if you can readly "write clear, well organized, easy to understand code". Why complain about it?
Because, in technology, you are constantly under the threat and opposing leverage of having your job shipped off somewhere overseas for a fifth to a quarter of your salary, artificially keeping it low as your employer pulls from a labor-pool that extends into regions where they earn as much in a month as your groceries cost, because of where you live.
I look forward to this happening to the teaching profession and all of those whiny bitches bawling over their teacher's wages and how "valuable they are to society" find that their wages and benefits drop even more, because we can stream live lessons in from India for a tenth the cost.
According to Warren Buffet, holding stock is normal, and high freq trading is a joke. His pal Charlie Munger, vice chairman at Warren Buffett's investment company Berkshire Hathaway. "Take the rapid trading by the computer geniuses with the computer algorithms...those people have all the social utility of a bunch of rats admitted to a grainery," I say we tax the heck out of it. Simply, it adds nothing to the social order.
http://www.despair.com/worth.html
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Adding to that, they are missing the top wage earners, who have retired, and are now including the n00bs who are earning entry level (for their position) wages.
If we went through a recession, and the several bubbles which have burst, and you only track individuals, there are some people who have lost jobs but average earnings are up. This is not a debate about how much people earn, which is where most people above gp were talking about.
The topic at hand is this - if IT is important to the world, why are they not paying IT people more?
The assumptions in the questions are beyond idiotic. As a whole, should everyone in IT be paid more just because we are important to the economy? Or are we just displacing people and earning their salaries?
How many people worked in tech, multiplied by their salaries? And compare that to now?
Adjusted for inflation, we are $2 ahead. How does Victor's quote mean anything when placed directly next to a quote disputing it? Adjusted, we are ahead.
Why Are IT Wages Flat? First paragraph - outsourcing, automation, and economy. WTF are the rest of you babbling on about?
Including all of the people who took retirement or quit for other industries, and all of the n00bs. The rest is explained in the article, leading to b4dc0d3r's law: NEVER read an article with a headline posed in the form of a question.
The real story is the EPI report, second link. Microsoft wants more H1-B visas, which is not new in the least. Microsoft wants to pay people from lower wage countries less money to work in the US. If you spot the conclusion, good for you. Microsoft wants to keep wages flat.
As a large tech employer, and someone who is lobbying for cheap labor, it's kinda obvious to me that dcblogs (submitter) is intentionally misusing statistics, and a poorly written CNET article, to prattle on about H1-B visas.
Is it really so easy for you guys to get hired that the only thing that matters is your ability? You don't even need a CS degree? Now that I don't believe.
Of course the nice thing about programming is that you can prove yourself to some degree. Rather than going back to college and getting a CS degree maybe all I would need to do is write a large, complex program that I could send to potential employers. Something like a game maybe. Might take me a few years. Maybe longer. But I'd have something that would show what I am capable of. Although it's still difficult for me to picture a realistic scenario where I would even have a chance to show it off. It certainly wouldn't get me past HR or to any kind of an interview. Maybe if it became popular enough that the program and I both were slightly famous so that my name would immediately be recognized by someone.
Obviously I don't know how to earn $40 an hour doing anything or I would be doing it. I don't think I've ever even earned half that much. A good friend of mine is about to get kicked out of his apartment because he can't manage to scrape together $700 each month to pay his rent on time. He can't seem to find any job at all. He's considering suicide as perhaps the only practical solution. And he actually has better social skills than I do and is probably equally intelligent, although he's not a techie/geek like me. I consider myself lucky compared to him and also compared to many of the people I see working retail and making no more than I do. At least I don't have to deal with the public (I'm shy and would hate that).
I guess I was so convinced that the job market was a certain way in the 90s, it is difficult for me to accept that it has changed. Or maybe it hasn't changed. Maybe for everyone else the early to mid 90s were a time when it was dead easy to get a job in programming or electronics design with no experience at all right out of college. Maybe it was just me. That was certainly my reality. After this discussion I think I will at least have to check out Monster or whatever people are currently using for job hunting and try to verify some of the seemingly wild claims people are making here.
