Visualizing the Best and Worst Paid Jobs in the Tech Sector (howmuch.net) 94
An anonymous reader writes: We often associate the tech sector with high-paying jobs and cool offices, but it turns out that the grass is not always green on the other side. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, personal finance site HowMuch has created a graph that showcases the 15 best and worst paid jobs in the technology industry.
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Too many people read the acronym as Blue Screen of Death...
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Well, it's sorta purple these days, so strictly speaking the blue screen is dead.
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The problem is location.
In some places 50k is a good salary, enough to own a home and have a family. In others you are scraping by.
If these prices are based on the national average. The numbers seem about right. I work in a City often awarded "All American City" which in general means the city is the closest to the national averages. Aka a fair representation of America on the whole.
However if you live in the big citys or Silicon Valley where prices are way high. chances are you will be making more then 5
More useless salary comparisons (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet again we have these useless base salary comparisons that aren't indexed to cost of living. Many in the tech industry see significant portions of income coming from bonuses and equity. Consider the bay area; $150k total comp is more like entry level software engineer these days, and AI/ML folks can pull in $300k+ from the get go.
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Anything that conflated "IT" with software development is BS to begin with. I have to wonder what a "Computer Programmer" is supposed to be, as I've never seen that as an actual job title. Especially since they also have "Applications Software Developer" and "Systems Software Developer" as different jobs (and I haven't seen those titles in 20 years).
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Anybody doing IT is going to end up doing at least a little dev. If only scripts.
It can be an incubator, learn the hard practicals, produce enough value to live. Learn to code better. Eventually you code well enough. You _should_ have learned to code better in high school or younger, but never too late to get better, never stops, get used to it.
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If you don't know a better way to do it when you finish a project, all that proves is you haven't learned anything.
'Well enough' has to do. Nobody can go back and continuously rework, very few anyway.
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Anything IT related, would involve system administration, setting up clusters, containers, virtual machines, managing user problems (forgotten passwords, inability to log into applications, fixing hardware).
Computer programmer would be someone writing algorithms and scripts in Python, C, C++, assembly language to assist academic staff in their work. I've heard of scientific programmer, device driver and graphics programmers. Programmers optimize code around hardware taking into account memory layouts, DMA t
Re:More useless salary comparisons (Score:4, Informative)
$150K is still not a typical starting salary in for programmers Silicon Valley. I'd expect that to be more common in a reasonable job for someone with10 years experience. For entry level the person is a complete unknown though with no graduate school, that's way too high to start with, except for a few companies with more cash than brains.
There is a snag here though. What people report as good salaries rise faster than the typical yearly raise or rate of inflation. So if you're getting a decent 5% raise each year you may not be able to catch up. So people usually get the biggest boost in pay by changing jobs, because then the pay rise isn't limited to a certain percentage. Which is counter productive because it makes it hard to keep employees or get them caught up in pay.
contracted work (Score:2)
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this is just my opinion obviously: you should look for a new job. Not only are they paying you very poorly considering the cost of living in your area, the fact that they're outsourcing lots of work means your job security could also be in jeopardy. You have experience leading a team and working in an enterprise company, that alone should be able to get you some decent entry-level jobs making ~60k or so, regardless of your actual skill-set.
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HVAC puts you in 115 degree attics and crawl spaces with 1 cm clearance and brown recluses.
Every day in the heat. Grunts in that job get paid because they have to be.
Do new construction, not maintenance, if you can. Maintenance 'crawler' is a kids job, because it will wreck you if you're not a kid with no health issues.
In the meantime, enjoy the AC.
At least try and get a new job in support somewhere better. Maybe climb up to testing, somewhere that does dev. The fact is that if computers are just o
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What's in a name ? (Score:3)
I'd agree that a lot of these salary rates look approximately correct to me. But you only know so much from a job title.
