The 2011 IT Salary Guide | Hacker News Reader

The 2011 IT Salary Guide

itmanagement.earthweb.com

101 pointsbconway68 comments

(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.

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.

Noticed that "money per unit leisure time" isn't what I want here, as it tends to infinity as you work longer hours! Maybe you should seek to maximise (money x leisure time) instead. Anyway I hope the sentiment was clear.

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.

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.

What the hell is the difference between:

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

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"

Developer/Programmer Analyst = looks for bugs.

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

The difference: Money

In my company:

1) Works with business analysts to design and code applications according to business requirements. Intermediary between engineering and business.

2) Engineering responsible for architecture and heavy lifting. ie; build a framework for the developers to use.

3) Same as 1 with more responsibility.

4) Same as 1 except more experience/skill set is specifically web related.

The difference:

1 -completely arbitrary 2 -randomly assigned 3 -words to fill space on expense reports and business cards 4 -another made-up title

Fancy mumbo jumbo words to differentiate somebody from somebody else.

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

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

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.

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%.

On the other side, NYC companies will look for remote workers in the midwest to save money. Consulting companies can charge NYC rates with an Indiana overhead. Midwest is the new offshore.

"On the other side"? Seems you're making the exact same point he is...

Could be -- I read it as "making NYC money on a non-NYC standard of living."

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

Forget infographics, how about a simple table?

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

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

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

http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/FreeResources?rfmCandida...

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

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.

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

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.

Put them on commission.

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

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.

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.)

City I live in pays an average of 34 to 40K as a programmer. I'm sure that moving 2 hours away and getting paid market average plus 10% is worth it.

It would be nice to see the outliers. What cities have the highest pay and cities with lowest pay. I'm positive that the city I'm in would be an outlier for lowest paid.

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?

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

Yes, but how do you value a bonus, if you don't know how much it is, or whether you'll get it?

A salary of 50K is a salary of 50K, you get 50K over a year.

How does that compare to a salary of 45K + bonus? Is it more, less, or the same?

My basic formula runs like this - when I'm negotiating, I cite my previous salary as everything I earned - salary + all bonuses plus any other perks I can cite.

When I'm comparing, I use only money I'm guaranteed: salary plus any guaranteed or performance bonuses I am confident I can hit (with targets in writing as part of my job agreement). Bonuses that are based on nomination or any other "approval" type process are really just too risky for me to consider as part of my overall compensation package. They will only factor if all else is basically equal.

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.

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.

This is very true. The variability of a benefit should certainly be taken into account. My point was just that salary alone is not your complete compensation so it shouldn't be the only number looked at.

That certainly makes sense, but weigh salary and benefits higher than bonuses.

Anecdote: The company I work for had a particularly rough quarter years ago and couldn't make bonuses. Those that had planned on their bonuses being there were suddenly left with a deficit. Even though the company increased bonuses next quarter to make up, that didn't help those guys then.

Personally I don't count bonuses as compensation. They're nice pot-sweeteners but salary is constant whereas bonuses can fluctuate.

But in many fields e.g. finance/banking/consulting, its all about the bonus, which can be several times your salary.

(and yes, this in many ways is the root cause of the current world financial problem, but just saying)

Of course it depends on the field, and for top C-level executives the bonus is pretty much the biggest chunk of compensation. My particular bonus rests on my performance, and is based on profit besides, which is the most common form of bonus I've seen in the trenches of software development.

And they may not be treated the same, legally. In Massachusetts, salary is sacrosanct; it is illegal to have an employee working for you if you don't currently have enough money to pay them. But bonuses () are wide open. You can decide not to pay somebody their bonus for any reason, even if the appropriate manager has already said, yes, you've earned it this year. (Yes, this happened to me.)

() Discretionary bonuses, that is, where a human decides what you get, rather than a fixed rule.

Probably somewhere between the lottery tickets and 5%. Both the individual performance and "hitting the numbers" scenarios are extremely subjective, and allow the company to justify cuts pretty much whenever they want. Bonuses make the offer sound better, and it's much easier for the company to say they are "cutting bonuses" rather than "cutting pay," which really amounts to the same thing. I would try to get as much in salary as possible, even if that means the total package is less.

That makes sense, if you plan to stick around. If you are job-hopping anyway, as some people are, you can just add the bonus to the salary.

Unless, on the day you start, the company announces that all bonuses will be reduced 75% until the company "makes its numbers." You don't have to be at a place long term to get screwed.

A fair question to ask when negotiating would be what % of the bonuses are currently paid, and when was the last bonus cut. Might give some indication of the reliability.

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

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.

Many schools publish public salary statistics for the graduates of last year. Some reports are better than others, but I’ve generally found good information that way. Just google "[school] salary statistics". For example, here's a pdf for Carnegie Mellon School of Computer science, which says last year there was a mean salary of $75k (which happens to be high compared to other universities I've seen): http://www.studentaffairs.cmu.edu/career/students_alumni/pos...

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.

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.

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.

They're about equal (Boston vs. LA).

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

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.

> divide by 1.0 (GB)

I wish that was the case.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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