Slashdot Mirror
More Than 60% of Tech Workers Feel They're Underpaid (cnbc.com)
gollum123 writes: Tech workers are the envy of labor market -- they earn some of the highest starting salaries and often command top-notch benefits. But money doesn't always buy satisfaction. Entrepreneur reports that tech workers in major American cities earn an average of $135,000 and yet, a survey of 6,000 tech workers conducted by workplace app Blind and reported by Quartz found that over 60 percent feel they aren't being paid enough. The survey also breaks down how tech workers feel about their pay by company. The five tech companies with the highest percentage of employees who felt they were underpaid shared one important characteristic: They were all founded before 1998. Cisco, Intel, Expedia, VMware and Microsoft employees were the most likely to say that they did not make enough money. Cisco had the highest percentage of dissatisfied employees, with 80 percent telling Blind that they did not feel adequately compensated. Facebook employees, on the other hand, were the most like to say that they are overpaid, with 13.8 percent saying that they felt their employer was overly generous.
they are underpaid and would like to get paid more. I am shocked!!!
;)
That it is not 100%
Just my 2 cents
Entrepreneur reports that tech workers in major American cities earn an average of $135,000 and yet, a survey of 6,000 tech workers conducted by workplace app Blind and reported by Quartz found that over 60 percent feel they aren't being paid enough.
I think this is the Dunning Kruger effect in all it's glory. Tech workers are routinely stricken by it, especially here on slashdot.
but wages declined 12-14%. _Everybody_ is underpaid except the ruling class. We gave up our Unions and with them collective bargaining. Rather than fix a little minor corruption we threw baby out with bath water and we're paying the price.
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They are. The execs at the top are making billions/millions off of stock options. This includes HR and marketing people who are a dime a dozen Andy walking away with millions. On comparison they are underpaid based on their contributions to the company.
Over 100k is really high for an average salary! Perhaps all the millionaires are offsetting all the 40k salaried jobs. So forget "average", I want the Mode
If I calculate the amount of time I actually work rather than look at my yearly salary, I am making less than a lot of non-technical unskilled labor jobs.
Putting in 50-80 hours a week degrades your quality of life and takes much more valuable time away from from family, but cutting down to only 40 hours a week degrades your productivity and puts you on a track to being fired. Tech workers also take less vacation too.
Because IT is a cost center at most companies, the workers are under more pressure from management to prove themselves essential to the bottom line.
When I look at the dollar amount of the projects I manage and the equipment I work on, it's no surprise that I feel I am underpaid, especially due to the nature of responsibility and blame if something goes wrong. Hell, one particular kind of controller is $75,000 and there are twelve of them.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Those ads with impossible requirements with insanely high salaries set unrealistic expectations, when really no one is going to be hired for that job at that wage, it's just a setup to request an H1B, but pleb programmers see it and think they should be getting those salaries... Recruiters did it to themselves!
More Than 60% of Workers Feel They're Underpaid
FTFY
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
When you don't get any cost-of-living increase in your pay for several years and go from doing okay month-to-month, to literally living paycheck-to-paycheck, and your rent is approaching 50% of your monthly take-home pay, then YES, you're underpaid and something needs to be done about it.
Of course in my case it's also much because I'm working through a parasite company (Kelly OCG) and if you ask about a pay increase to cover cost of living increases, they play the finger-pointing game, saying their client is the only one that can authorize that -- but that you're not allowed by their 'company policies' to discuss money with the client. I know I'm not alone in this either, many tech sector workers are 'contingent workers' or 'contract employees' that have to work through these parasitic staffing companies and are more or less used like $20 whores because of it. It's a bad situation that needs to change.
I would think that it would be normal for 50% of people to be paid less than the median salary for any given set of identical positions. so 60% of them feeling underpaid yet having the same job description as their peers who are paid more is lcose to what you might expect.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Maybe it's the ad department but nobody overpays for anything involving web or database work at this point and Facebook is not underpaying any of their ad targeting algorithm makers.
... "on average" every one in the bar is a billionaire.
(see "earn an average of $135,000" for more bad statistics.)
Unions made American industry unstable with strikes and transferred money to organized crime. Costs rose and quality plummeted, so industry outsourced.
