2010 Salary Survey Highlights IT Woes 332
CWmike writes "Trapped between flat salaries and ever-increasing workloads, IT professionals are about to explode. That's the top takeaway from Computerworld's 2010 survey of nearly 5,000 IT workers. 'Bonuses and benefits are way down, and workloads and work hours have increased. Meanwhile, salaries are stagnant (rising just a microscopic 0.7% on average), and — not surprisingly — satisfaction is on the wane.' Another finding of note is the shrinking female IT workforce. Have a look-see at how IT fared in your neck of the woods with this smart look-up tool."
Re:You control your own destiny (Score:5, Interesting)
I still find something trouble about the notion "take your happy pill and be glad you have a job..." It's certainly true, but it allows companies to railroad over employees, and not just IT departments specifically. But these companies will suffer if they can't find a way to make up a lack of salary increases with some sort of compensation when the job market opens up.
The bigger point is that IT is not alone in this. All sorts of departments are basically being told to do more with less, and expect no monetary compensation in the short-term for it.
Re:You control your own destiny (Score:3, Interesting)
That's basically what I'm looking at. I've spent enough time working with enough types of obscure proprietary apps to have all sorts of ideas on how to do the concept of them right. There are tons of things that there are niche markets for out there that you'd never think of, and that reality alone is why the existing apps cost a fortune often for old buggy software written in VB6 (or worse). These programs cost tons of money not because they're really any good, but rather because often times there's just no good competition to offer alternatives.
I'm still working my day job, but in my spare time I'm writing a lot of various little tools and such. iPhone development, .NET app development, etc. If any of them turn out to be marketable, then great, I'll market them. If not, I'll probably just put the code under the GPL and give it away. Either way, a lot of time success will be achieved through extra-curricular work - not working a salaried job. It's at least worth a try.
Re:female (Score:4, Interesting)
My sister has been a nurse for many years. I once suggested to her that more men would be willing to work as nurses if they just changed the named. The name "nurse" (also a synonym for breast feeding) is clearly emasculating. There are plenty of men in every other of health care. My sister actually agreed.
Re:You control your own destiny (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are working your way up the tech ladder you should really be living as transient a lifestyle as is possible. This means renting rather than buying a home, not buying roomfulls of furniture (harder to move all of your stuff), limiting debt, etc.
If you are able to be mobile and local opportunities are limited you will always have options elsewhere. I am fortunate that I live in an area that is still growing (Raleigh, NC) so I still have plenty of opportunities locally; I would be in trouble if I had to move right now (house needs work, would need to hire a mover, would probably lose a little money, etc). I know some guys who are stuck in areas like Boston, NYC, Michigan (multiple cities), etc who can't sell their house (not only is no one buying, they owe more than it is worth) which means they can't afford to move at the moment. If I could get them down here I know of multiple jobs they could get but they just can't make a move.
Marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
I love this survey. I write software; it's what my degree is in, and it's what I do.
I can choose "Software developer", "Software engineer", or "Programmer/analyst". I like engineer. It sounds fancy; that's what the concentration was in school.
Salary went up in my region by 6.3% -- that's better than I've seen in 3 years. But what if I choose developer. That's what I call myself on my resume. My salary went down 1%.
That's why this survey is laughable. And they use average. Everyone else in the statistics community switched to median years ago. Where's your sample size per category? And seriously, 10 years experience as the first hurdle? No standard deviation either?
Visa cap increase (Score:1, Interesting)
So many unemployed IT workers, yet according to tech sector managers we don't have enough and need to raise the cap on visas again.
Re:You control your own destiny (Score:5, Interesting)
Its not just money. In my last job (as an engineering grunt in a large corp.), I was paid pretty well. OK, I'll be honest....very well. But they had that attitude; 'be happy we're handing you piles of cash and shut up'. So I left. For less money (initially). They just couldn't figure it out when they tried to get me to come back. Its not just about the money, its about the culture at the company. And theirs stank.
This is why women steer clear of a lot of IT jobs. They have a much greater sensitivity to interpersonal factors. And when a company, or industry, starts playing behaving like assholes, they leave (or just never show up). Women are like canaries in coal mines.