For example? According to this chart, a Network Administrator gets paid about $58,873 yet a Network and Computer Systems Administrator gets $86,430. I bet if you actually talked to a number of people who were given each of those job titles, you'd find a big mish-mash of what people holding either title actually did as job responsibilities. Arguably, someone purely doing "Network Administration" might be the one getting paid MORE, because he/she was purely responsible for high-end Cisco switches and networking gear, firewalls, etc. -- which require more specialized skills and certifications than someone just doing Windows PC workstation support or taking care of user account setup via Active Directory or what-not.
And heck, my own job title is "Support Analyst" -- which seems to be a completely made up name, created by pulling from a couple of different job titles and pasting words together. I can't ever find a salary match for my particular title -- and I'm quite sure that was done on purpose.
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Google's EMT?
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At my company Network Administrator meant "server admin" and Network Engineer meant "does Cisco stuff". Didn't make a lot of sense. We also had SAN and LAN Administrators and some other odd titles. It's definitely a random mishmash, composed of history, changing management, HR policies, and the path of least resistance.
We do have Support Analysts, though - both Tier I and Tier II, for helpdesk and site-visit type support.
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IT job titles are indeed a mess. Often one does a little bit of lots of things such that to be accurate, you'd have to break down tasks by percentages, which would make job titles resemble URL parameters: Coding=50%, Testing=20%, Analysis=20%, Documenting=20%, AdministrativeBS=20%, Etc.
(Adds up to more than 100% you say? It's called "undocumented overtime" :-)
Looking at TFA's graph... (Score:4, Funny)
Customer Success Representative??
Right. And secretaries just loved it when they were "upgraded" to becoming Administrative Assistants.
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Men are physically larger than women, and they earn more. QED!!
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Tall men earn more than short ones, on average.
Wear elevator shoes during interviews. Even if you're tall. Every inch counts (preemptive: that's what your mom said).
I wonder if 'Amazon women' earn more money?
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Are they demoted to Customer Failure Representative if they screw up?
Where's the "Synergy Assurance Representative" on that chart? The PHB's aren't keeping up.
I'm just being an Agitation Engineer; colloquially known as a "troll".
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Agitation Engineer... I like that!!!
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They also became "Executeries" - Executive secretary.
Another useless survey (Score:5, Insightful)
Same goes for the other numbers. Yes, they are relative, but do not take into account regional differences.
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I guess they have knowledge of military procedures, standards, procurement processes and how the bureaucracy works (or doesn't).
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I pay my gardener 5 bucks an hour. But his name is Jose, Jesus is his brother, he's a car mechanic.
Pay went DOWN since 2000 (Score:4, Interesting)
It's showing a programmer making $51.30/hour or $106,710/year (I'm assuming that's as a W-2 salary and benefits.)
I was a programmer in 2000 making $75K with benefits or $37.50/hour. (Metro Atlanta) That's $54.88/hour in todays money [usinflatio...ulator.com] that's $109,760 a year. And according that website, the cumulative rate of inflation was 46% since then.
And the salaries for other things have fell behind too. I remember project managers getting over 90K back then.
I wasn't in Silicon Valley or anything, either.
I would expect much larger increases if there was truly a tech talent shortage.
Re:Pay went DOWN since 2000 (Score:4, Insightful)
Put 2000 in context. The first dotcom bubble was going real strong in 2000. The most incompetent people I've ever seen warm seats were doing it in 2000, for fat bank.
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I remember back then a good many dot-com's merely gave stock options on top of rather ordinary salaries.
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You can't compare bubble salaries to normal times. In 2000 we made like half a million for a three month project, and this was us 3 students with barely any experience and zero reputation. You think you could land something like that today?
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That guy that drives the septic tank pump truck? (Score:2)
Innumeracy (Score:2)
The fact that this ridiculous "graph" was used to present the data, instead of a simple table, tells you all that you need to know about the mathematical/statistical knowledge of the presenter. The visual format adds literally 0 information. Other commenters cover the details of the myriad fallacies. I want my 5 minutes back.
IT != Tech Sector (Score:2)
When did "tech sector" stop including the semiconductor and electronics industries?
Anyway here's the real list.
Best paid: CEO
Worst paid: Intern
Highest hourly rate: That omniscient guy down the hall who's been with the company since before you were born.