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."
You control your own destiny (Score:5, Insightful)
career experts say you have to take a strategic approach to your job search and application process. The best candidates are always taking steps to manage their careers...
I fully agree. If you sit passively and wait for your next raise, you may be waiting for a while... But if you are proactive, good things eventually happen to you. Contribute [github.com] to an open-source project. Become the co-founder [fairsoftware.net] of a cool iPad app or whatever cool idea people are trading nowdays...
It doesn't pay off instantly, but a year or two later, your resume stands out from the crowd, and more importantly, you may not even need a resume anymore to get a great job!
What?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really?
What jobs are you talking about?
Most of the jobs that actually pay a salary don't give a rat's ass about any F/OSS projects you've worked on. Recruiters want to know what your paid experience was. If you're applying for your typical corporate IT department (read a MS shop), no one really gives a shit. They want their laundry list of skills and at least 2-3 years experience with each.
I would be astounded if someone post a job description that says FOSS experience a plus.
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.
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You're insane, or you're simply not looking in the right places. LAMP jobs are everywhere, and almost always like open source experience.
Bitch about your job-finding experience if you like, but don't claim that only Microsoft folks are hired, it's just simply not true. Plus, your argument conveniently ignores companies like Canonical, where open source simply is everything.
Re:What?!? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually as a person currently look to hire F/OSS experience would be a definite plus. It shows that an applicant is really interested in the field and the work. Granted, we're not the corporate IT office you refer to, but if an applicant for our software position (if anyone is curious and interested in north central FL.... http://tdt.com/news/jobs/softwareengineer.htm [tdt.com]) was actually interested enough in programming to do outside projects that would be a positive.
In general you need something to make you stand out, and contributing to or starting a project is a reasonable way to stand out. I interviewed some current master's students and was optimistic until it was clear that they did exactly what coursework required but weren't interested in exploring for their own interest.
Re:What?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed, but if you think this ends with their hiring practices you are probably in your early twenties. An IT shop that isn't excited about an applicant's FOSS experience will never be a positive work environment.
Caveat mancipior.
Re:What?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to look at interoperability problems and then blame them on the Open Source folks who use open standards. So perhaps people agree with you, in a way, and are just more up-front about where to assign the blame. Not to mention that it will forever remain a "Microsoft ruled world" if no one is ever willing to value alternatives.
Honestly you don't sound very happy or content to me. You sound angry and venomous. If you have a great source of joy in your life, something that makes it easy have patience and be at ease with all the things you don't like, you seem rather selective about expressing it. Even if you're right and they are indeed foolish, why would the opinions of some "fanbois" take away your happiness by making you so upset?
If someone has no formal training and still managed to become an important part of a real software project, doesn't that tell you something about his or her resourcefulness and ability to take initiative? Why do you believe they would fare poorly in an environment like an office that comes with additional advantages like structure, training, clearly spelled-out expectations, and financial compensation?
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I can't bring myself to believe that you have 15 years of experience in the IT industry and don't know the rea
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I can't bring myself to believe that you have 15 years of experience in the IT industry and don't know the real value of these "certificates". They exist solely to help HR tick off the appropriate box on an application.
in my eyes, you are a bit overly-cinical. Sure those certificates are mostly checkboxes for HR, but i can state from my own experience that getting my sun certificates really helped me in my first job, partly since i didnt do a pure CS/IT study.
now microsoft certs (where candidates get testkings a few days before the exam), those are worthless in my eyes. At best they prove the person has the ability to memorize a couple hundred multiple choice question/answer combos
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Not entirely. If everything else is equal the guy with the cert gets the job. I understand that all the cert does is show you can attend a boot camp but it does bring a measurable skill set with it. For instance if you've got an MS Exchange cert and I'm looking for an Exchange administrator the cert will definitely help you get the job.
However, if you put yourself out there as a certified Exchange admin and you can't do the job I'd be considerably more inclined to fire you than try to train you.
