Computer Weekly, 26 May - 1 June 2009

[Um, why am I still receiving this junk?]

Page 14

"Average salaries on offer to permanent staff in Q1 2009:












This raises many interesting questions. (E.g., what the hell is an 
"operator"? Do you realise that "analyst" and "programmer" are two 
wildly different job titles? What does a "database administrator" 
actually do all day?)

But for me, the really significant part is that only the two lowliest 
jobs on the list pay less than *twice* my current salary. O_O


Also entertaining is page 15, where there's a chart showing demand for 
various IT skills. Every item on the list has gone down by roughly 50%, 
with the following exceptions:

   HTML -5%
   JavaScript +7%
   Linux -23%
   PHP +10%
   AJAX +1%

Insert conclusions here. ;-)

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On 15-6-2009 16:45, Invisible wrote:

> Insert conclusions here. ;-)

You pay a lot for staying with your mother.

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Invisible wrote:
> Insert conclusions here. ;-)

Conclusion: Open source commoditizes the market for everything where you 
actually wind up distributing the object code, so companies are shifting 
over to software-as-a-service to avoid that.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Insanity is a small city on the western
   border of the State of Mind.

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Darren New wrote:

> Conclusion: Open source commoditizes the market for everything where you 
> actually wind up distributing the object code, so companies are shifting 
> over to software-as-a-service to avoid that.

Question: Is "commoditizes" actually a word? WTF does it mean??

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Invisible wrote:
> Question: Is "commoditizes" actually a word? WTF does it mean??

Commodity (n): Undifferentiated goods characterized by a low profit margin, 
as distinguished from branded products.

Like gold, or oil, or soybeans. You don't really care which mining company 
found your gold, or which oil field your oil came from. Similarly, you don't 
really care *who* gave you your web server or emacs binary, because there 
are thousands of places to get the exact same thing, all for the same price.

However, there's only one place to get gmail, salesforce[1], or Amazon S3.

[1] Yes, I know they're bust.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Insanity is a small city on the western
   border of the State of Mind.

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IME the salary varies much more from company to company rather than from job 
title to job title.  Thus, the best way to get a significant pay rise is to 
move companies :-)

> Insert conclusions here. ;-)

You're not that fussed about earning more money, and you don't like much 
change in your life.

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scott wrote:










> 
> IME the salary varies much more from company to company rather than from 
> job title to job title.  Thus, the best way to get a significant pay 
> rise is to move companies :-)

It seems to me that IT job titles vary rather greatly from company to 
company. One company's "programmer" is another company's "business 
analyst". Which is worrying, because those are rather different roles, 
having wildly different responsibilities...

>> Insert conclusions here. ;-)
> 
> You're not that fussed about earning more money, and you don't like much 
> change in your life.

I meant about everything being in decline except web-related 
technologies. :-P

I'm not quite sure how you get from "I can't get a better job" to "I 
don't want a better job"...

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> It seems to me that IT job titles vary rather greatly from company to 
> company. One company's "programmer" is another company's "business 
> analyst".

Yeh that too, which makes it even harder to compare your salary with surveys 
like this.

> Which is worrying, because those are rather different roles, having wildly 
> different responsibilities...

I think the job roles do actually vary quite significantly.  In Engineering 
at least, one company's "Engineer" can be sat there all day at his desk 
making drawings of product designs, while at another company an "Engineer" 
would be running the project, organising testing and tooling schedules, 
working with customers and suppliers, and doing drawings as a minor task.  I 
suspect it's the same for software, the breadth of the role of "programmer" 
probably varies hugely from company to company, most likely depending on the 
size of the company.

> I'm not quite sure how you get from "I can't get a better job" to "I don't 
> want a better job"...

Well if you are only looking for jobs involving Haskell programming within 5 
miles of your mum's house you're not going to find much :-)

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scott wrote:
>> It seems to me that IT job titles vary rather greatly from company to 
>> company. One company's "programmer" is another company's "business 
>> analyst".
> 
> Yeh that too, which makes it even harder to compare your salary with 
> surveys like this.

Indeed.

I still think my point stands though: Even the most lowly position 
listed is almost 2x my current salary.

>> Which is worrying, because those are rather different roles, having 
>> wildly different responsibilities...
> 
> I think the job roles do actually vary quite significantly.  In 
> Engineering at least, one company's "Engineer" can be sat there all day 
> at his desk making drawings of product designs, while at another company 
> an "Engineer" would be running the project, organising testing and 
> tooling schedules, working with customers and suppliers, and doing 
> drawings as a minor task.  I suspect it's the same for software, the 
> breadth of the role of "programmer" probably varies hugely from company 
> to company, most likely depending on the size of the company.

Yeah, it seems that way.

Unfortunately, the tiny handful of programmer jobs I've found have all 
been the "you are the entire development team" type.

>> I'm not quite sure how you get from "I can't get a better job" to "I 
>> don't want a better job"...
> 
> Well if you are only looking for jobs involving Haskell programming 
> within 5 miles of your mum's house you're not going to find much :-)

Agreed. But who says that's what I'm doing? :-P

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> I still think my point stands though: Even the most lowly position listed 
> is almost 2x my current salary.

Everyone here knew that already, you've told us many times.

> Unfortunately, the tiny handful of programmer jobs I've found have all 
> been the "you are the entire development team" type.

What's the problem with that, it sounds way more interesting than "sit here 
and program what I tell you to" for the rest of your life.  Besides, you 
might find out that you actually really enjoy some other part of the job (eg 
design, testing, planning etc), and if you are just doing a single task you 
are easily replaceable (and hence not likely to earn as much).

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