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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.
..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.
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.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility
And scalable.
Telcoms allow a worldwide workforce.
Technology has been allowing to leverage up IT staff so you need fewer of them.
Two trends that offer feedback on themselves.
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.
You could. Get some skills, maybe a few certifications. Apply for every possible job that looks remotely interesting.
It's your career- take charge of it. Nobody else will.
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.
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.
It is not the current economic problems. Real wages in Canada and the US have not increased since the early 1980s, and in some cases have dropped. We are still paying the price for the deeply flawed economic policies of Reagan and Mulroney.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
There is some truth to that. IT jobs used to pay significantly more than other jobs that required similar levels of training and skill. Part of what we are seeing now is IT wages coming into line with wages in other industries.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
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.
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.
That's it - the economy doesn't figure out who 'deserves' the most pay, it's supply and demand ... only.
Spoken like a true Libertarian: A sweeping statement with little attention given to reality.
There's a hell of a lot more that factors into pay rates for industries - even at a macro level - than just supply and demand. Industry trends, transfer pricing, changes in goods costs within in an industry, the difference between internal and external facing roles. There's a myriad of factors that go into the equation.
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.
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.
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.
imo, it has nothing to do with demand. The ill organization, of which there are now many - treat IT, its services, and infrastructure as a cost center. That means that when cuts are needed, IT is the first to get singled out as a burden that nobody wants. It's only till after the damage of this kind of thinking takes place, that the least dumb among them realizes what a big mistake it was.
Treating IT as an integral part of a robust and growing organization - and salaries, satisfaction, productivity and success will be more prevalent.
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.
+1 Well said
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.
Look further back and you'll see the middle class has been basically flat since ~60s. It's not the presidents, it's the congress (though I admit the presidents mostly haven't helped). Meanwhile the upper classes have had constantly huge increases in % of income compared to the middle class. Moreover the % of americans who are middle class has dropped significantly over that period.
Simple fact is the economy has slowly been pressed into restructuring over the past 50 years by a bunch of wankers in congress, it's no wonder we're seeing so many extremists these days, look at other countries with middle classes equally small and you'll see the same thing.
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.
You could. Get some skills, maybe a few certifications. Apply for every possible job that looks remotely interesting.
It's your career- take charge of it. Nobody else will.
Nice sentiment, but it's rarely that easy. Take where I live, for example: Southern Indiana. Tech jobs are practically nonexistent, regardless of how much education I have, and the companies around here that have anything to do with tech simply aren't hiring for anything more advanced than tech support monkey, if they're hiring at all. Why is that? It's anyone's guess, but I have a theory:
The folks who have the (few) jobs above tech-support monkey are firmly entrenched in whatever company they work for, and aren't moving up, down, or sideways. They'll be doing that job with that company until they retire or die, which may or may not be their fault, the companies they work for aren't exactly overflowing with tech-based initiatives anyway. But that means if you start working under them, upward mobility is nonexistent.
So you take the only tech related job you can find, some low-level help desk gig, and make just enough to scrape by. Or, if you're lucky, enough to live on and be reasonably comfortable (i.e. can pay all your bills on time). And after a time you want to move up in the tech world. Only you can't move up in your current company because your boss and everyone in the chain of command down to you is 20 years from retirement; you can't go to another local company because they have all of their positions filled, permanently (nobody's going anywhere unless they retire, die, or get fired); you can get certifications (at your own expense, natch. the company isn't going to pay for them, especially if they're not directly related to your current job), but without some kind of actual job to put them to use, they're not going to do much good other than personal improvement; or you could move to where the jobs are, which would be great if you could afford to do that, companies these days aren't going to relocate you unless you're exceptional (and most of us, contrary to what we might think, are not), and since you're spending most of the money you make on living expenses and repaying student loans/certification expenses, good luck saving up enough money to both move to a new city and survive for longer than a month while you try to get a job, which is bad enough if you're a single person. Married and/or have kids? Forget about it. You'll have to save up for years before you have enough resources to move, and by that time your skills from your certs and education will have withered if you haven't been using them, and with your low-level support desk job, they probably will have.
So, what do you do?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Bullshit. It doesn't take much reading to get a feeling for what's really going on.
.: Semper Absurda
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Get off your ass and spend every spare moment creating something or learning something! Make a job for yourself or demonstrate your value so that people come looking for you. Yes it is incredibly hard but it's either that or keep going in the same rut your in now.
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
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.
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.
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?
Yeah, but flying them over and putting them in hotels each time there is an issue would be annoying and take so long.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
You can sell open source software just fine.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Having technology is the richness
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
You could. Get some skills, maybe a few certifications. Apply for every possible job that looks remotely interesting.
It's your career- take charge of it. Nobody else will.
Nice sentiment, but it's rarely that easy. Take where I live, for example: Southern Indiana. Tech jobs are practically nonexistent, regardless of how much education I have, and the companies around here that have anything to do with tech simply aren't hiring for anything more advanced than tech support monkey, if they're hiring at all. Why is that? It's anyone's guess, but I have a theory:
The folks who have the (few) jobs above tech-support monkey are firmly entrenched in whatever company they work for, and aren't moving up, down, or sideways. They'll be doing that job with that company until they retire or die, which may or may not be their fault, the companies they work for aren't exactly overflowing with tech-based initiatives anyway. But that means if you start working under them, upward mobility is nonexistent.
So you take the only tech related job you can find, some low-level help desk gig, and make just enough to scrape by. Or, if you're lucky, enough to live on and be reasonably comfortable (i.e. can pay all your bills on time). And after a time you want to move up in the tech world. Only you can't move up in your current company because your boss and everyone in the chain of command down to you is 20 years from retirement; you can't go to another local company because they have all of their positions filled, permanently (nobody's going anywhere unless they retire, die, or get fired); you can get certifications (at your own expense, natch. the company isn't going to pay for them, especially if they're not directly related to your current job), but without some kind of actual job to put them to use, they're not going to do much good other than personal improvement; or you could move to where the jobs are, which would be great if you could afford to do that, companies these days aren't going to relocate you unless you're exceptional (and most of us, contrary to what we might think, are not), and since you're spending most of the money you make on living expenses and repaying student loans/certification expenses, good luck saving up enough money to both move to a new city and survive for longer than a month while you try to get a job, which is bad enough if you're a single person. Married and/or have kids? Forget about it. You'll have to save up for years before you have enough resources to move, and by that time your skills from your certs and education will have withered if you haven't been using them, and with your low-level support desk job, they probably will have.
So, what do you do?
Work for yourself, leverage the finer points of capitalism and charge less than those jokers. It's easier than you think, if you know helpdesk type stuff start with that and build up. If the opportunity isn't there with some established entity become an established entity.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
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.
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
If you look, you'll see that executive wages skyrocketed in that time. That everyone else's wages were flat proves "trickle down" doesn't work. When everyone's wages rise together, productivity rises faster than it did in that period. It's not the wages that are killing us, it's the income disparity.
Learn to love Alaska
Free market means free on BOTH sides of the market.
Hint: If high profits ostensibly predicted to attract competition from other firms fails to do so, then something fishy is going on.
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
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.