It all comes down to economics. When you first graduate and get a job, you are a burden on your employer. Your exeperience will mean that development time will likely be longer, and the likelyhood of errors and bugs will be much higher. Therefore, you will actually cost the company money.
As a software engineer, we develope a product which is in many cases, the only sourece of income. Executives, accountants, secretaries and all the other support staff still need to get paid, and the longer we take to make a product that can start getting money coming in, more money that will need to be spent to maintain all this support staff.
When I went out on site for support, I discovered that the company was chargine over $500/h for my time. I was seeing less than $25/h of that. But this can give you an indication of the overhead a company has.
But rest assured, as your experience grows, so will your salary. Mine doubled in the first 2 years and has continued to rise since. Your first few years, you are working for experience, not pay. In my first year as a software engineer, I learn't way more than I ever did at uni, so just because you work hard at uni and good marks, it means relatively little in the scheme of things.
I hope I've made it clear that the reason you you're paid little is because you make relatively little, but this should motivate you to work hard and refine your skills so you can start being an asset instead of a burden.
Slashdot Mirror
It all comes down to economics. When you first graduate and get a job, you are a burden on your employer. Your exeperience will mean that development time will likely be longer, and the likelyhood of errors and bugs will be much higher. Therefore, you will actually cost the company money.
As a software engineer, we develope a product which is in many cases, the only sourece of income. Executives, accountants, secretaries and all the other support staff still need to get paid, and the longer we take to make a product that can start getting money coming in, more money that will need to be spent to maintain all this support staff.
When I went out on site for support, I discovered that the company was chargine over $500/h for my time. I was seeing less than $25/h of that. But this can give you an indication of the overhead a company has.
But rest assured, as your experience grows, so will your salary. Mine doubled in the first 2 years and has continued to rise since. Your first few years, you are working for experience, not pay. In my first year as a software engineer, I learn't way more than I ever did at uni, so just because you work hard at uni and good marks, it means relatively little in the scheme of things.
I hope I've made it clear that the reason you you're paid little is because you make relatively little, but this should motivate you to work hard and refine your skills so you can start being an asset instead of a burden.
Thankyou for that link to the Acts of Gord.
I spent hours reading through it tonight, sometimes in tears it was so funny.
Its good to see that there are other people our there that are tired putting up with stupidity as well.
I recommend everyone has a quick browse. Classic reading.