Re:I dunno mang, (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, that, and working for one of the few companies that can afford large pay increases. Ones level of skill really has very little to do with ones salary. I had a job working as a one-man IT dept making something like 30K/year. I wanted more money. My boss said 'you're not worth it', so I quit. Seven month later, after a string of weirdos and losers who would work for that salary, I was offered my job back for nearly double. Three years later I was at 66K/year. But I quit again for another job offering more. Now I am at about 80K/year. New skills needed to 'climb' in this way? Zero.
It was all timing, luck, and playing against the 'unkempt, slovenly IT' type in job interviews.
Re:What?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
From the listing for the job I now hold (emphasis mine):
BS in Computer Science, MS is preferred.
Knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis.
Fluency in two or more of: Java, HTML, JavaScript, AJAX.
Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills.
Working knowledge of Microsoft Windows and Unix (preferably Linux).
Working knowledge of SQL and data warehousing principles.
Knowledge of PHP, Perl or Python a plus.
Open source experience/contribution with any Linux or open-source projects.
The company uses a lot of open-source projects in their work. Being familiar with the open-source community (especially the self-managed, team-oriented development and the community-driven support system) is practically required for the job.
This is what happens when you stop looking for just a "typical corporate IT department" and start looking for actually decent jobs. With no previous paid employment, I'm starting at a salary roughly equal to the average given by the linked search. You may now be astounded.
Re:female (Score:1, Interesting)
If you're female there is no reason to go into IT... nursing pays better, comes with better benefits, better hours, way less stress, no bullying from male coworkers, no worries about your job going offshore to Inida, more respect from the general community, just a better future period.
In fact males should also go into nursing, but constantly being made fun of (such as being called Gaylord Focker) might be too much to take for most men. However, it is undeniable that healthcare is the wave of the future in the United States; aging population and an entitlement mentality ("I deserve free healthcare as a Gaea-given right") means the demand for healthcare will grow and grow and never stop growing until the nation is bankrupt. So men should suck it up, go back to school and get a medical degree, and leave the codemonkeying to the Indians.
This seems to hold true for many professions where it is male dominated. Look at the physical sciences in academia. Very few woman are stupid enough to do 60 hours a week working after spending 10-15 years of advanced schooling and then 3-6 more years of advanced training and only get paid 80k a year if you're lucky. The job application is a pain and very competitive plus once you have the job you're no longer doing science but spending all your time writing to get more money so others can do the science for you. Not to mention putting off childbearing until their thirties or later.
And yes I am a man and stupid enough to go through this crap. I'd rather do this then deal with MDs. Hell I'd rather open my wrists then deal with MDs most of the time - quicker, cheaper and more efficient.
Depends where you are (Score:2, Interesting)
The report there lumped where I am now (Alaska) with the job hell I just left (Oregon/Washington). I'm looking at an 18% raise for next year and I still get almost three months off.
I moved up here and had three offers within a month of getting here and had one of the places I turn down call me back and offer 5% more.
I figure by 2011 I'll be able to get another 20-25% in salary.
So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
If I were a betting man, I would say that anything which isn't tied to locality and is not specialist/niche in nature is doomed to become as crappy as any normal job. Locality is real important because boilerplate services which are not niche such as auto maintenance are highly localised to the customer, and hence a mechanic or plumber in a rich neighbourhood will tend to earn loads for identical work done elsewhere. Compare auto maintenance costs between Berlin and Addis Ababa for example.
As my daddy said to me many, many years ago, the secret to high earnings and excellent work conditions in the free market is to be perceived by those with money as being able to do something valuable which is perceived as hard to find elsewhere. I know a guy who fits spiral staircases - he's good at it, but his talents are hardly unique. Yet Elton John had him fit a spiral staircase in one of his houses a few years ago, then the other celebs saw it and suddenly he's putting in spiral staircases all over the world and charging six or seven times the normal cost. In the end, it is cheaper to pay seven times the odds and avoiding finding your own worker when your opportunity cost per hour is like US$500!
