Dr. Dobb's Journal October, 2005
Arnold Schwarzenegger, erstwhile movie star and current governor of California, has been giving me headaches. For starters, I've been diagnosed as suffering from PAS, short for "Post Arnold Syndrome," after downloading the Governator ringtone and seeing both Kindergarten Cop and Conan the Barbarian on the same day. Symptoms include nausea, nightmares, and an uncontrollable urge to pump serious iron.
But the real grief Schwarzenegger has brought home is the revelation that he's been earning more than $1 million a year moonlighting as a magazine editor. When this news broke, the Dr. Dobb's Journal editorial staff descended on my office, with the equal-pay advocates jostling for head of the line. Not to be left out, Margaret Anderson tried to change her job title from "Art Director" to "Art Editor," while Senior Production Editor Monica Berg, who grew up in Germany, made her case because she sounds like Schwarzenegger. Jeez, that'll teach me to wander into the office.
However, the good news is that U.S. compensation for software developers seems to be on the rise, at least, according to a recent survey conducted by Foote Partners (http://www.footepartners.com/). Granted, most programmers (or editors) won't be breathing that rarified Schwarzenegger ether anytime soon. Still, in the first six months of 2005, pay for noncertified skills inched up 2.1 percent for application developers; 4.3 percent database developers/administrators; 5.1 percent networking/internetworking; and 8.2 percent for operating systems experts.
For categories in certified tech skills, salaries were up 3.8 percent for web/e-commerce development; 2.3 percent for application development/programming languages; and 0.7 percent for database administration.
In Foote Partners parlance, skills-related pay is typically paid as cash bonuses or embedded in base salary as an adjustment for the presence of a dominant vendor or technology skill critical to the job. For example, the salary for an Oracle database administrator, Linux systems administrator, or .NET developer, can be different than what employers might provide for generic "systems administrator", "programmer", and "developer" job titles. According to Foote Partners head-of-research David Foote, the redefinition of IT jobs is currently so pervasive that traditional job titles are becoming increasingly meaningless. Instead of overhauling job titles, employers are finding it easier to differentiate workers with the same job titles by recognizing technical skills fundamental to their jobs, putting a market value on those skills, and adjusting base pay accordingly.
So what's going on? Are employers suddenly opting for kinder and gentler employment practices? Hardly. For one thing, Foote sees a return to hiring as the economy has strengthened. For another, many companies were stung by botched offshore outsourcing projects, particularly when they failed to keep key people who had both technical skills and an understanding of the business and industry. Consequently, says Foote, companies are trying to do a better job of hiring and retaining talent with specific technical skills and business and industry experience—and reinvesting in onshore application development. He adds that as Sarbanes-Oxley compliance related work tapers off at many companies, the need for complex combinations of industry knowledge and technical skills is rising. "The shift is on innovation and new products," Foote says.
The survey, which queried 50,000 IT professionals, found that the hottest noncertified skills (that is, those that exhibited 25 percent or more growth in skills pay over the last 12 months) focused on SQL Server, WebSphere, Active Server Pages, SQL Windows, and .NET. Likewise, the highest paying noncertified skills involved project-level security, RAD/Extreme Programming, VoIP, Gigabit Ethernet, IBM WebSphere, Oracle database and applications, and SQL Windows.
The Foote Partners findings are more or less confirmed by Information Week's 2005 salary survey conducted earlier this year. (In the spirit of disclosure, Information Week is published by CMP Media, which also publishes Dr. Dobb's Journal.) Information Week (http://www.informationweek.com/) found that the highest salaries were commanded by web-security experts, followed by wireless infrastructure personnel. However, in the Information Week survey, which queried more than 12,000 IT professionals, salaries for application developers was more or less flat, as compared to 2004, although networking jobs were paying slightly more.
Within the next couple of months, Software Development magazine (another of DDJ's sister publications; http://www.sdmagazine.com/) plans on publishing the results of its annual developer salary survey. It will interesting to see how that matches up with Foote Partners and Information Week. Until then, you can find me either lifting weights at the gym or in my neighborhood movie theater, setting a personal record of seeing Hercules in New York, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Conan the Destroyer—all in the same day.