IT Salaries Edge Up Back To 2008 Levels 266
tsamsoniw writes "A soon-to-be released salary survey finds that the average salary for IT professionals in the U.S. is $78,299, putting overall compensation back at January 2008 levels. More heartening: Midsize and large companies are both aiming to hire more IT pros. The midsize are seeking IT executives (such as VPs of information services and technical services), as well as programmers, database specialists, systems analysts, and voice/wireless communication pros. Enterprises are moving IT and data center operations back in-house, which means greater demand for data center managers and supervisors."
Please... (Score:4, Informative)
Please let my boss know.
Except for inflation... (Score:5, Informative)
According to the inflation rate calculator I used, the consumer price index (one measure of inflation) has increased 5.08% from 2008 to 2011.
So, on average, IT pro's are effectively paid about 5% less than in 2008.
Re:Average (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, but if they're just reporting an average salary half of the people will be getting below average salaries. It's a lot more informative if you get mean, median and standard deviate. Preferably with some indication of how the samples are distributed.
A mean alone is of very little value unless you've also sorting things in a way that makes sense. For instance a mean that covers the entire country is going to be somewhat worthless as one could be making a good salary in one part of the country and effectively impoverished someplace like NYC, and be making the same amount of money.
Re:Average (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
What did Canada do to screw up their economy?
The value of the basic unit of currency has little to do with economic strength. (If you doubt this, consider that a Mexican Peso is worth 7 times a Japanese Yen).
The Canadian dollar, and the Australian dollar, have a correlation to commodities. As commodity prices went up, so did the Canadian dollar.
That's not the only thing that affects the exchange rate, though. It's a supply/demand thing. Over the last 6 months, demand for the US dollar has jumped, because of the European crisis. So it isn't the Canadian dollar that has dropped so much as the US dollar that has risen.
Re:Average (Score:5, Informative)
"Yes, but if they're just reporting an average salary half of the people will be getting below average salaries."
Nope. Given the usual pay scales, far more than half the people will be getting below average salaries. Exactly half the people will be getting below the median salary. Different things.
Re:Average (Score:5, Informative)
Stop bitching and follow the money. Some of us are making the 130k even though the economy is "fucked".
Or you're still pimping your vertas+solaris skills and not following the buzzwords. There's at least another year on the cloud train, time to hop on it buddy.
Re:Average (Score:5, Informative)
No shit. We are almost done virtualizing our entire datacenter, I assume the next step is to realize that having a single point of failure for 20 virtual servers isn't as cool as having 20 dirt cheap real servers, each independant.
What are you virtualizing them onto? If it's a big machine that's highly redundant, then the "single point of failure" mantra is false. On a big iron machine where you can hot-swap power supplies, hard drives, memory, CPUs without missing a beat, there is no single point of failure, and you get much higher availability than 20 dirt-cheap servers where something could break at any time.
Re:This will sound insensitive (Score:4, Informative)
I agree with this part. I've drastically increased my pay by switching jobs in the past few years.
Big word of warning... If you post a resume to job sites, expect an absolute FLOOD of horrendous and useless calls from Indian "recruiters". If a single word in your resume matches any keywords for a job, expect a couple calls about it. Doesn't matter what job you say you're looking for, doesn't matter if you checked that you aren't willing to relocate.
I averaged a dozen calls every day for over a month after updating my resume on a couple job sites. I've gotten hundreds and hundreds of e-mails, and all of a handful have even been possibilities (right job title, not two states over). Large states are the worst (California), because these useless foreign idiots that call themselves recruiters don't check a map, and just assume if it's in the same state, it's a reasonable driving distance, and that's even the ones who are (barely) trying... I get spammed about jobs all over the country.
This is a new phenomenon to me, and seriously risks making posting your resume a fool's errand, or worse. It's so bad that just posting your resume with a cell phone number runs the real risk of causing you to lose your current job as you are inundated with calls.
Worse, employers are getting flooded by insane numbers of resumes from completely unqualified applicants. The weapon of choice seem to be requiring a recruiter to meet candidates in person before submitting them for consideration, which is quite the nightmare when your recruiter could be located 200 miles away... suddenly you need to take a day off work just to be allowed to SUBMIT a resume for consideration, which is the case with a number of companies. And just watching job sites doesn't work, as a huge number of jobs aren't ever listed on such job sites.