If the workers had simply pooled resources to buy voting shares in their company, they would have come out much farther ahead.
The real reason that wages are so low is that there are too many people here with more coming each day. Law of supply and demand, remember?
Alternative Right.
I feel like the statistics are skewed by one or two markets, while obviously not the same market I live in a major Canadian city and no one I know in tech is earning near 135k USD.
13.4% are idiots. I failed the dumb test on the subject line apparently.
I learned to program on my own. My first programming job was when I was still a student in the line of programming. There was another student working there from university, which was higher level school than my own. Because of that, the other student received higher pay than I. This felt wrong to me, because while I was already capable of doing actual work, the other student failed to do his work and his work was reassigned to me so that it would get done.
I was seen the same thing several times later. People in the field of programming simply can't do some task. One example was a senior developer from elite team, who attempted to do some work for a month and then gave up, saying that it was impossible to do. I took the challenge and within a week I had done it. I estimated that because I was able to do this impossible task, it saved half a million dollars to the company per year. Looking at that, yes, I feel underpaid. I get about 55000 dollars per year.
I notice that, since the MS takeover, LinkedIn uses that same annoying interface. You reach the bottom of the initial "page" of posts, click on "Show more", and you're transported to the top of the feed again. If it weren't for browsers having tabs, you'd never find you way back to to where you were before you followed that link.
Maybe the underpaid MS workers ought to get jobs at Facebook: they're already up to speed on the UI.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
"Underpaid" can mean a few things including "I'm not paid enough for the shit I have to put up with."
IT requires seeing some of the worst of humanity, working long hours, and facing constant competition from management which just wants to cut IT costs.
Maybe a solution is to find other ways to cut IT costs, like automating some of these mindless tasks...
Alternative Right.
I have any number of friends in technology fields and over the last 10 years I've heard the same story "We had layoffs and I wasn't cut but half my department is gone and now I'm doing the work of three or four people; working an extra 3-4 hours a day (and working at least one weekend a month) and I haven't had a raise in 3 years".
Company's are taking advantage of people like this, making them do the work of three or four people and work substantially more hours while paying them the same and basically saying "Just be glad you have a job!".
When I started out in IT, I negotiated my first salary, and wow, I could buy 3 Corvettes a year! But I refrained.
Now 45 years later, I can only, in theory, buy 1.3 Corvettes a year. In theory. Sooooo, in effect my pay has more than halved since I started.
Actually, I should also say this is why most tech workers believe they are underpaid as they know of people in silicon valley earning twice or more their salary.
$135,000 is good outside of the bay area!
Cisco, Intel, Expedia, VMware and Microsoft employees were the most likely to say that they did not make enough money.
No kidding? Cisco, Intel, and VMWARE are located in Silicon Valley, where cost of living is astronomical. Expedia and Microsoft are in Bellevue, WA and Redmond, Wa, where the median cost of a home hovers around $900K.Toss in excessive unpaid overtime, and a person would be crazy not to consider themselves underpaid.
The goals of that IT workers union are something we all can agree on:
OVERVIEW
This document investigates the needs of Information Technology workers and the likely parameters of an IT Workers Union.
GOALS
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Historically the goals of Unions have not always been about pay. the first Trade Unions (beyond mere guilds) in the USA were the Train Worker's union. Their the goals were about quality of life and longevity of careers. Their promise to the bussinesses was that in return they would be able to develop a more professional class of tranin worker and decrease expensive accidents. This actually did work out pretty well. Train workers were scheduled so they would return home every couple weeks rather than having to flop in railroad owned hotel-bars. The bars in the company owned flop houses were closed down. Merit based pay was insituted. And train wrecks did decrease and on-time schedules got better. It was only later that the collective bargaining began to focus on having worker's capture a larger slice of the profits. But even then Unions recognize that growing the pie was as important to wages as the slice of the pie they got. However like all things some weird dynamics set in, in which collective bargaining at Ford would set the wage rate at GM too. All ford cared about was making sure any price rise they incurred was felt by GM too and vica versa. Pass it along to the consumer. So Unions and management became less focused on keeping the company competitive as they could both pass along the costs. They paid dearly when foreign imports ate their lunch. As a results Unions got a bad name.