If nothing else I don't really feel I'm properly qualified for a professional coding job. I do enjoy programming in c/c++/assembly but I haven't taken the same classes that CS majors took. Compiler design, algorithms... All that stuff. It would seem kind of cheeky of me to even apply for a programming job without having at least taken those same courses.
What's almost funny about this discussion is that I would be considered fabulously wealthy--almost beyond imagination--in some countries. But to most of you guys I'm terribly poor.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I'm complaining about it because I'm still bitter about my experiences trying to find a job after college and failing badly. Not even coming close. Not even finding a single promising ad. Seeing this news story is a salt in the wounds kind of thing for me. I would love to live in the Puget Sound area. Probably one of the best places to live in the US I think. Although that and SF are both quite expensive. in terms of cost of living. Not that the Boston area is cheap either... I think the first thing I have to do is verify that what you guys are saying is actually true. I haven't been job hunting for a while. How do people do it these days? Is Monster still around or relevant?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
At least where I live, outsourcing is becoming more and more common. As a manager of an IT department, I can say that the number of business cards I receive in a given month are overwhelming offering cheap out-of-house IT service with names like "Geeks to go" or "Geeks on the run" or "Nerds at your door" or something lame like that.
It's to the point where an organization almost can't justify keeping an IT person or team on staff full time when services are readily available with fast turn-around at little cost. It's downright threatening. Unfortunately, if you feel like jumping ship to go work for one of those services, you're looking at getting paid much less with potentially fewer benefits.
If companies had a hard time finding skilled employees you'd expect wages to be rising, and they aren't.
What CEOs mean when they say this is "We can't find skilled, educated employees who will work for pennies."
Winchester, Browning, Smith & Wesson, Colt and Beretta...
If you work for IBM for instance your wages will never climb. They're on about year 13 of essentially no wage increases for 95% of the workforce. In the US, at least. But I would say it speaks to a different problem over all. Most employers want young people for about 3 years and then it's churn churn churn. For the employees out of school you have to make as much as you can as quickly as you can up to about age 30 or so. After that they plateau you whether you're good at your job, great at your job or terrible at your job. They just freeze you. You can stay and eventually make LESS than all the newcomers, become a management sociopath, or just quite. Employers don't care which of those three options you choose.
It's simple.
Tech is an important part of driving the economy and building the future economy. But IT has nothing to do with that.
IT is just the technology version of workplace facilities management. In other words, the janitors and carpenters. Need new cubicals assembled? Need the floors mopped? Need IDs provisioned or a new report about something? None of those folks are doing anything to drive the economy except in the same way as anyone else who gets paid to do a job.
They're a cost of doing business. Nothing more.
I used to work for technology companies, doing R&D for the products that the companies sold. Now I work in IT at a giant company that runs restaurants. The restaurant company is highly dependent on the technology, and there are some things they couldn't do without it, but nobody confuses IT with product R&D.
There is a big difference.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Your $39 per hour wage can easily pay for between 4-8 people in India or the Philippines.
Tech is now i phones, i pads, BlackBerry, touchscreens, etc. and it's getting easier to offload IT tasks to managers and individuals instead of having in house helpdesk employees in high numbers.
At least where I work, individuals are better at keeping their systems clean, avoiding the virii, worms, etc. than in the past. They can map their drives and printers themselves, and all in all are less of a pain than say five years ago.
Most of our corporate IT is actually cross functional, doing CAD and CNC programming as well as IT work in our engineering department, or data entry and database administration along with network administration and system installs.
IT has and always will be seen as overhead. Because it is.
As far as verifying the claims goes, try Glassdoor. Of course, it's still a matter of trust, but it'd have to be a pretty huge conspiracy to skew the results there. In practice, comparing what I've seen there to anecdotal evidence from coworkers and friends in several big companies, it seems to be pretty accurate.