The second thing my daddy said to me is to leave the free market when you start thinking of having children. The free market will throw you away if you get sick or you lose your reputation which someone influential can easily cause. He suggested a highly unionised public sector job where if you feel a bit peaky you can just go on sick leave for twenty years. Personally, I wish there were some middle ground between excellence being rewarded and the dead but safe hand of guarantee, but we as a society are still too torn between the old Babylon myth even after all these millenia later
I would also say that from my personal perspective as a specialist IT consultant, work is still paying US$750-1000/day upwards but the recession means that there is simply a lot less of such work, so much so that you have to find other sources of income which are usually totally unrelated to IT as so to prevent reputation damage. However in my subjective opinion there is certainly no pressure to reduce payments for high quality specialist work, if anything in some fields the rate is actually rising as more skilled professionals quit permie jobs for their own IT consultancy business. At the top end things keep on getting better, and at the bottom they keep on getting worse. Just like the wage gap in all Western countries since the 1980s!
Cheers,
Niall
Re:You control your own destiny (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why women steer clear of a lot of IT jobs. They have a much greater sensitivity to interpersonal factors. And when a company, or industry, starts playing behaving like assholes, they leave (or just never show up). Women are like canaries in coal mines.
Exactly. And then various people start hand-wringing, asking "why aren't more women in IT or engineering", and trying to "fix" the problem, when in fact there's no problem at all. Women have seen that these careers mostly suck, and have decided to pursue other careers instead. I'm an engineer, and I wouldn't recommend this job to anyone unless they're the type of person (like me) who simply can't see themselves doing anything else in life. I know I never would be any good as a manager or really any job where I need to interact with people a lot, so basically for me it's either engineering (as an individual contributor) or some type of skilled labor like auto mechanics. Engineering obviously pays better (though it's debatable how much), so that's what I went with. If you have any people skills at all, I'd recommend doing something else for a living. However, if you live outside the USA, this advice should be ignored, as things are very different elsewhere. Germany, for instance, is still very strong in engineering, and I doubt companies there treat their engineers as poorly as American companies do.
Meh, what is IT? (Score:3, Interesting)
Really, what is this IT sector. Does it include EA? Id? IBM? The guy who fixes the printer? The help desk retard who tells you to reboot?
If you read some slashdot posts, you might almost think that programmers do not belong in IT at all. Or at best are a minor influence.
So, whose job is going down the drain?
I can only speak from my own experience in Holland (un-employment rate 3.9%, that is socialism for you, suck it yanks) and yes, some people are loosing their jobs and finding it hard to find new ones. But having done my fair share of interviews, I am not entirely sure these people belong in the industry anyway.
Come on, what developer can't answer the question of what a join is? What debug tools do you use?
I got jobs from intern to senior but I expect you to be worth your salary. Don't come to me demanding a senior salary if you fail questions I knew when I was a junior. And no, I don't care if you don't know every function or the correct order of parameters. I want to know you understand the concepts behind the tools you use and that you know how to test that what you build works works as it should and how to start tracing problems.
Is that to much to ask? Well, yes, for a lot of people it seems to be.
So I am not surprised with current situation in the US. We had this before, in a recesion the dead wood is sorted out and salaries for the barely adequate settle down. The rest, the few who actually are any good at their job do fine. My own salary has been steadily rising. Not because I am a genius, far from it, but because I am an above average coder. And yes, that does mean that I am on occasion dealing with outsourced work, testing it and fixing it. Can't blaim them. It is not that we don't want to hire western developers, but there just aren't any. Not good ones.
Please tell me that expecting a medior web developer to know what a join is, is not to much to ask.
Re:"shrinking female IT workforce"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"shrinking female IT workforce"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Rate of inflation (Score:3, Interesting)
There needs to be a Web site with a well-maintained registry of companies that treat their IT workers this way. It could be modelled after the various consumer-protection sites that inform people about scams and abuses in the marketplace. The goal would be that such companies have terrible difficulty finding anyone in IT who actually wants to work for them while the talent flocks to their competitors. This could save many people from having to invest their time and hard work before they find out what you did. It's deplorable that taking three gallons of milk and paying for one of them is called stealing, but receiving 3X work and paying 1X salary is called management.