But the idea that a union can foster career development that benefits an industry as opposed to treating workers as disposable cattle is still valid.
However Millenials dont' seem to subscribe to the idea of career longevity. So Unions aren't going to happen in the IT industry.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Have you seen what plumbers and electricians charge nowadays? Why in hell should programmers, who require more skill/education get paid any less?
. . . or go out and get a better paying job. There's literally never been a better time to do either. It's a total employee job market right now, especially in technology.
I disagree. You can't just talk about total salary. You also need to consider the number of hours worked since programmers are usually required to work a lot more hours than anyone else. I make more than twice as much as my project manager who is also on salary, but she only works 35 hours a week since she has to leave early to pick up her kids. I usually work over three times that many hours a week, so I'm making less per hour. I don't think it's wrong for me to think I need to be paid more.
We give generous stock options that won't dilute until they're vested (in 5 years). We also have a foozball machine and pay the grubhub delivery fee for employees that work more then 80 hours a week.
If you're interested in making the world a better place by copy-pasting shitty javascript code and can pivot weekly, or have a rich dad that wants to get into "that VC stuff", DM our instagram.
All the money that companies used to spend on technology went to marketing. We are on the age of "Bending Reality with Marketing" not on the age of actually doing things.
if $100,000 is the poverty level in San Francisco and you're paid $135k, then it's not an issue of greed is it...
Besides, if you make the product, you make the money, so why shouldn't you be compensated appropriately? It's not like shareholders do anything of value whatsoever.
You are incorrect. Companies intentionally move jobs to lower cost of living areas so that they can pay employees less. This is especially pronounced in older companies that have offices scattered across the US. I could feel underpaid because I know my counter parts in California are paid more than me but honestly I get paid good money for the area I live in. The company can save money, and still pay me more based on the local cost of living. Those people in high cost of living areas like California are struggling because of competition from other states.
It's been renamed the Trump Effect after the person who displayed so much of it to so many on so many fronts.
But CEOs get the salary they rightfully deserve, right? Does this also include the government bailouts and the golden parachutes?
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
she only works 35 hours a week since she has to leave early to pick up her kids. I usually work over three times that many hours a week
You only have nine hours per day for breakfast, lunch, dinner, hygiene, commute, sleep, every other aspect of your life, and you are posting midday on slashdot on a monday? Incredulous.
"since programmers are usually required to work a lot more hours than anyone else."
[Citation Needed]
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I just posted in the other article about how my last two job changes each nearly doubled my take-home pay, and that my next move will be a strategic move to inoculate myself from offshoring and H1B issues. I've chosen my next company and listed which skills I need to have on my resume when I apply there, 10 months from now.
> It's a bad situation that needs to change.
Okay, your situation is bad and needs to change. What are you doing to change it?
Come on, every field is full of blowhards and egos.
There is some evidence narcissism may have an evolutionary advantage under the right circumstances.
See, evolution made me an asshole, it's not my fault ;-)
Table-ized A.I.
The higher pay in California does not make them better off. I make about $130k but my house and other expenses are low and my quality of life blow my Cali colleagues out of the water--in the same company. They make more than me but barely scrape by driving old cars and shitty clothes...and they are always working on their expensive ass houses. Houses they are not proud of.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
> work for a month and then gave up, saying that it was impossible to do. I took the challenge and within a week I had done it. I estimated that because I was able to do this impossible task, it saved half a million dollars to the company per year.
That's the kind of thing you document and discuss at your performance review. You can also call out those achievements on your resume.
I just posted in the other article about how my last two job changes each nearly doubled my take-home pay, so I'm making about four times as much as I did a few years ago.
I make more than twice as much as my project manager who is also on salary, but she only works 35 hours a week since she has to leave early to pick up her kids. I usually work over three times that many hours a week, so I'm making less per hour. I don't think it's wrong for me to think I need to be paid more.
I read that as you need to be paid at least half as much as you do now and your company needs to hire another person to do half your workload. Do I qualify for an MBA now?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
For example, the average income in Ireland is about 45,000 euro. But the median - what the typical average Joe earns is 18,000 which you cant love on here. Immigrants take note! It's not that we don't want you. It's that there's literally nothing here for you so if you come, we all get less than nothing
I'm a EE. I worked in tech for 20 years. I only got a raise when I switched jobs, and worked comically hard for what I was paid.
