
If Tech Is So Important, Why Are IT Wages Flat? - bitcartel
http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/12/05/2115238/if-tech-is-so-important-why-are-it-wages-flat
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patio11
"If people get older every year, why are college students always the same
age?"

Seriously: massive expansion of the field disproportionately among younger
workers, who bring the average down, is totally consistent with wages
increasing for the vast majority of workers considered individually.

There's also some weird effects at the top of the scale. Half of the HN
leaderboard is people who you'd consider technologists, but many of them (us?)
don't count as it for statistical purposes. This disproportionately excludes
from the comparison people who are older, at their peak earning years, and/or
those who took advantage of many of the (numerous) options which are a bit
more lucrative than System Administrator II at an insurance company.

~~~
phillmv
Eh, I'm not terribly persuaded by that line of reasoning: the article CW links
to^1 mentions that the IT field operates at full employment. At 3.7%
unemployment you have a huge amount of bargaining power.

As you alluded above, I too think the statistic presented mostly captures IT
workers 'proper': server administrators and support people. But as a support
function, they've basically stopped having major gains in productivity in like
1998.

We're not like them. We're princes of the universe who own the means of our
production. Instead, I think it's more along the lines of

1) a lot of wealth increase has been captured by the higher skilled workers
(some with cause, some without) and, of course, equity owners

2) but mostly, average wealth economy wide has been stagnant for everyone in
all jobs except non-executives/equity owners.

You can make six figures before you're thirty. No problem. It's very common
within my social milieu.

\-- 1\. Obviously a white paper designed to help lobby against increased
immigration quotas. As an incumbent, this benefits me but the initial claim
that 3.7% unemployment doesn't constitute full-employment is so spurious that
it's hard to take any of the rest of it seriously.

~~~
rmc
_At 3.7% unemployment you have a huge amount of bargaining power._

Yes. People just don't realise it.

------
gojomo
The underlying data is from the EPI, a left/labor/economic-protectionist
advocacy think tank whose choice of figures/methods/spin will always emphasize
a 'workers need rescuing' narrative. In this case, the aim of the cited report
is to advance EPI's conclusion: "Now is not the time to increase the number of
H-1B visas and STEM green cards".

EPI concerns themselves with the very broad category "computer and
mathematical occupations, workers with at least a bachelor’s degree". If you
dig into the underlying BLS report
(<http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes150000.htm>), this category includes
"Actuaries" and "Mathematicians", and includes 11% of all workers in the
'Insurance Carriers' industry.

Still, a rise in real wages over the past 11 years, when many other
occupations are flat or declining, isn't that bad... especially if the
composition of this category has grown to include more young workers and
career-changers. Sometimes expanded demand, if filled with more marginally-
qualified workers, brings down average wages, because workers are not uniform
interchangeable cogs. (Consider similarly: English is spoken worldwide more
than ever before, but the vocabulary/skill of the _average_ English speaker
has likely gone down, because so often it is a second language.)

------
rodh
What always surprises me with these posts is the amount that developers make
in San Francisco. Or possibly in the US as a whole.

I work in London for £31k ($50k), doing computer vision computer graphics
(GLSL) and the occasional ML development. Mostly in C++ or Python. My rent for
a 1 bedroom apartment is £1000/month ($1.6k/month) (the cost of which I
thankfully share with my girlfriend).

Honestly, it's a constant struggle just getting by. Looking at the salaries
offered on the job market, I don't think I'm the only one. Yet the demand
appears to be high. I've seen job posts up for months on end on Linkedin.
Every Hacker News meetup I've been to, almost everyone presenting is desperate
for new hires.

How have we ended up with such a huge difference with respect to SF? I'm sure
other jobs would be much more closely matched across the pond.

~~~
jasonkester
It sounds like you see all the pieces, so you hopefully have all the
information you need to fix your situation.

Everybody finds themselves in the same underpaid first job (or three) out of
school while they build a reputation. The important thing is to recognize when
you've become a Computer Vision Specialist with strong C++ and Python skills
and on that day go out and find the place that pays $200/hr for that sort of
thing.

There are lots of that place. As you've no doubt noticed, none of them are
advertising in the London newspapers. But if you started networking your way
into the computer vision scene in California and maybe finding some folks who
might be in a position to hire a guy for a remote position, I can't imagine
you'd do much worse than you're doing now.

Incidentally, the fact that "everybody" is trying to hire at comically low
salaries doesn't mean that the market salary is comically low. Quite the
opposite. If the market really did contain skilled people willing to work for
such terrible wages, those companies wouldn't be hiring anymore. The fact that
they keep at it is adorable in a way, but from your perspective it should be
taken as meaning that they're just not being realistic about what a skilled
developer should cost.

~~~
Nursie
I don't disagree with the substance of what you're saying but software jobs in
the UK, even in London, do not pay on the same scale as they do in the US
AFAICT. Or Australia actually, by moving over there from London (where I was
not in a bad job) I pretty much doubled my income.

The market has always been low for permanently employed computer folks here so
far I as I can see, with the exception being the late 90s before the bubble
burst.

~~~
NateDad
Interview, get ridiculously low offer, counter offer with something
reasonable. Repeat until someone accepts your counter. With so many jobs out
there, you should be able to get several interviews per weeks. Someone
somewhere is going to finally say "screw it, we've been looking for 3 months,
let's give this guy the extra $20k - we need this stuff done yesterday".

That, or all the software development companies in London will eventually fail
from lack of employees.

