The going rate for good salaried programmers used to be 80K - 120K per year, with some stock option grants varying company to company. Has the economic crisis affected that at all? Does it depend on what part of the country (or what part of the world) you're in?
Salaries are very dependent on what part of the world you're in, obviously.
Here in central Japan many companies have seen bonus cuts. Typical compensation for a 20-something Japanese programmer might be:
$2,500 a month salary
+ $200 single's living allowance
+ $200 commute allowance
+ overtime
So call their base monthly pay $3,000, plus overtime. Now twice a year they get a bonus, which is calculated as "X months of your base monthly pay", where X is determined by how well the company is doing. In good times, that might be X = 2.5 or X = 3. In leaner times, it can scale down or be eliminated.
If you assume that you earn 12 months pay from work and 5 months pay from bonuses, then a quick contraction in bonuses amounts to a substantial pay cut.
Bonuses at my company are down this year, by essentially rounding error, but some of my professional colleagues in the city have been cut all the way to zero.
These are not slouchy engineers, they just work for companies that supply a certain large automobile manufacturer, and that large automobile manufacturer has laid down the law: cut costs to us or find yourselves another large automobile manufacturer to give you 60% of your orders.
i think that greatly depends on the way you define the word 'programmer'.
If programmer to you means someone that can code php and maybe do a bit of css work to help build web applications then yes, the economy has changed that, there are quite a few people like that looking for work right now so the going rate is down (my estimation about 20..30%).
If by programmer you mean somebody that can take a complex problem or specification and solve it or realize that spec then I think the market is unchanged, mostly because there always was - and probably always will be - a shortage of such people.
My previous job was at a company that ended recently, with the last paychecks in Dec. It's not yet the end of February, and three out of the four programmers employed there are working elsewhere, for the same or higher pay. Everyone keeps talking about the economy, but here in the metro DC area there hasn't been much effect.
Economics blogger Megan McArdle over at the Atlantic made the point a while back that politicians love recessions - their power grows, while that of the folks in the free market (their rivals) shrink.
Of course things in the metro DC area are good.
The flow of cash into the metro DC economy is larger than it's ever been.
The problems are out in the productive sectors of the economy.
not me. i got a good offer in late nov. right in the middle of the financial turmoil, but i also do mobile dev. and really good mobile devs. are rarely in the market. They either have already a job, or they are doing their own apps + some contracting on the side.
But the market is affecting some people. My previous company is having about 2% raises achross the board (last year was about the same), and they are underpaying most developers, and they can pull it off, as the market has cooled off, and there are less options out there.
The funny thing, is that the company is thinking that is gaining by having little raises, but i know from a fact that a lot of people are just working less, and are in a don't care mode/will do just enough not to get fired mode.
People that can develop working, maintainable software that makes users happy seem to always be in demand.
Omit "working,maintainable" and we're good. It needn't be either, but it must make someone happy. Whether this is a pointy haired boss or an end user is irrelevant to how much the developer is paid.
The consensus so far seems to be "no, not for good developers, but it's affected everything else." Does that imply that good developers were accepting pay too low before?
Or is it just the way people are measuring? A good programmer should get better over time, so their work should be more valuable each year. Taking a new job is often similar to a salary renegotiation, so do the people reporting the same pay imply that either they're not a good developer (because they didn't get better), or that the economy has in fact affected the going rate of good programmers?
good developers were accepting pay too low before?
Yes, or rather: good programmers aren't always going for top dollar, but for interesting work. That prior behavior gives them two kinds of insulation from downward salary pressures:
- at an established job, they are already recognized as especially valuable, so less likely to be affected by compensation or job cuts
- if seeking new employment, they can marginally maintain income by sacrificing interestingness, if desired
On the other hand, a mercenary whose only criteria for accepting work was that it pays top dollar is especially vulnerable to economic pressure. Because of the winner's curse in auction processes, such mercenaries are likely to have been overpaid even before a downturn (and the companies overpaying them, likely to have been bubble creatures).
The curve has changed, but the overall range appears to have remained the same. For the people at the low and top ends of the spectrum, its basically business as usual.
It does seem as though the middle has fallen out some though. We recently had an opening for a short-term junior level position and we got a ton of responses from overqualified people who would ordinarily fall in the mid-range classification.
I think it's more subtle than that; it's edge vs core. Edge systems are the ones (non-tech) people interact with, and have a very high turnover. 3270 one day, then Visual Basic, then Cold Fusion, then Java, then AJAX, then... There's a lot of churn so there's work, but there's also a lot of elasticity, a company won't really hurt if it delays projects like this for a year, it can even skip a generation. Core systems are the ones that operate the business. There's a lot less churn here and fewer people employed... But if a change needs to be made to support a new product or process or regulation or to integrate an acquired company, then it has to be done. Similarly these systems have to be up 24/7 and there are people needed to do that.
My experience over 15 years (almost all of it core) is that edge people can make fortunes and get written up in magazines in the good times as everyone jumps onto the latest bandwagon but suffer in the bad times when everyone realizes that what they've got does the job perfectly well and if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Core people have much stabler careers, but will never be "rockstars" (and we aren't interested in being either).
Here in central Japan many companies have seen bonus cuts. Typical compensation for a 20-something Japanese programmer might be:
$2,500 a month salary
+ $200 single's living allowance
+ $200 commute allowance
+ overtime
So call their base monthly pay $3,000, plus overtime. Now twice a year they get a bonus, which is calculated as "X months of your base monthly pay", where X is determined by how well the company is doing. In good times, that might be X = 2.5 or X = 3. In leaner times, it can scale down or be eliminated.
If you assume that you earn 12 months pay from work and 5 months pay from bonuses, then a quick contraction in bonuses amounts to a substantial pay cut.
Bonuses at my company are down this year, by essentially rounding error, but some of my professional colleagues in the city have been cut all the way to zero.
These are not slouchy engineers, they just work for companies that supply a certain large automobile manufacturer, and that large automobile manufacturer has laid down the law: cut costs to us or find yourselves another large automobile manufacturer to give you 60% of your orders.