I switched to finance and I started off making 2.5 times what I did doing engineering work. My next move will double what I make now again, maybe a little more.
If you're smart enough to do tech, you're smart enough to do something else. Do not work in tech as an employee. If you do, work only long enough to do something else or acquire enough capital to set yourself up to engage directly with the market - e.g. own your own company, be it software, consulting, or better yet, something like law or accounting and make use of the tech skills to lower overhead.
Folks have no idea how much money gets made. If they'd did they'd riot. Or at least unionize.
I'll be able to retire at 45. If I worked in tech, I'd still be struggling to have any savings.
YMMV and there are exceptions everywhere. Get a large enough sample pool and the trends are very clear.
..don't panic
... in lake Woebegone, all the children are above average.
Actually, I should also say this is why most tech workers believe they are underpaid as they know of people in silicon valley earning twice or more their salary.
I work for a large publicly traded company. Part of the federal regulation mandates that it publishes median employee compensation (excluding C level management). This raw number is meaningless because we have offices in multiple states within the US and multiple countries (not to mention it includes everything from Software Engineers to Receptionists). My own commutable area has two distinct areas: one averaging 90k per year and the other averaging 70k per year for "IT workers". Five years ago the areas were swapped.
This is typically the end result when wages do not keep pace with cost of living or inflation. It's been this way for quite a long time now.
This is also subjective based on where you live.
$130k doesn't go nearly as far in San Francisco or New York as it does in Houston or $lower_cost_of_living_city
If there wasn't such a huge discrepancy in pay for the various positions versus management and chairpersons then that wouldn't be the consensus.
If we work and save the company money, we don't get a bonus.
When overpaid CEOs save the company money, they get a bonus.
WTF.
#DeleteFacebook
You sure do! Here you go.
#DeleteFacebook
I've never met anybody who felt like they were overpaid unless they were actively showing up as a leach waiting to get fired.
So shocking....
Meals can be eaten while working.
Commuting.. the person could work from home.
That leaves 9 hours for hygiene, sleeping, and whatever else they might want to do. Which.. could be done, but it would be a really shitty life and I imagine would quickly lead to some extreme burnout.
I think if you ask anyone, they'd think they're being underpaid. Not just tech people, but anyone. From the small business owner who barely makes minimum wage (running a business is hard work), to the janitors who break their backs nightly mopping floors to the CEOs who always believe they need more.
I don't think there's anyone who would answer that they make enough money right now.
without money
And what happens when you buy stock in a company like General Motors and they fold the legal entity rendering the stock worthless? Or how about Hostess where they sold the brand and machinery so they could raid the pension fund and bust what was left of the Union?
Workers can't absorb the losses that ruling class have. And they can't buy off politicians the same way to get bail outs. The working class needs to organize or they lose. That's exactly what's happening now and what every single economist (who doesn't work for a right wing think tank) says is the cause of declining wages.
As for organized crime, would you shut down our banking system because sometimes somebody robs a bank? Or would you throw the bank robber in jail? The whole organized crime thing is a red herring to distract from the points I made above.
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I was, like now, waiting on something to compile. Relevant XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/303/
Do you happen to enjoy strategy games? Thinking ahead of a way to achieve the goal and working through it? Your career can be a strategy game, or it can be a series of accidents.
> You're such a genius
If I were a genius, I might not *need* a strategy. As it is, I need a long-term strategy. Right now I'm working on a company that I selected two months ago. I plan to apply probably May 2019, a year after I selected where I wanted to work.
> The only card I have to play is to look for another job and make it clear I'm doing so. If they value me then they'll try to keep me around, if not then nothing of value was lost. Am I right?
That may not be your only card. Making it clear that you plan to leave may well mean you aren't considered for advancement - why invest in training you for the next thing if you're going to leave anyway?
> what the fuck am I SUPPOSED to do about it?