Many other industries have unions to address the same problems. The trouble with that is that a union is like any other bureaucracy; the organization takes on a life of its own that is often at odds with its original purpose. A loosely organized, grassroots type of effort based on reputation and the open exchange of information might remedy some of these problems without all of those disadvantages. What I know for sure is that this kind of mistreatment is most successful when it's unopposed.
Re:I dunno mang, (Score:3, Interesting)
I have worked in IT for 30 years. To me, you sound like a staffing company recruiter.
if you want to make more money, you need to ALWAYS be thinking on what skills you could acquire to achieve that goal.
Of course recruiters will always say that, no skin off their noses. Truth is: you can acquire all the skills you want, if you don't have recent, paid, professional, enterprise-level, verifiable, experience, in those skills, then your skills count for nothing. Don't take my word for it, look at the job ads.
Don't sit on your ass in the same job for a decade. Change teams, companies, industries, roles.
Yeah, great advice, employers just love job hoppers - ask any employer about what they think of job hoppers. IMO: one of the key reasons that US employers have such a strong preference for offshore guest workers is that offshore quest workers can not easily change loves.
Guess what?
Offshore resources job hop as well. Ever in your 30 years of IT hear of a Bangalore lunch? That's where they offshore resource is fed up, goes to lunch, gets a job and doesn't call back.
We had a guy in Mexico do exactly the same thing, he was fed up, and just walked.
Back in the 80, under Greenspan, employees got used to the cyclic nature of business, they stopped feeling safe. Because the figured that as soon as there was a downturn, their job was toast. Now us peons have taken our lesson from the people at the top and have the balls to walk and find another job once management starts bringing in less experienced peons for more money than we're making; because that's what the market is paying. We have taken a lesson, from the people at the top.
Job hopping will be a way of life as long as employees don't feel comfortable and raises don't at least equal the market. And that doesn't take domain specific knowledge into account. It takes a long time to bring engineers up to speed on the enterprise specifics, yet most companies don't value that. They're quite happy to give out 2 and 4% raises, when the market is good, but pay the guy coming in 10% more than they were paying last year.
So yeah, we're not going to stick around, when the market is good, deal. The sharp guys are smart enough to know when we're getting the shaft.
Re:Exactly. (Score:1, Interesting)
What's paid overtime?
Well, in Canada, getting paid for over time is the law. Check with your government and you will probably find similar laws protecting you. A lot of companies insist that these laws don't exist and as long as you don't check they'll get away with not paying you.
Re:Accountants and marketers running the show... (Score:1, Interesting)
We learn what relational databases are, not how to do an installation of SQL Server 2008. What SOA represents to standardization and business intelligence, not how to set up the ESB, write adapters, etc.
This is exactly the wrong attitude to be taking. Unless you know the nitty-gritty details about any technology, you won't truly understand its implications, and thus can't make good decisions regarding its use.
This is why we have so many managers who think that MySQL is a relational database that's equivalent to Oracle. They know at a high level what a relational database is, and they know that MySQL is cheaper than Oracle, but they don't realize that going with MySQL will likely result in lost data, performance problems and severe scalability issues because it's technologically-inferior to Oracle. Then when everything goes to hell, that manager doesn't realize that he made a bad decision, and instead blame some IT underling who was just using the technology that was hand-picked by that manager!
Since you guys are pretty much fucking clueless about the technologies you're working with, you buy into all of the marketing hype surrounding the buzzword technology of the day. SOA is a good example of this. Web apps are another. Cloud Computing is by far the biggest fuck-up we've seen in a long time. Huge amounts of resources are being wasted thanks to managers who don't truly understand distributed computing, yet heard from a friend who heard from a marketer from some vendor that Cloud Computing is the cure for all problems.
Re:Accountants and marketers running the show... (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with you completely.
I'm an IT Manager, but I'm very hand-s on as part of my position. So I can easily fill the role of whatever IT Skillset we need at any given moment.
Although, even then, my programming skills suck. I can build a relational database system complete with functions, triggers, etc as needed. I can setup and manage routers, VPN's, etc. I can handle the helpdesk...but if someone needed some C# written, I'd be fucked LOL.
