IT Salaries and Hiring Are Up — But Just To 2008 Levels 198
tsamsoniw writes "A mid-year salary survey has a mix of good and bad news for IT professionals: The good news, hiring is slowly increasing as companies bring more IT operations back in house and salaries are creeping up a bit. But compensation (including benefits) are just now reaching 2008 levels — and hiring will remain soft, at least until the presidential election is over."
Re:Entitlement problems (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a flipside to this. IT workers *have* been traditionally underpaid since around 1995 and the first wave of large-scale internet boom. Our salaries gained a bit and almost approached "worth it" around 1999-2000, but then the big dotcom bubble hit in 2001 (the people I'm talking about worked for real businesses, not stupididea.com, but were all still affected). From then on as the markets have gone through periodic mini-recession cycles and layoff seasons, the net result has been no raises. Most people I know in the IT industry are making today roughly what they made in Y2K. On average, they missed years of their expected ~5% raises per year for performance/tenure/whatever, and never really got adjusted for inflation. Sometimes it's because the layoff cycle had them switching jobs too often with every company's policy being to wait on raises for a full calendar year. More often it's just that businesses keep telling even their long term It employees things like "The economy sucked and our business is down a bit, so no raises this year".
It is complete horse-shit, and it won't turn around until people who deserve better start demanding it. If you were a productive IT employee making, for example $80K in salaried spot at a mid-large company in 2000, and you've stuck with your career and performed well and not made too many unnecessary changes of employment, and grown in responsibilities as appropriate, you *should* be making ~$130K+ today. But you're probably making $90K. They screwed you, the whole industry...
Re:Citation needed (Score:2, Interesting)
The GP wasn't advocating deregulation, but rather that the government stop changing the rules. Once the rules are established, businesses can adapt and the economy will stabilize. If the rules change every few years, the economy will keep fluctuating.
Re:Hirring for IT has always been strong. (Score:2, Interesting)
I didn't go into management, and I didn't corner myself into a braindead corporate bullshit thing like CCIE, CISSP, being an Oracle DBA, etc. I've remained a *nix hacker doing cool things with a variety of good tools. Some days I'm writing infrastructure code in C and Perl, or helping developers scale application server code. Or maintaining Linux systems with automated deployment tools, or working on network infrastructure issues.
And I'm making well over the $100K mark. Salaried, full time, F1000 company, liberal-but-optional work-from-home policy. You don't have to sell out.
Expectations (Score:4, Interesting)
He did not understand the sad truth of corporate salaries today: It no longer matters how long you have been with the company, or how long it has been since you last had a raise - the only thing that matters is what is on your job description and what other companies are willing to pay for that role in your area. If you want a raise, then you have to get your job description changed to represent a larger scope of responsibility and a role that is worth more money. My employee was on the right track - he wanted to change his job title - but he failed to understand that it isn't the title - it is the job description and the scope of the role that matters.
Corporate life sucks. We are all replaceable, and we are only worth whatever it would take to replace us with some poor, unemployed worker that would take anything as long as it provides benefits and pay better than COBRA and unemployment.
Re:Citation needed (Score:2, Interesting)
198 of 205 Democratic members of the House voted against the Bush Tax cuts. 46 of 48 Democratic members of the Senate voted against it. The CBO predicted that it would increase the deficit.
It is disgustingly dishonest of you to pretend that this was some sort of bipartisan effort based on best information. There are no economic policies that suggest increasing deficit spending during booms, yet that is exactly the reckless nonsense that was supported by the Republicans. That recklessness meant that when a problem came, we didn't have a nice healthy balance sheet to start with, because you'd already all stolen it.
Only an easily manipulated fool or a sociopath could sit and pretend that GOP economic policy has been wise.