You could start by choosing your goal. Decide on your destination before choosing your route. You could select what kind of position you want and identify two or three companies you want to work for. Glassdoor is one good place to do research. Maybe the company you're actually working for (not the staffing agency) is a place you'd like to work, maybe not.
You can look carefully at the want ads for positions you'd like to have 1-5 years from now, making a list of the skills they want for those jobs. Once you have a list of which skills you need your resume to illustrate in order to get the job you want, you can probably figure out strategies to get the skills and experience that will land you the job you really want. You may be able to practice many of those skills at your current job, volunteering for tasks or projects that give you the experience your next employer is looking for.
when 80% of your populace is living paycheck to paycheck
The productivity gains from the last 40 years have gone completely to the top 1%. When you're barely getting by and your parents did just fine and we've doubled productivity then you better believe you're underpaid. Folks are getting to the point where they notice they've been had.
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It's not like shareholders do anything of value whatsoever.
If that were true, no company would ever go public.
an average of $135,000 and yet, a survey of 6,000 tech workers conducted by workplace app Blind and reported by Quartz found that over 60 percent feel they aren't being paid enough.
The AVERAGE includes all those rockstars who make millions and the near-retirement specialists who are the last surviving member who knows just WTF is going on and the company cannot survive without them. Also all the millionaires in SanFran who can't afford a lean-to dilapidated shack. You'd be wanting to look at the median, and even then split it out across different cities or different Cost-of-Living rates. And (all?) those old companies have workers across the globe.
Listen, statistics is hard. Sociology even harder. This is a bullshit sub-journalist blip just made to start an argument. It's not science.
"Feels" - what a joke /. has become.
"I think this is the Dunning Kruger effect [wikipedia.org] in all it's glory."
ha ha you can't even tell its from it's...
I'm a tech worker and one of the reasons I left a staffers job to become a consultant was management. Management believe that because they are "above you" in the food chain they should be paid more to justify their position. When really the opposite is true. Without the skills you would have nothing to manage but then again that isn't just applied to the tech industry
I doubt you usually work over 15 hours a day, 7 days a week. And if you do, it's because you aren't any good at your job, which a competent person would be able to do in less than half the time.
Either way, you don't need to be paid more.
If you are being underpaid, that means there are other companies paying more. If there are no company paying more, you are not underpaid.
I'll be able to retire at 45. If I worked in tech, I'd still be struggling to have any savings.
You expect to retire at 45, and yet...
I worked in tech for 20 years.
What's your life expectancy? 50? Or do you count those 20 years in tech starting from birth?
Even if you started working at 16 and left tech at 36, you'll earn/make enough in 9 years to last 30 or 40 years of retirement? Either you're making a lot more than 2.5 times what you were, or you're vastly understating how much you made and saved/invested during those 20 years in tech.
Most employees of tech firms are not techies.
And most of your options won't vest.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Money isn't everything.
I work for a well-known US charity. The job satisfaction alone is worth the pay difference.
If they paid me what I'm worth on the open market, the charity's clients would suffer.
Don't worry, I'm paid more than enough to live on. Would I trade my job for a bigger paycheck in the corporate world? Only if I really needed the extra money.
If you are hiring me, I expect to be able to cover my cost of living and then some.
This means housing within a 45-minute commute that's AT LEAST in the "top half of the bottom half" of the housing market, tuition for my kids at a good school if the local school isn't good, food, utilities, etc. etc.
Oh, and I'm "redlining out" any area that is too dangerous to live, too far away from a grocery store to shop, too far from medical, police, fire, and other essential services for me to want to live in, any place I wouldn't want my kids to grow up in, any place without decent telecommunications and other utilities, etc. even if they aren't in the "bottom quarter" of the local housing stock.
So, if you are in San Francisco, prepare to shell out. If you are in some middle-sized city east of Colorado and west of the expensive East Coast states, I'll work for a lot less.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
We need a wambulance. Shattup and change jobs.
80% of all workers feel they're underpaid
95% of people feel they're underappreciated.
So at 60% unhappy, relatively, tech workers are doing pretty fucking well!
(See how useless stats can be out of context, in case you missed the actual point of this post?)
-Styopa
Why on earth would you work so many hours per week? It's not healthy.