Now, progress to my boss, who happens to be (as is most of the small/medium business corporate world) the Director of Finance. I cant pay off the bastard to look at my proposals, and even if he did he wouldn't fucking understand a thing. Same at the executive level...there are NO people understanding technology at that level, but they're making the budgetary and project decisions. THe only saving grace is (finally) they'll actually ask for my input (I'm still trying to get a seat at the big table for the strategic planning sessions so that some clueless executive doesn't promise undeliverable IT solutions).
I still hold and believe though that all this outsourcing will bite a ton of companies in the ass in the future though. I know in my own Relational Database world that from time to time a situational bug creeps into the code - I had one procedure that once went to hell because it was a leap year in code written 3 1/2 years prior to the incident. I was a rookie, and my date formula was wrong for leap years. But it didn't get discovered until the next leap year...and if I had been a lazy fuck that didn't document things properly, and had left the company...that bug could have crippled them at least for a little while. Outsorucing o the lowest bidder is just asking for a product that is likely to have a situational bug that won't be discovered immediately, and when it is the programmer will probably be all but unreachable.
Re:You control your own destiny (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks, man. For the past 10 years, I've worked at the same company which has always trained me and treated me well. Well, that all went to hell in a handbasket when we were sold. Now I'm frustrated, pay frozen for 3 years, they want more and compinsate less. Benefits are costing more, what benefits they didn't cut.
You are absolutely right in being proactive. I'm honing my Linux/UNIX skills, scripting skills, and even thought about participating in an open source program. I did in fact notice a co-worker who has participated in an open source program and he really does stand out.
Post your resume on Dice.com and start looking for a new job. They're out there.
Re:You control your own destiny (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting..for me is only about the money. I mean, let's face it...if I didn't have to work for a living, say if I won the powerball jackpot, I'd never work again. To me a job is only a means to an end...the end being having enough money to live my life in the lifestyle I prefer. I like to travel, have nice cars and other toy...go out, party..etc.
I'm certainly not defined in any manner by my job. Don't get me wrong, I like to futz around with computers, so what I do is always somewhat fun, but, if I didn't have to work, I would not do so.
Re:and please raise your hand (Score:2, Interesting)
Then he'd ask them if the number on his spreadsheet was close to what they made today. Jaws would drop - it was always so close. It was funny but instructive. The company (most large corps are this way) would give existing employees a standard 'performance variable' increase, more standard than performance based. Meanwhile the outside world was seeing real wage inflation. So to get new hires out of college it would cost 15% more than a five-year experienced current employee.
Between that and seeing all the 52-year olds getting early retirement 'packages' - I knew then not to try keeping the 30 year career with one company route. So I took the path of more adventure and changed jobs every five years (two as noted in the prior post seems a bit too short).
The key though is to keep your expenses low early on - so you can have a cushion and an FU account built up.
Re:"shrinking female IT workforce"? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's an interesting question. Are strippers fungible? Some of it is looks, some of it is practice, some of it is customer preference.
If they held existing pricing, they could possible make more as a whole(although perhaps less individually) when unmet niche needs were fulfilled by those who would otherwise not strip in better economic situations.
However, increased supply would probably lead to reduced pricing when newbies charge less to steal business, as it were.
Re:female (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll give my little anecdote. My wife went to the hospital on my son's due-date. The wanted to do an NST (No-Stress Test) to make sure the baby was fine and perform a quick ultrasound to make sure fluid levels in the uterus were ok.
The NST consisted of a nurse strapping a heartbeat monitor and contraction sensor or something like that to her belly. They came back in after 30 minutes, looked at the charts and said we were ok. Walked to the ultrasound room, guy does a 20 minute ultrasound and says all is well and we could go home. We were there for an hour tops.
The bill? $1600!!!!! $700 of that was the NST. THEY LITERALLY JUST PUT TWO SENSORS ON HER STOMACH AND QUICKLY GLANCED AT THE RESULTS!!! Insurance covered all but $170 of it, but damn! People don't pay attention to the true costs of these silly little procedures. I'd love to see the price breakdown of those two procedures.