

The 2011 IT Salary Guide - bconway
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/3909826/The-2011-IT-Salary-Guide.htm

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SandB0x
(It's not loading on my phone, but)

What makes it very difficult to compare jobs is the actual hours worked. My
last job had great hours, but I had friends who earned maybe 1.4x my salary,
but often worked double the hours. I'm not talking about the effective hourly
wage here, rather _money per unit leisure time_. If you offered me an extra
few grand per year, but every week night I'd get home completely exhausted at
9pm, forget it. Not for an office job for someone else.

Note leisure time includes time to learn and work on things that interest you.

~~~
kevinelliott
I've learned that lesson the hard way too. I will from now own find it very
difficult to work for anyone again, but when I do, it sure won't be more than
40-50 hours per week. In fact, I would actually get a real kick out of a 30
hour a week job. That retains time for the family, friends, personal
development, and business/hacker projects.

Most employers are still too concerned with how much time you spend in their
office, and not enough on output. Given the right kind of work, I can output a
typical 50 hour week in 30 hours. In fact, given that opportunity, the
motivation is built in.

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mcknz
I was interested to see that as a Lead Application Developer, you can add:

    
    
      10% for Microsoft SharePoint skills
      11% for SharePoint skills
    

There's gotta be some arbitrage opportunity in there somewhere.

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jbooth
No, it's just an artifact of the text in the job descriptions, jobs that
happened to phrase it without "Microsoft" happened to pay 1% more --
surprising they're that close, really. It's not like you can buy Microsoft
Sharepoint developers and relabel them as Sharepoint developers for a profit.

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joshwa
What the hell is the difference between:

    
    
      Developer/Programmer Analyst
      Software Engineer
      (Lead) Applications Developer
      (Senior) Web Developer

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iamdave
The way I see it (would be good to hear other opinions):

Developer/Programmer Analyst = looks for bugs. Software Engineer = Integrates
the code into live environments Lead Applications Developer = Primarily
focused on developing the relevant code Senior Web Developer = "I've been here
the longest"

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Xurinos
_Developer/Programmer Analyst = looks for bugs._

Around here, it means "Integrates the code into live environments, does some
statistical work, does some DB work"

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cagenut
• New York, NY: 41% higher • San Francisco: 35% higher

as skype/telecommuting evolve there's an incredible arbitrage opportunity here
without even going offshore.

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krosaen
anecdotally, you can pull this off if you have worked somewhere for a while on
location and then go remote, but going for the full salary from a remote
location from the get go, not sure.

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smackfu
Yeah, I've seen this where someone goes from in-office to work-at-home locally
to work-at-home distant, and there was no salary cut at any point.

OTOH, the multiplier for our company for NYC is not 40%.

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Malic
In a time when infographics are all the rage, you'd think the information here
would be presented in a more absorbable format.

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golgo13
No kidding. Just paste into excel and take a screen shot. I guess they need
the page views...

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gaius
Wow, even the print version isn't single-page

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joshwa
The actual source for this article is a document by Robert Half Technology (a
staffing firm):

[http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/FreeResources?rfmCandida...](http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/FreeResources?rfmCandidate_5.dmreq=true&rfmCandidate_5.Z=0&rfmCandidate_5.A=RHTsgd11CO&rfmCandidate_5.B=1349)

Registration required. Would post to scribd, but the PDF is password
protected. Reg-free download here:

<http://drop.io/2011salaryguide/asset/rht-sg-2011-pdf>

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thwarted
I wonder if Robert Half finally removed me from their list of people who live
in Chicago and are looking for a job in Chicago. I had to email them like 30
times telling them that I live in SF now and if they would like to find me a
job in SF, that would be great, but I have no interest in a Chicago position.

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hugh3
As a postdoc, I'm not going to look at this. It would only depress me.

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yummyfajitas
I was a postdoc during the NYC transit strike, I read how much various
unskilled MTA job categories (e.g., garbage collector, token booth cashier
[1]) made and how much of a pay increase they hoped for. _That_ was
depressing.

[1] For those outside NYC, we have a human in many subway stations selling
metrocards. Often the human refuses to sell metrocards and just points people
to the vending machine.

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metageek
Put them on commission.

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f1gm3nt
This just reminds me of how underpaid I am and that the closest city pays an
average of 10% higher the average. I'm thinking it's time to move ;p

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ohyes
Remember that cities are more expensive to live in than suburbs. That extra
10% might just be cost of living adjustment. You have to figure out what your
expenses are currently, as well as what your estimated expenses will be in the
new location, before you really know that you will be getting an extra 10%
salary or whatever.

~~~
weeksie
Yeah, but if you live in a real city with good public transport and a thriving
commercial/residential core you can get by without a car and all of the
associated costs. I live in Manhattan and though it is more expensive than
elsewhere the pay differential and the money saved on cars makes it a pretty
good proposition. (For me, anyway; degustibus non est disputantum and so
forth.)

