Mac, Linux skills grab higher salaries than Windows | Hacker News Reader

Mac, Linux skills grab higher salaries than Windows

news.cnet.com

23 pointsnreece15 comments

I don't think this is true. I think the keyword "Windows" is much more common, and low-paying jobs dilute the high-paying ones. Consider, for example, a low-level secretarial job. Would the job posting include wording like "Must be familiar with Microsoft Windows and Word"? Probably. (The idea is that non-technology jobs, which tend to be lower-paying, include the keyword Windows, but not OS X or Linux. This drives the price of "Windows" down, but it doesn't say anything about the price of a Win32 developer or an AD admin.)

Then, as we move into the real IT jobs, the word "Windows" probably doesn't show up, since it's assumed that you already know it. (I forgot to ask "what OS do I have to use" at my first job interview, and ended up having to use Windows without having any Windows experience. Fortunately, VMWare made that problem go away.)

If you're a student hoping to get a job after graduation, your best bet is likely to aim for the largest and/or most resilient markets.

No, please don't do this. Focus on something that you really like, and get really good at it. Then you will always have work, regardless of the market's whims. (If you took this advice 4 years ago, you'd just now be ready for a lucrative career securitizing mortgages. Have fun working at McDonalds...)

The original article - while showing Windows itself as attracting a lower salary - shows that jobs involving Microsoft/proprietary technologies are paid significantly more than OS counterparts. It seems to me that the author (certainly of the cnet article) jumped to conclusions based on the first graph of the story, not the full picture.

Here in the UK, developers using Microsoft technologies are easily paid double what your average LAMP developer earns (in my experience).

"easily double" doesn't sound likely at all IMHO if you're comparing like for like.

This is my experience only so is likely to differ based on location (for example, salaries are so widely different in London compared to where I'm based, that I couldn't even begin to hazard a guess) and industry (I have only applied for jobs in education and small businesses - never a large corporation).

However, back when I was looking for a job a couple of years ago, I interviewed for ASP positions - same hours, same benefits, same location, etc - that paid twice what was being offered to PHP developers. If I hadn't been so much more experienced in PHP I definitely would have gone the Microsoft route.

I keep an eye on the local job market (every few months) and this doesn't seem to have changed. Be interested to hear if it's the same by you? (Are you UK based? I can't think why I've got that in my head...)

Ditto in Phoenix (5th largest US city by population) where the job market strongly favors Microsoft tech. I search indeed.com every few days and the lamp/open-source/mac jobs here are super rare compared to .net demands.

Scarcity + Demand = Higher Prices

Surprised?

or could it be that windows is just easier to manage, therefore the barrier of entry is much lower?

Have you used any of the Win32 API(s)? Windows Forms is about the first generation that isn't too painful to use. VB6 before it was manageable too, but all the abstractions are leaky and you have to delve into the raw C API sooner or later. MFC was a complete train wreck.

The perceived ability to manage Windows is lower. And that's enough to make the entry barrier lower.

You're completely right, but since when did someone need to know the Win32 API to manage windows?

Sorry, I can't find mention of that in the article. The article doesn't exclude development as far as I can tell. Besides, are you telling me scripting in windows is easier?

The person you replied to mentioned it, not the article. I'm not making any claims either way.

The thing that surprises me about the graph is that MacOS jobs pay significantly more than either Linux or Windows; the advantage of Linux itself over Windows is so small that it might be a statistical fluke.

Maybe anyone who can afford to fill their office with Macs can also afford to pay top dollar for engineers to program and maintain them.

I think there are a couple of factors in play there. One is the iPhone, and the big spike in his graph would indicate that demand shot up when the iPhone SDK was released. The other is that there just aren't very many traditional MacOS jobs.

iPhone. D'oh!

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