I still p
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My Current company: http://www.onehippo.com/en/company/career/senior+consultant?backpage=en/company/career [onehippo.com]
(...)
Qualifications:
* University degree
* Extensive knowledge of Java, Spring, JSP, JSF, Wicket, SpringMVC, or other (Java) frameworks;
* Familiar with content management systems and portals;
* Standards like JSR 168,286/170, REST;
* Application servers like Tomcat
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Exactly. (Score:2)
In addition to developing your skills for your current job, you need to focus on your NEXT job.
Where do you want to be and how do you plan to get there?
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, after a year without a job, I decided to just take whatever was offered (i.e. $30,000 below my former salary). In 2011 I'll look for something better but for now, having a job is better than not having a job.
I'm also working lots of paid overtime to make-up some of the loss.
Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Same with me- just trying to hang in there at this point. In an effort to get more hours working on a project that is viewed by consulting company management as "non-billable hours", have even offered to cut my hourly just to get more hours.
And the stress level on my billable project is way up, as Fortune 500 company expects 40 hours worth of work a week on a project that I'm limited to only billing 20 hours a week on. I'm being stubborn on that one though- sooner or later they'll notice that I'm only hit
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Maybe you are not as fast on the subject as you thought you were. Or the project takes longer then 20 hours a week because of X,Y, or Z.
I was honest about what I could do; they were not honest in how well this project had been documented in the past. And the price they are paying is $25/hr LESS than what I was paid for similar work in 1999 in the same city; they're just trying to cut corners.
And yes, I will not be making the same mistake in negotiating again. I will insist on seeing *ALL*
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: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: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.
Re:You control your own destiny (Score:4, Insightful)
There are good or at least decent companies to work for so I doubt this explains the gigantic sausage party that is IT. By and large, most women look at the world in terms of relationships both with people and with objects such as tools they use. By and large, most men appreciate the relationships they specifically want to participate in but view the rest of the world in a more utilitarian fashion. IT is all about utility and pragmatism. It's not a surprise that most IT folks are men while i.e. most teachers are women. Women either don't have the IT skillset or don't wish to do that kind of work and that's why many of them don't choose IT as a career path.
Honestly I don't see what the big deal is with this issue. Not every demographic disparity is because of racism or sexism, though that idea appeals to people who just refuse to admit that women are different from men and tend to have different preferences. I think they refuse to admit this because they think that saying "women are different" is the same thing as saying "women are not our equals" and that just isn't true. If anything, refusing to appreciate their differences is a disservice to them, a denial of the way they want to be. I think you'll find that actual discrimination against women is rare, that most men prefer a co-ed environment over a sausage party and would be glad to see more women who share their interests.
This reminds me of the absolute lunacy perpetuated in the name of feminism. Professors and others have been fired merely for suggesting that a woman's brain is "wired differently" than a man's brain, nevermind that this is demonstrably true. I think the same people who can't deal with such realities are the same ones who would automatically assume the scarcity of women in IT must be due to sexism. If some kind of discrimination is really going on, it's probably not sexism. It's probably discrimination against obesity, as the few women I've ever seen who were highly skilled in IT were all rather chunky. It's a shame this is so important to people because the bottom line in a workplace is whether they can do the job, not whether they make good eye candy, but this does happen.
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Re:You control your own destiny (Score:5, Funny)
"Women are like canaries in coal mines."
If I find them passed out or dead around the office, I'll be sure to evacuate!
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Interesting..for me is only about the money. I mean, let's face it...if I didn't have to wo
Re:You control your own destiny (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You control your own destiny (Score:5, Funny)
The 1950's called. They want they're attitudes back.
Your 3rd grade teacher called. She wants your English grade back.
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Just because you find an environment tolerable does not mean that the environment isn't broken.
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I imagine your mother deserves piles of compensation for having to put up with you, and likely with the demented woman-hating father you had that taught you to think this way.