It's hard to say what the best venue is for someone fresh out of college, but beyond that it's mostly networking. I found that LinkedIn helps a lot, too. And, of course, the good old fashioned writing letters to any prospective employers and asking if they have open positions. For big guys (which is where you usually want to be if you want a stable 6-figure salary), they generally have their own public listings online, where you can find something of interest and apply right away:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/jobs ...
http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/index.html
http://www.google.com/about/jobs/
https://careers.microsoft.com/search.aspx
Cost of living in Puget Sound is relatively high, though probably not as high as SF, from what I've heard. I'm paying $1300 in rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in Redmond, but it's literally 10 minutes walking distance from my office, so they charge some premium for that. Also don't forget that there's no state income tax in WA, which comes up to a hefty difference at the end of the year.
(By the way, Google also has an office in Kirkland, WA these days, and they seem to be growing it rapidly and are constantly seeking to hire more people.)
$40/hour for writing code? Seriously? Jesus. I'd do real work for that much. Unpleasant shit work. Cleaning monkey cages. Cleaning the inside of nuclear reactors. Now I think I understand why prices in the US are so absurdly high. You guys can afford to pay them. I make $10-$12/hour and that's when I'm lucky.
So move to the Bay Area. If you're rather unlucky you'll make only $40/hr. I'm not saying that just for rhetorical effect - if you really are unhappy with your current compensation, sometimes it pays to move to a region with a stronger economy.
An interview is frequently not required to figure that out. I have not interviewed you. Yet I detected you have poor social skills.
In the job environment, it can come across in the resume and cover letter.
Did you apply if you were close? The big dirty secret about job ads is we specify everything we'd like to have. Not everything we absolutely must have. Because 99% of the time, there's several not-very-related skills required to actually do the job. And we almost never find a candidate with all of the requirements.
Employers take a candidates that have most of the requirements, and they'll have to pick up the other parts on the job. Just don't try to fake it during the interview - let them know you don't have a particular skill, and mention any skills you have that are somehow related and mention ways you have picked up skills you needed.
Whether or not your particular skills are a problem depends on the applicant pool - if you have 30% of the skills and others have 80%, we'll take the 80. But if you have about the same or more than every other candidate, the employer may hire you.
What the heck are you talking about? It's been my experience in over 25 years of hiring coders that the better ones tend to have engineering degrees. A CS degree is NOT needed to become a programmer
I wouldn't write code for under $60, and I don't live in the Bay area either...
Why would you expect your salary to not be flat?
You have Skill X, which is worth price Y.
Assuming the relevance of skill X doesn't change drastically, unemployment and cost of living don't change drastically, etc., neither will your salary.
It doesn't mean your job isn't important, it just means you agreed on a salary for your work when they hired you.
In general, the salary for a certain type of work (say, Oracle DBA) should remain relatively constant, going up with the cost of living mainly.
Sometimes there are huge spikes due to a "hot trend" everyone wants to hire for and a labor shortage (like HTML in the 90s), but that's the exception, not the rule.
Janitors are super important too, but their wage is relatively defined.
There should be no shit hitting fans except the shit that you predicted would hit that fan. And after predicting it, you will have acted to mitigate the effect.
Only bad IT people need the firefighting skills you are so excited about.
The plans, drive and quality of those CxOs that are getting large amounts of compensation is why your pay is staying flat rather than you getting laid off.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I live in San Francisco, and have for many years.
I'm a Sr Software Engineer in enterprise Java development these days (been programming professionally for 30 years). Never wanted to get into management or team leadership, tried a bunch of startups that failed, and am not much of an entrepreneur, though I still love programming.
So at 48 years old, I'm still a Sr Software Engineer, but my salary (or yearly based on hourly, since I'm contracting right now) ends up being about $145k w/bennies, MAYBE $155k without bennies (contracting used to pay up to double what salary could get, but no longer - it's barely more than salary now).