~~~
Nursie
Might work for an individual with specific talents, might not.

As I say, the market is not in a depressed state at the moment, it's not the
case that it's a ridiculously low offer _that's what UK software jobs pay_.

Software engineers are just not paid rockstar wages in the UK. So they will
find people to fill many of the roles. Software salaries are still good
compared to average wages, so people will go into it, and work for better-
than-average-but-not-awesome money.

------
hayksaakian
IT is sadly not at the epicenter of growth in the industry.

My understanding is that IT keeps things together, but the "things" are what
ultimately moves investors and the money.

~~~
sonabinu
You said it right!

------
fleitz
Because most companies run IT as a cost center rather than a profit center.

There is no money in IT but lots in 'tech'.

------
paulsutter
Two reasons:

1\. Tech money isn't made in the wages, and

2\. This average wage would be weighted heavily towards sysadmins, not the
tech industry

~~~
NateDad
1\. You're wrong 2\. You're probably right (that the wages include a lot of
tech support, not specifically software developers)

Anyone who thinks money is made through stock in this industry is going to end
up poor.

------
jeffdavis
I find it amazing when people ask questions about the price of something
without even _considering_ supply and demand.

~~~
randomdata
Supply and demand is really the only consideration. However, I think that is
implied. You could rephrase it: If tech is so important, why is IT demand not
rising faster than supply?

------
bhntr3
Without a graph, I'm not entirely convinced of the conclusion. 2000 was a
crazy boom year for tech. I wouldn't be surprised if it took 12 years for
wages to return to dotcom era levels.

------
batgaijin
Slashdot, asking questions when they know the answers:
[http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/04/22/1525212/apple-
and-g...](http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/04/22/1525212/apple-and-google-
face-salary-fixing-lawsuit)

------
wladimir
They're flat at a time in which many others are losing their jobs, to be re-
hired at lower wages, or unable to find jobs at all. Comparatively speaking
we're still off very well.

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tomerv
The way I see it, "flat" wages are the default state, and I would expect wages
to be flat for many othet areas of employment. It is true that IT has become
an increasingly important part of the economy, but wages in the field were
always relatively high, and now you have many more employees to share the
workload. It's simply that the IT field had become much larger, not more
prestigious.

~~~
ijl
Flat wages really aren't, for the reason that labor productivity has
historically and consistently increased slightly every year. Some shared split
of productivity gains between corporations and employees accounts for great
wage increases during the '40s, '50s, and '60s. Why there hasn't been an
increase in wages for most workers from the '70s on is an interesting economic
and sociological issue.

~~~
georgemcbay
"Why there hasn't been an increase in wages for most workers from the '70s on
is an interesting economic and sociological issue."

One that can be summarized thusly: "Top executives are taking all that money
for themselves".

Average CEO in 1970, $700,000/yr, 25 x worker average.

Average CEO in 2012, $13,000,000/yr, 380 x worker average

~~~
guard-of-terra
Which is interesting because I believe traditionally when calculating
production costs, you added materials required to produce an item and a hourly
salary of workers making an item divided by the number of items they can make
in an hour. You could throw in marketing and advertising bugdet too.

The management salaries weren't the part of the calculation. They were
considered constant and therefore insignificant in the mass production.

But now, when your CEO makes 380x worker average, and the rest of the
apparatchiks make the same combined, and you have 250 workers - then it is no
longer wise to "optimise" worker salaries at all because they are by far not
the biggest expense!

That's capitalism turned upside down. And I know it because I see how people
are able to account for recurring costs but put a blind eye on development and
management costs.

P. S. Maybe it tells us it's CEO/traditional management who need to be
disrupted now. In some areas you can imagine a worker's cooperative paying
1.5x average salary to workers, outsourcing their management cheap, and still
being insanely competitive thanks to no apparat spendings.

~~~
Evbn
Your number of workers is off by a factor of 10 or 100 for the average CEO's
company.

~~~
guard-of-terra
When I say "workers" I only mean people who are in the direct making of the
product. Most people on the payroll share the property of not being properly
accounted of when the production costs are calculated with CEO. And that's the
group we want to optimize today.

------
akurilin
Aren't there simply enough people in the field to make most IT workers (I
include both programmers and "system administrators" in this category)
completely interchangeable? As long as the majority of the workforce, the
bottom of the pyramid, is readily replaceable by a steady stream of college
grads, there won't be much need for salary increase.

Becoming irreplaceable, my guess is, is where the cash is.

------
nianticbot
where does the big data and data scientist fit into this .. if you believe it,
some such as McKinsey & Co say "The United States alone faces a shortage of
140,000 to 190,000 people with analytical expertise and 1.5 million managers
and analysts with the skills to understand and make decisions based on the
analysis of big data. " <http://www.mckinsey.com/Features/Big_Data>

------
digitalWestie
Wages in many industries have been stagnant for a while now.

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ww520
The closer you are to the money, the more pay you get. Money in term of how
the company makes its money. IT is often far away from the money and get lower
pay.

------
skilesare
After a few years in IT you realized that you're stealing from yourself by
earning a wage. Quit and become a contractor. You will make 3 x market at
least.