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There's something to this idea. Every army needs its cannon fodder (or Jihaddist with a bomb vest).
I consider it a Darwinian reproductive strategy by the alpha males,
Possibly that's why the "Protestant Work Ethic" goes hand in hand with admonishments against promiscuity. You work hard and keep your hands off the harem. Those are for the king.
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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 jus
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.
Re:You control your own destiny (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Don't forget not getting married, or if you do, marrying a housewife and not a woman with any career aspirations beyond perhaps working at the mall.
would need to hire a mover,
Moving isn't quite as hard as you make it out to be; I've done it many, many times. These days, the best way to do it is to use a freight shipper. I used ABF when I moved cross-country in 2000, and it worked out quite well: you get some friends and move all your stuff into a trailer, close it up, and then the company comes with their semi-tractor and takes it away. 10 days later, your trailer shows up at your new home, ready for you to unload it.
Whatever you do, NEVER hire a full-service moving company like Mayflower. They'll hijack your stuff and hold it hostage, demanding extra payment for you to get it back. If you don't have any friends to help with your ABF move, then you can hire local movers (like from Craigslist) at each end to do the work for you. With locals that don't have any connection to the trucking company, you don't have to worry about anyone hijacking your belongings.
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.
They can, but they'd have to walk away from their homes. They really should look into this; if they're underwater any significant amount, and don't want to be stuck in their current location for the next decade or more, then they NEED to walk away. House prices are NOT going to go up significantly for 5-10 years; it'll take them decades to recoup what they've paid for their homes. It's easier to just walk away, take the credit hit, and buy a new house in a few years (or at most, 7). Also, they can try to do a short-sale, which has less of a negative effect on your credit score.
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I think you're right about much of what you said, but recommending people just walk away from their homes if they're "underwater any significant amount" isn't the most responsible thing. Our country is in such bad shape right now, partially because of people with this attitude of "I'll just walk away from what I owe as soon as I don't like the terms anymore that I agreed to initially!"
Bullshit. I'm only advocating living up to the contract you signed.
Every home loan is a collateral-backed loan (as opposed
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If you want to be a business person, not an employee, then why learn software development? Just hire some dirt-cheap offshore bozo from rentacoder for next to nothing.
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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 wh
"shrinking female IT workforce"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe they are going into a better paying industry.
http://newsone.com/nation/news-one-staff/more-women-considering-stripping-in-struggling-economy/ [newsone.com]
Re:"shrinking female IT workforce"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe they are going into a better paying industry.
http://newsone.com/nation/news-one-staff/more-women-considering-stripping-in-struggling-economy/ [newsone.com]
Or maybe they are running away from an industry that considers jokes like that acceptable.
Re:"shrinking female IT workforce"? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is that an unacceptable joke (or even a joke, necessarily - it's an extrapolated guess based off of disjointed but related data)? I know of a guy who left IT to become a Chip'n'Dale stripper because it paid better and was less stress (go figure). Woo, nakedness - big deal! If it's acceptable to say "men are leaving IT for construction jobs" (some are) why is stripping (physical labor for work) any more offensive?
If you want equality, then you better want it equally. People are sick of this "equally better" PC bullshit the women's lib movement has been pushing for the past 50 years. If you can do the work, great: step right in and pull up a chair, etc.
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I'd guess that it takes at least a hundred employed people to support one stripper.
If the economy continues to be bad, this will not end well.
Plus- 2 of the 3 strippers I've known were messed up by the work and the 3rd skitters along the edge and may lose it at some point.
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I'd guess that it takes at least a hundred employed people to support one stripper.
That's kind of silly logic. I guess it's based on some misconception that economics are zero sum, or that some services are inherently worth more than others. Being a stripper is employed. It's providing a service that people want, just like an auto factory or an amusement park or a grocery store.