Unless I were to head to a management track, or team leadership, or software architect roles, I'm pretty much stuck at this point. It's not horrible, not at all, but feels strange how one gets to a certain point in this field and wages just STOP, pretty much. The only people I know who have stayed in pure engineering who's salaries have gone higher (but who didn't strike it rich at a startup and aren't entrepreneurs) got there by taking a reasonably high wage at a big company, and going up through small yearly cost-of-living increases.
For some reason, I thought - when starting this career - that my wages would just continue going up and up and up the more experience I got, but that ended up not being true after a certain point.
Just giving my perspective anyway.
Very simple. /always/ comes as a result of one of these two things: either you have a skill or competence that is so rare companies must pay lots to actually acquire you as employee, or you have a power position (typically a management position, apart from some backstabbing skills mostly no further competence required), and you get high salalry as a result of the consensus in such a power tree on dividing higher salaries amongst your peers.
Techies are both not rare and have no power.
In case you missed it: High salary
.. it amuses me that doctors are hugely compensated by everyone across the wealth spectrum, because it's pretty important to, you know, stay alive and healthy.
Then you have the ludicrously wealthy corporations that throw out pennies to see which IT worker is desperate enough to pick them up... regardless of the fact that IT is the lifeblood of any corporation nowadays.
There are numerous reasons for this, mostly I imagine for short term off-shore glory for the administration, before they bail and take their success story to the next bidder. Sometimes, it's an established wage structure where a higher income for fresh blood means raises for the aging straggler.
The thing is, when the salaries start forcing their way up, the off-shore drums start beating and we're back to the status quo.
In 2000, I was hired on to look after a 911 emergency call center. I had a BSc in CS, and an ASc in Electronics Engineering (with work experience in both). Rat bastards 'started me off' at $19 per hour. WTF! The boss was a micro-managing lazy-as-shit ass hole. I left after about 2 years. I knew the Ericsson Trunking radio systems, the SCADA systems, the Oracle databases, the GPS systems. There were only two of us, and I was the only UNIX guy. Ninteen Fucking bucks an hour. Untrained laborers get more.
Not as much outsourcing these days? I want what you're smoking...or live where you do.
You still see outsourcing because it's all about short term results, hey look I cut costs by 50% by offshoring! I'm awesome, now bye I'm getting scouted by another company that wants immediate results.
It is due to the fact that the IT world is mainly dominated by younger/newer employees. The entry level salaries in the IT world will probably stay flat for quite some time into the future and due to this and the fact that for most roles, companies would rather just higher a recent grad, the salaries for the IT world will always be highly weighted towards the entry level range.
IT has and always will be seen as overhead. Because it is.
Unless you work for a company whose business is IT. Corporate IT is vastly different than say being a sysadmin for a SaaS company.
Depends on the industry you're in.
I'm in pharma and I'm embarrassingly overpaid, specifically because of the specialised protocols/procedures/methods I know and the critical/sensitive nature of the work.
I've managed to pay off 30% of my home bond within 10 months... (home bonds are typically paid over 20-25 years)
CA != ("San Francisco County" AND "Santa Clara County" AND "Alameda County" AND "San Mateo County")
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If food is so important, why are farmer wages flat?
Having technology is the richness
$40/hour for writing code? Seriously? ...
No - I make $105 per hour writing code. Seriously. But it's taken a lot of hard work to get there and I certainly didn't expect that straight out of college.
It's all about becoming excellent at what you do, working hard, developing good people skills and trying to develop other skills such as project management, people management, etc. The more value you add the more valuable you are and your reputation is important when it comes to negotiating your contracts or salary increases whether you're a lone contractor or a salaried employee.
Ok, call this a random act of kindness if you like.
I can't offer you a job in the electrical engineering sector but I am able to guide you in the right direction.
The energy sector of Finland, if you are willing to move from the US, is booming. The two major clusters are in the Vaasa area and in the Helsinki area.
Notable companies in these locations are Wärtsilä, ABB, Vacon, The Switch, Citec, and Vaasa Engineering group. Except these larger players we've got a totalt of around 100 companies active in the sector.