I agree. Bear in mind this is what they think, and I'm not sure if you can even get a reliable answer for whether they actually are or not.
If there's a surprise, it's that the percentage is so low.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Most tech workers ARE underpaid. Because most tech workers are not rock star coders. They are sysadmins, and network engineers who slave over keyboards all day building/running/maintaining systems for large/middle/small companies. Thanks to contracting it's getting worse. I work for one of the top 100 most profitable companies in the world but as a contractor. I pull $60,000/year. If I was an internal staff member I would begin on $70,000/year and with my current skills/experience would be on $90,000/year based on other workers in my area. So I am basically being ripped off $30,000 for being a contractor. Hell we had one employee jump ship in the same are to take up $130,000. Now she admittedly had qualifications/experience beyond my own, but I was able to fix equipment that she couldn't. Pay is not really related to what you are really worth. I suggest that everyone analyse your conditions closely and jump ship when you need to. Remember the golden rule: No company or boss is going to be loyal to you. Punch your 2-3 years so you don't look like a flight risk and move on if the conditions aren't what you need.
I make more than twice as much as my project manager who is also on salary, but she only works 35 hours a week since she has to leave early to pick up her kids. I usually work over three times that many hours a week, so I'm making less per hour. I don't think it's wrong for me to think I need to be paid more.
I read that as you need to be paid at least half as much as you do now and your company needs to hire another person to do half your workload. Do I qualify for an MBA now?
I read that as "my project manager is underpaid because she's a woman"
And the tech workers *in* Silicon Valley know of people elsewhere making twice as much after adjusting for the cost of living. (Alternatively, they know of people who own a house that's bigger than 600 square feet.)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Most of these report are based off on US markets; and while private sectors in Canada doesn't pay as well as its US counterpart, you will find plenty of tech workers making the Ontario sunshine list each year making well over 100k
Hypothetical:
You run a tech startup with 10 employees, including yourself.
Your employees are all paid $15/hr.
You pay yourself $250/hr.
The average pay at your startup is $38.50/hr, despite the fact that not a single employee makes anything close to that figure.
Tl:Dr - excessive pay to upper management really fucks up the charts.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Anyone who make more than $100,000 a years and feels underpaid is too stupid to live. Die, please. Die now.
I wouldn't say that I'm "not paid enough" based on how much money I need, but based on the amount of money my employer makes off my work, definitely.
Companies intentionally move jobs to lower cost of living areas so that they can pay employees less.
I wish there was more of that. There's no reason to add to population density that's already out of control and there are a lot of other great places to live than Silicon Valley. And companies really should be smart enough to find a productive way to spend less on employees rather than just paying badly in a high-rent area.
I have a colleague in California that commutes an hour one way because living closer to our office there would just cost to much. He get's paid more than I do but not enough to make up for the difference in the cost of living. He's started talking about asking the company to transfer him out to the mid-west hoping they would let him keep his current salary.
The company I work for has actually more than doubled my salary over the past 2.5 years. Why? Because we have a unified skills matrix and we pay people depending on the knowledge and skills they show every day at work. If you DO give a damn, and care about your craft, you get appreciated. Simple. If you do, however, believe that you deserve more just because someone else earns more, then it's your own fault that you're feeling underpaid. Think things through, start working on improving your abilities and the money will come.
Well, my salary if very nice. However the cost of living for me is very high in Silicon Valley so it doesn't feel like I'm rich. Give me this salary in Kansas and I'd be very well off.
One problem is that for some reason, entry level rates for simplistic tech jobs in Silicon Valley can be very high, like there's not even such a thing as "entry level" any more and you have to work your way up, they're starting in the middle instead. No wonder that their cookie cutter jobs are being outsourced.
To me, don't feel envious of Silicon Valley workers. If you've got a nice three bedroom home with a back yard that you have a good chance of paying off the mortgage to by retirement, and your company is paying for health care, then you're doing awesome.
Is Dunning Kruger like when you think you know how to spell "its," but you really don't?
"Impossible" often means the same thing as "I couldn't find a library that matched my search results" or "we didn't learn this in school".