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So? It takes about 80 employed people to justify my job. Without them, my company would need one less full-time geek. And each of them requires a client with dozens of employees to buy the stuff they make. And each of those companies presumably has hundreds of customers, etc.
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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:"shrinking female IT workforce"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Possibly, but maybe not to where you are expecting.
The thing is, if you're in IT, you're probably smart. You understand basic math. For example, you can easily see that [(weekly pay) / 60] [(weekly pay) / 40]. If you're expected to work longer hours for less pay, you'll understand that you're getting paid less. There's a reason overtime is supposed to be time +; it's because it's shitty work that makes you neglect your Real Life. Women are just as smart as men, and they are surely aware of the same basic math. Why end up as a slave with worse pay than retail sales? It's not worth the hassle. I'm sure a lot of folks are moving into management, HR, and other fields that don't have 3am emergencies.
For what's it's worth, my pay is 165% of what I made at my first post-grad job in 2004. I've left a job that wanted me to work 60+ hours a week "because I'm a computer guy" (I'm an EE). Now, I never work overtime. I've also got an 8% raise coming up this summer. If you look for better work and hold the same level of loyalty to a company as they do to you (i.e. none at all) then you can be more successful at home and at work.
Re:"shrinking female IT workforce"? (Score:4, Funny)
...and other fields that don't have 3am emergencies.
My female keeps talking about quitting and raising kids, so this can't possibly be right...
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You can deal with a 3am barf emergency without actually waking up.
Trust me, I'm a father of two.
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Re:"shrinking female IT workforce"? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Please try.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Rgds
Damon
Rate of inflation (Score:3, Informative)
What was the inflation rate last year? Zero? Slightly negative? As long as your wages increase faster than inflation, then your purchasing power is going up. And .7% is better than the 0% raise I got.
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Re:Rate of inflation (Score:4, Insightful)
Not quite. While your salary might beat out the rate of inflation, other things need to be considered. For example, I was notified my rent is going up starting next month by 9.8%. The actual amount happens to coincide with the exact amount of my monthly pay increase. In other words, I'm treading water because my pay increase will now go towards my rent increase.
On top of this, mother nature decided to force my decision on replacing my 12-year old car, I'm taking classes to (hopefully) get out of this urine-soaked hell hole (thank you Krusty) which are costing me over $1,400 per class and whose prices are also going up in the coming semester and my electric rate just rose by 30%.
So, while my pay increase was higher than inflation, it is completely overwhelmed by everything else that is going on.
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Correction. That should be (thank you Sideshow Bob) and not Krusty, though one could argue that it was because of Krusty that Sideshow Bob was the way he was.
Re:Rate of inflation (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really...
If your pay goes at the same rate as inflation it means your value in the company even after an other year of experience hasn't increased. Normally you should expect a 10% increase in your pay per year until you reach 15 years of experience then it will slope down as your years experience is having a slower rate of return.
Re:and please raise your hand (Score:5, Insightful)
I have. However, all my "raises" came from changing jobs. It's simple: if you want more money, you need to find another job. Employers these days NEVER give out pay raises, unless they're a pittance. However, in their utter stupidity, they're more than happy to give new hires much more money than the people who've been working there for many years. My advice is to stay in a job for about 2 years, and then go looking for a new one. You should be able to get a 10-20% increase.
Watch as some trolls try to refute my comment. Of course, if job-hopping were such a bad thing in the eyes of employers, they wouldn't be hiring, now would they?
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I am living in a totally different country (somewhere in Eastern Europe). I got hired by a large multinational company (a very large one indeed) in June 2007. I got promoted twice. My responsibilities tripled (I was a Helpdesk Analyst, then a Team Lead, now I am a Service Delivery Manager and in couple months will move to another position, or so they said), my salary raised 0% in all this time. I mean ZERO. No raise. No compensation. Nothing.
I am paid in local
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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
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What was the inflation rate last year?