A more comprehensive list is avaliable (focusing on the Vaasa region) here unfortunately in swedish since I couldn't find it in english.
Tech people have no negotiation skills. Period.
The market is flooded with PhDs working for a dime a dozen. Business people think they can take advantage of us as a result, but what they don't know is that most of these PhDs can't write a single line of code to save their lives. Joke's on both us I guess. They screw us and we screw them right back :)
It's easy to buff your rep and experience as a software developer, just join any of a million open source project and contribute code that is awesome. Then you have something real to point to that will impress everybody. Libreoffice could use some more helping hands at the moment, for example.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Yah right, you better send that prof some hate mail, and get down to coding your AI on a GPU like everybody else.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Your problem is that you live in the Boston area, one of the sector-segregated, non-fluid labor markets in the country with a high cost of living to boot. Get the hell out of there.
Back in "the old days", wages rose throughout the entire economy in every growth period. It was normal.
Hmmm, let's see if I can figure this out - unemployment in the IT industry is currently TWICE it's historical norm, and wages are flat... Could it be that old "supply and demand" thing where as supply increases, prices stagnate or drop?
The value of a profession isn't established by comparing wages with other professions - besides, I'm pretty sure wages have been fairly flat/stagnant across the board for the last handful of years.
Ken
Thanks. I really appreciate it. This story has gotten me really depressed. My whole life seems like such a waste. It's not just the money: the fact that I am poor by US standards. I think I would have been a much happier person writing code for a living even if I continued to only make 10k/year. A happy code monkey leaning back in the branches and chewing on delicious leaves.
I thought I was being relatively practical studying Electrical Engineering especially compared to some people I knew, but I think I ultimately fell into the same trap as the anthropology major who believes they will be doing something other than waiting tables (or maybe teaching if they are lucky) or whatever when they get out of college.
I guess it really is a whole new world nowadays, even with outsourcing. A system in which people are educated in university and then cannot find real jobs in their field when they graduate does not seem to be a sustainable one. Eventually those experienced developers will retire, but all of those inexperienced college graduates will have been waiting tables for the past decade or two when the industry finally has no choice but to accept people without relevant experience. I guess those companies that used to only take experienced applicants have finally seen the error of their ways. It's too late for me though.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I won't beat on you because I don't know exactly "how" you attempted to get a job in your field, or what your requirements were. Maybe you couldn't move very far or something. Let me continue my advice for others... and maybe, maybe you, if you're looking to start over again.
I will say this. Getting a job is a very _human_ endeavor. I find a lot of younger technology oriented people, especially in technology fields, want to land a job the same way they get everything else. Online. This can work for someone with all the right experience, and just the "right" resume. sure it can. However, if you want to beat that guy with your lesser resume, you walk in the front door. You network with current employees. ( Use online information to find them. ) Build rappor. You call HR, you ask if there are any short term contract type positions available so you can see if the company would be a good fit for you. If they say no, or, we don't do that, you say, "Oh, you should ask your technology managers if they could use a program like that. You get a lot of value for your money, and it almost eliminates bad full time hires."
The executives and investors are good villains in the story because some are in fact, just that, and there's a broken phenomenon culturally based on a buddy system at the board level so that even those who don't act on craven impulses to cash in more still come in with a ridiculous compensation package and aren't exactly clambering for lower salaries (would you?).
But another HUGE part of the problem in medium or even high skill white collar areas with flat or declining compensation is one of medical costs. Because employer premiums in employer group medical insurance plans is tax deductible, you don't see that part of your compensation on a regular paycheck, but it's usually quite large, and has always grown faster than inflation.
We're up at 18.2% of gdp folks. Not all of that is in your group plan, some of it is medicare spiraling out of control, but no matter how you slice it, it's way more than any other first world country spends for better results. This entire sector of the economy is overpriced give or take 2X and it's making the rest of us a lot poorer.