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sethg
When comparing offers or negotiating a raise, how do people translate between
a salary and a salary-plus-bonus? When my company got acquired, my base salary
didn’t go up, but now I get a performance-based bonus; both my individual
performance and the company’s overall hitting-its-numbers are used to compute
the bonus figure. If my “normal” bonus (i.e., when everyone hits but does not
exceed performance targets) is 10%, should I consider this equivalent to
having received a 10% raise? 5%? 0% plus a fistful of lottery tickets?

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brown9-2
I would think it only really makes sense to compare total compensation (salary
+ bonus + benefits) when comparing jobs.

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sangaya
I recently left a job that paid lower salaries and tried to focus on total
compensation through bonus + benefits. The thing is, salary is steady and
something I can budget my family off of. We can make decisions such as
mortgage's, car payments, savings goals, investment goals, etc off of a
salary. I can't do the same with a bonus. In fact, 08/09 made a lot of
employees realize that the bonus can't be relied on in any way.

Is it possible to make more through total compensation of lower salary + bonus
than high salary + little to no bonus? Sure. But I'm happier with the salary,
and my hunch is that many other employees would feel the same.

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ohyes
This is the same for benefits. Benefits programs can have their terms modified
from year to year.

A company with a great benefits program (ex. paying full tuition on a degree)
can drop it from one year to the next.

So if you have a budget that includes that degree being paid for, you might
find yourself suddenly strapped for cash when you are footing the bill for the
degree yourself.

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alexgartrell
This is tangentially related, but what should a new college grad expect to
make his first year out?

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krschultz
I graduated in my May. My friends who were CS and went to work for "normal"
software companies (i.e. exclude startups, wall street, and the big guns like
Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft etc) are making $50k-$65k. Those salaries
were mostly in Philadelphia and Washington DC.

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PonyGumbo
After seeing the variance by region, it makes me very curious about the %
adjustment for telecommuting-only jobs. I'm at the low end of the scale (and
about $30k underpaid if you adjust for location and skills), but I work from
home on the opposite side of the country from my employer.

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aaronblohowiak
30k underpaid for your location or the location of the employer? If it is for
the location of the employer, then you are "right-sourced" and being paid
"fairly".

Honestly, i think telecommuting-only jobs make such a minority of jobs that
gathering real data on their pay would be difficult.

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matwood
I telecommute and put my own $ figure out what it's worth to me. When I first
started I thought the salary was fair for what I thought telecommuting was
worth. Recently I've been talking to my supervisor about a raise because now I
feel I'm underpaid (and the article just proves along with my other research).

The company also cut my bonus to a why bother number and raised my insurance
costs. I love working at home, but there comes a point where I can't justify
leaving so much money on the table in prime earning years.

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robin_reala
This is US-only data; bit of a shame when the domain is earthweb.com.

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wazoox
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation convinces me that it should be
roughly applicable to western Europe. Example :

US$100000 convert to 72000 € Depending upon the country, divide by 1.0 (GB) to
1.4 (France) or maybe 1.5 (Denmark) for charges, you get a somewhat realistic
value.

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DrJokepu
> divide by 1.0 (GB)

I wish that was the case.

~~~
wazoox
I wouldn't. I want more taxes! We deserve a nanny state :)

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kevinelliott
I have always found these salary guides to be hit or miss. Depending on where
you live, these numbers can be wildly different. Also, once you do take
location into account, you have to remember that the cost of living in that
area is likely much different. Supply and demand for the region also plays a
big key.

In many cases, employers use these guides to gauge what they will tell you
what "market rate" is, and a lot of shady employers will stiff everyone in the
company. They might even tell you that you are at the high end of the pay
scale at the company, which might be true since they're stiffing everyone.

Just don't use this as true self worth indicators, as chances are your
category is likely lowballed.

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smackfu
Is the base number for the programming jobs even meaningful, since it seems
like every language adds a modifier?

Or, to put it another way, the modifiers are 4-8%. So that 4% baseline could
be subtracted out to give a better base.

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iworkforthem
Going through the salary guide, I know .NET, Java, PHP and SharePoint, help
desk pros, virtualization, cloud computing, Saas. And with my Project
management certifications (Prince2)... it's time to ask for a raise! Er.. next
step, how to approach my boss? Any suggestions?

~~~
bconway
If you search, I believe there's been a couple discussions on this recently.
It comes down to being able to justify it, either by a.) increased roles and
responsibilities or b.) value/scope of work completed.

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fourk
How much less should someone make if 'Junior' is prepended to their title?

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varjag
A junior programmer does not make less because of his title.

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RicRoberts
I'm the technical lead at a small digital agency in the UK. I don't earn
anywhere near what this says I should. _sad face_

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Omnipresent
it's surprising that java is mentioned to be "in demand", however, no Java
certifications seem to be in demand. Being a enterprise j2ee developer for
about 5 years now, I was thinking about finally getting my
certification....but now..maybe not.

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SkyMarshal
Hopefully employers have gotten wise by now that certification does not
necessarily guarantee skill.

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omarish
It would be great to see this visualized in a scalable fashion.

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murmax
we work 7 hours a day (20-30 minutes break for food and tea). coding is very
intense work, hard work (as you know), better code 6:40 hours effectivly. Plus
in free time after the office hours we ussually code again but for fun or our
project.