Most measures of inflation are highly politicised; what may be a somewhat useful simplification in a local economy is far from reality in a situation with global wage arbitrage.
The largest deficiency IMO is the failure to account for asset price inflation, a failure which is inherently connected to the boom/bust cycles (most politicians don't want to see interest rates raised, which the central bank would be force to if any of the more 'real' inflation measurements were
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The CPI has been gamed and tricked out so much that you can't believe it.
For example they have this idea about cheaper substitutes. Basically as the price of something nice goes up, you'll use a cheaper substitute, so they change their baseline to include the cheaper substitute instead.
The classic example here is "hamburgers for steak". Which the BLS has responded to:
http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpiqa.htm#Question_3 [bls.gov]
Their rebuttal, if you read it carefully, actually admits that they do substitute less desirable
Silicon Valley is dry as hell (Score:2)
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Google initially sets you up with a 20 minute phone screen interview where they ask you puzzle questions over the phone. I called last year and got all the puzzle questions that the dude asked, except for some algorithmic one about enumerating collinear points in 3D. I had only found the shitty O(N^2) solution before the phone call end
Accountants and marketers running the show... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly what happens when you have non-technical accountants and marketers making technology-related decisions. Look at the executives for nearly any American company. You'll find the number of technical people at or near the top is virtually none.
Accountants are concerned with one thing: the next quarter's numbers. Software and IT infrastructure, on the other hand, often takes longer than that to properly implement and to see their benefits. So these accountants ignore IT, and often do what they can to deny funding, especially if it won't result in a near-immediate balance sheet gains.
In the past, when America still had some manufacturing base, engineers often had a prominent place within the leadership of most companies. They could think beyond the next quarter's financial results, and saw how technology could make their companies more efficient in the long run. Unfortunately, these people have retired or been forced out.
America now generates its "wealth" not through the creation of tangible goods and improving productivity at existing enterprises, but rather by creating and selling a variety of bullshit financial instruments. Things won't improve until technical folks are making the calls, rather than accountants and marketers.
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I'll let you in on a secret, since I'm in a Management of Information Systems class right now as part of our MBA curriculum... We're being told not to worry about being intricately familiar with XYZ technology, since XYZ tends to have a useful lifespan of 3-5 years... we're there to learn how to focus IT to best provide a service to the other parts of the business, and how to manage people. We learn what relational databases are, not how to do an installation of SQL Server 2008. What SOA represents to st
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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
Yup, no raises these days. (Score:2)
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?
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And they use average. Everyone else in the statistics community switched to median years ago.
Median IS an average, as is the mean, which is what you're probably thinking of. If they simply state "average" though, then it's possible that they went with the median over the mean (or not - it really doesn't indicate either way).
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...and don't forget that "Web Developer" is still another choice. For some reason writing programs that happen to get executed by a web server puts us into totally different territory.
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I dunno mang, (Score:3, Insightful)
My pay nearly doubled in 2010. Maybe it has something to do with me working on my skills portfolio for over a decade and pent up demand for those skills.
One thing for sure - if you want to make more money, you need to ALWAYS be thinking on what skills you could acquire to achieve that goal. Any retard can poorly code up a web page - why would anyone pay a pretty penny for that?
Another life's lesson - if you want to grow, you need to move. Don't sit on your ass in the same job for a decade. Change teams, companies, industries, roles. If you don't do this, the best you can hope for is a 5% merit raise, and that's in a fat year.
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.
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Yep. You don't get more money by showing your worth...you get it by someone buying into the promise of your worth.
Every story I hear just reinforces the idea that if you want more money, find a job elsewhere.
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>> for one of the few companies that can afford large pay increases
What part of "you need to move" did you not understand? :-) There's no way I'd have gotten to my level of compensation had I stayed with just one company. Change jobs every couple of years. Build great reputation along the way. That's all there is to it.