Technically you can't require someone to work longer hours, legally. Instead you assign tasks and goals and hope they work longer. This especially works for younger workers who seem to think that the long hours are required, or other workers have told them that this is normal. A few long days now and then during a "crunch" is ok but if this is non stop then you should bring it up with your manager or get that resume updated and see the doctor about stress.
Also, time spent at Slashdot does not count towards working hours!
60% of tech workers feel underpaid. In a related note, 60% of tech workers live in some of the highest cost communities in the world. Stay tuned for further details...
Maybe he'll get lucky since its within the same company but I doubt it. At my previous job we interviewed a couple people that were trying to move out of silicon valley, and all of them expected to keep making a SI salary in a place with ~40-50% less cost of living. They all balked when they got an offer
Its one reason I would never move there. In various cost of living calculators to even match what I earn here I would have to make 240-270k in SI. Theres just no way when the average google senior engineer makes ~190k including bonuses. So not only could they not compete with my current salary, I would have to take a huge hit in income just to move there. fuck that noise
So you feel underpaid? Go out and get a better-paying job, where you are paid what you are worth! Oh, you can't find a job that will pay you more? Maybe there's a reason for that! Maybe you aren't worth as much as you think you are!
I've certainly worked with people who feel under-paid, They tend to be the complainers, and they usually need a pay cut more than a pay raise. The good ones are too busy getting things done to complain, and their employers notice and bend over backwards to keep them.
Of course there are exceptions, where people are not paid fairly. But I suspect this is far less common than 60%.
You also need to consider the number of hours worked since programmers are usually required to work a lot more hours than anyone else
I know some doctors who would like to dispute that statement. I happen to be married to one. During her residency she pulled 40 hour shifts with some regularity. Investment bankers are well known for the ridiculous number of hours they put in - 70 hours per week is a slow week for many of them. Many programmers do work very hard but they are hardly unique in working long hours.
Come on, every field is full of blowhards and egos.
True but IT seems stricken with an unusually high percentage of them. That's not to say all or even most IT workers are egomaniacs because that's clearly not true. But there are seemingly a larger than average number of them who seem to think that because they can program a computer that somehow that makes them an expert in all sorts of activities unrelated to programming. For example my work is primarily in manufacturing and the number of programmers I've run into (especially here on slashdot) who think that manufacturing is some trivial exercise that a trained monkey can do is astonishing. They have no idea what they are talking about but are convinced that they have a thorough understanding.
Awwwww... moderated "offtopic" which it isn't. Looks like we have some butthurt FB developers here on /.
Not only are you overpaid, you can't take criticism either.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
$135,000 is freakin' awesome. And, that more than likely includes benefits like health/dental/vision, IRA matching etc.
Do you know how much the rest of us wish we could earn that much?
GP may indeed want to get a new job, or may keep the same job and switch employer's - working directly for the employer rather than for the agency.
That won't solve his or her problem, though. The problem is that they think they are a victim, blown by the winds of fate and the whims of "the man". So long as they keep that manner of thinking and don't plan their own career, or take any responsibility, they'll never win. You can't win a game when you refuse to acknowledge that you're even a player in the game.
I have never met anyone satisfied with their pay... let alone 2 out of 5!
"It costs money"
I wrote an add-on to my companies product and got a bonus for it. A 300k customer changed their mind of switching to another vendor in large part due to this plugin.
I saved my company 180K by submitting a bug report to an open source project. Turns out they were going to buy software because 1 feature of an open source project didn't work. Since I submitted the bug with very easy to reproduce step-by-step instructions, the bug was confirmed in 1 day and fixed withint 30 days.
I saved my company 175k a year for replacing it with a internally built app. The app we bought was like buying an 18 wheeler to handle a 5 mile commute to work for 1. We couldn't edit it. We didn't use 95% of its features.
I increased quality of code among a team of developers that wasn't even my team. Since joining the department I share with them, their code has vastly improved.
I wrote a tool that saved one of our network IT teams three weeks of work. They use it once a year, every year.
Another tool I wrote replaced 2 heads. They were headcount that only makes 45k, but that means they have been saved 90k a year for the past few years.
I took a couple products that caused daily tickets and redesigned them so we never get tickets.
From the perspective of how much money I have made and have saved my company, I am vastly underpaid. However, I am happy with my salary and my company.