Absolutely! I'd give a nut to have full-time work in IT making even $20/hr. I've been in the field since the mid-90s and can't find anything but temporary contract jobs, and those are few and far between.
A long time ago, those in charge realized that so long as every employer treated the people who do actual work like shit, they wouldn't quit to go somewhere else when you treated them like shit. The other guy treats his employees just as badly (or worse). Wages have been flat across all sectors for 40 years, while productivity has steadily improved. Executives buy million dollar vacation homes while the workers that make that possible struggle to pay for 2 bedroom homes in shitty neighborhoods. The truth is, that hard work doesn't get you anything other than more hard work. The trick is to make money off others' hard work.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
It does not matter how important you are. What matters is the supply of people who can do what you do. If the supply is there, the wages are not going to increase. If supply shrinks, then wages will go up. Econ 101.
network admins & server admins, beware: your skills are not valued by corporations
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
You got to be joking, in Southern VA, IT tech here, $15 a hour... :-(
Working 5-10 hours OT a week, I'm lucky to pull in $35,000 a year. Last IT job before this one, in this area? $12 an hour....
The area sucks so badly.
Thank MS for giving industry affordable solutions to its problems guaranteeing wage-structured skills at an economy business likes
Plain and simple. We're finally feeling the effects of balancing out the world's pool of available workers. India will probably host more IBM employees in 10 years than any other country and they're much cheaper to employ --which is based on their cost of living.
IT isn't like manufacturing, though, so it's not like the manufacturing jobs that return to the US because Chinese wages and the cost of fuel rise (like GE finding they could produce a physical product here cheaper than China, now).
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Wow, you poor sap. You're whole life seems to have been one big cop out.
Compared to the insanity of Hong Kong, California isn't _that_ bad.
Well, sure, there's always going to be somewhere that has it worse than you. But that doesn't mean that it's unfair of the vast majority of Americans to look askance at the cost of living in the Bay Area.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Unless I were to head to a management track, or team leadership, or software architect roles, I'm pretty much stuck at this point.
I realized that and went back to school for an MBA. Even though I love engineering, now I grin and bear the business track, which, I assure you is more lucrative than being stuck in engineering. Yea, MBAs get a bad rap here on Slashdot, and yea, the coursework doesn't REALLY teach you much, but it's a credential that gets a little more than a second glance by business folks, and that's often enough to get your career back on an upward track.
Good advice - sadly, I was one of those self-taught computer teens; I took a programming job right out of highschool, went to college for a year after that, decided I didn't like college, and have been working ever since. I'd have to go back for both a BA and an MBA for that - 6 years at 48 is nothing to sneeze it. Hard to say it's worth it at this point (esp. since the biz side of things would indeed be - as you say - for me, something to 'grin and bear'). I can't say I did a lot of 'career planning' earlier on. :-)
If you're a US citizen, they look for it.
If you're from some hellhole of a country, they dont care - they just commit fraud to ensure that even a degreed US citizen with honors and qualifications will not get it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Those foreigners are working off of desperation, which is a very poor demonstrator of value. That is the only thing that those foreigners possess that no US citizen will or should ever possess.
In addition, you've been looking for the wrong citizens, or the process was designed to discourage qualified citizens from applying. So the claim that they're "better" is suspect given that it leaves out the incentive to discourage citizens from applying.
If you have billions of people, they don't matter if they're not in the same regulatory domain (the US). The best you can claim is with criteria based on United States citizens - within the United States.
The proper thing to do is to kill offshoring yesterday and perhaps bring it back when businesses like yours can't pull off fraud or needlessly avoid US citizens.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
IT and computers used as "IT" are in late adoption as a technology. They are a commodity. Cost reduction is the only value added, relatively speaking.
It's the same any other other technology that is fully mature. Consider paper as a technology. Nobody makes a lot of money being involved in making paper or in using paper. Journalism and book writing is not a "money making profession" except for a tiny number of "super stars". For the average worker, it's a shit job. Same with IT now.