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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
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I don't know, I practice what I preach. I change jobs every 2-2.5 years. Sometimes stay in the same company, sometimes move to another. So far I have no complaints.
And you're right about having verifiable experience, but there's nothing preventing you from acquiring this experience while doing your current job, if it's not too drastically different, or in a different team within your current company. Lateral moves within the company are always easier.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If employers have a hard time keeping their employees, who's fault is that? The employers or the employees?
Consider that not long ago, people were working the same job for their entire career. People, by their nature, prefer stability (that's why many go through all that effort of getting a good degree, and why government job preference has been on the uptick for some time).
If employers don't want employees to jump ship they need to make their employees feel like their jobs aren't in danger and provide them
Re: (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 fro
Dissatisfaction with IT jobs is increasing (Score:2)
A recent study suggests that IT people really don't seem to like their jobs very much. Apparently, only 4% of IT people found themselves "highly engaged" with their jobs -- a number that has dropped from the still low, but not as low, 12%, two years earlier. There are concerns, of course, for what this means for companies and their IT staff. It certainly raises some questions about whether or not this is a potential issue going forward, and how companies might deal with this. Are the problems caused by the way IT people are treated? Or does it have more to do with their own worries about the future of the IT profession? And given that so many people in IT aren't particularly enthusiastic about their jobs, how can that be dealt with?
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/itinnovation/articles/20100216/0318428178.shtml [techdirt.com]
All that, but still the best job in the US... (Score:2)
Econ 101 (Score:2)
When that commodity is you, "marginal cost" -> "subsistence mode of existence".
Just hope that you die before our imperfectly competitive economy reaches this particular state.
well, shit. (Score:2, Funny)
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
What real IT Pros are saying (Score:2)
Here is a quick look at the work experiences of real US IT pros:
http://techtoil.org/doku.php?id=articles:news_and_commentary [techtoil.org]
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: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: (Score:2)
Secretary became "adminstrative assistant". Or admin for short.
Maybe nurse can become "doctor's assistant".
Or docs'ass for short.
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sysadmin is "administrative assistant of systems"?
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>>>it is undeniable that healthcare is the wave of the future in the United States
Except that the U.S. government is paying LESS than actual cost of procedures, so many doctors are quitting the profession due to increasing losses. You're better off to stay in a profession that doesn't have top-down price fixing (i.e. commercial, engineering or programming).
Re:female (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to be guaranteed a job for the next 30 years or so, go into geriatric nursing. Unfortunately, you'll be spending the next 30 years changing diapers for 90 year olds, but at least you'll always have steady work. Depending on whose IT department you work for, this may or may not be an improvement over your current situation.
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My SO is taking nursing classes right now, in a class that is mostly female with a handful of males sprinkled in. It turns out that hospitals need a certain number of male nurses for specific tasks (heavy lifting, if you will) and the relatively small number of men going into the field means that those men that do pursue a career can have their pick of jobs.
I'll just stay here and keep grinding code though.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Wow, seriously? Do you know anything about nursing?
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.
There are plenty of reasons to not go into IT. Nursing pays worse (IT 5 years experience = 50k; nursing 15 years experience = 50k), the hours are usually worse (no such thing as 9-5s or holidays, and everyone is "on call" almost all the time), constant bitchiness and "office politics" cattiness (if you want to hear someone lie about someone else, listen to an orderly...), and (very likely) increased hours + shifts with decreased pay in the very near futur
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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 (sic), more respect from the general community, just a better future period.
Yeah, but the challenge is that in some areas, it's nigh to impossible to get into a nursing program unless your grades are in the top 7% of the applicants that year (or some incredible number). My sister has been trying to get into a nursing program in Oregon for quite some time. Perhaps if the teaching positions for nursing paid more, there would be a greater number of instructors, resulting in higher enrollment capabilities, and so on (trickle down).
Of course I'm not an expert in this field (I'm an IT
Re: (Score:2)
You work with Mr. Creosote?