Businesses are created to maximize profits for the shareholders/stockholders, who in turn reward the CEOs/upper level managers, not the actual workers who keep the business afloat.
And still write the top 5 company executives a $40million bonus, while keeping another $20million each in reserve for executive golden parachutes if they run the company into the ground.
There are far too many people with the "You're Lucky to Have a Job! What!?!? You Expect it to Pay you A Living?!?!?!"
You mod me troll. You should mod me terse and realize my point is valid.
It seems apparent to me, why not everyone else?
IT wages are not flat, you need to be your own IT business owner to not complain.
Sincerely,
Dumasses
Not only do they get around the requirement for a degree, fraud is used for declaring that they have a degree or that they are qualified for the job.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Globalization is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum and promotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom
Casteism
Because of capitalism.
Because of capitalism, if feel that I'm not being paid what I'm worth, I am free to market my services to competing employers. Try doing that in a command economy, where there are no competing employers because the State owns all means of production!
there's almost always someone willing to do it for less.
That works in our favor when it's time to, say, get a haircut. I'm better off when I go to the barber that charges $12, instead of the barber that charges $16. The one with the more competitive price gets rewarded with my business.
Maybe you're not like me: do you seek out the most expensive barber you can find, because you feel sorry for the way the other barbers are undercutting him? Hmm, I didn't think so.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Shit, you merkins are madder than I thought.
And you're making $10 an hour and think that efficient code is unnecessary. Pull the other one.
1) Cloud hosting/SAAS/PAAS
2) Outsourcing.
#6495ED - cornflower blue
I think a lot of companies these days believe that IT/tech is overhead and not part of the core business. Part of that problem is most managers have no idea how it works, it just works. they toss money at a problem a result is produced. never understanding what went into making that result or what it takes to maintain it. they just know when they click they get
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
Spoken like a middle manager who has no idea how much their low quality IT is impacting performance of other workers or hindering their business. They think a professional is expensive, but they are shoveling money with no results.
In car analogy, they would rather pay someone to take apart their car with a $200 set of craftsman tools and no experience, then take it to a mechanic who can do the same job at book rate in 1/4 to 1/10 of the time. They think it's a bargain because they are getting more hours, meanwhile less is getting done and it's getting done in the worst possible way.
===
Perhaps the processes for training are the same our community as you have in yours.
In the Montreal Quebec area of the country we have several colleges (CGEPS) and Universities (McGill, Concordia, UQUAM, Ecole Polytechnique, Univ of Sherbrooke and more. The introduction to CS are done via the CGEPS. Students come out with Java, C++, Networking (TCP/IP), C, GUI design, database (Postgresql or mysql) and Linux expertise.
To graduate from CGEP or University, they must do a 16 week intern-ship in a software house. To graduate from a CS degree from University they must have first graduate from CGEP (4 semesters).
The CGEP graduates here are very well skilled, They know subversion, git, and learn beyond fundamental algorithms. Some continue to University to complement their education with mathematics and CS engineering. (Bachelor Degree after 6 semesters of progressive work). For a subset of them, a masters degree in CS is their education path. And the demand for these new semi-experienced graduates is phenomenal.
My own experience with two different CGEP level interns in successive years was amazing. I gave each a project that was matched to 16 weeks work. The intern had to create a power point presentation of his work, make a classroom presentation, had to demonstrate his working software to his professors and present grammatically technically complete well organized written documentation.
In Quebec, the CGEPS and Universities are not-for-profits, meaning that the CGEP year would cost the student about $1500 per semester. The university is about $2000/semester for six progressive semesters.
Want hardware design and interface or even kernel or device driver modules? Most of these graduates could do it. Is that the level of training of your entry level people?
Yet the people that you quote came in under much more "nationalist" and "draconian" immigration policy - back when they still had honest-to-goodness quotas and/or laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act(up to 1943).
I'm speaking some very painful truth - where desperation is what they have and what no US Citizen is to ever endure.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
i bet serfs working the land under feudal lords asked a similar question about farming.