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Dr. Dobb's 2012 Salary Survey
- jandrewrogers 14y agoAnecdotally, that seems correct. Wages for competent software engineers have noticeably risen in the last year due largely to supply shortfalls. It is a really good time to be a software engineer if you have some skills. A caveat is that part of the perceived average pay increase is that the minimum talent level required has also been increasing. Demand for generic, average skill has not been where the growth is. I think we are in the early stages of a bimodal job market.
- maybird 14y agoWhat's creating this shortfall? Too many openings? Too many engineers working for themselves? Too many engineers retiring? Too many engineers going abroad? Too many engineers interested in the same small number of niches that leaves everyone else with too few applicants? ...?
- Evbn 14y agoExponential growth of the industry.
- aaronblohowiak 14y agoAll except: > Too many engineers going abroad? I don't think this is a contributing factor. More software is getting made/integrated than ever and the talent pool is inelastic; programming is "hard" and "boring".
- suresk 14y agoAlso, after the dot-com crash and the first wave of offshoring, programming was sort of seen as a dead end. CS enrollment dropped considerably, and I'm not really sure that it has fully recovered. I would argue that the talent pool isn't completely inelastic, but it does take a number of years for the talent pool to respond - especially because the most acute shortages appear to be in the market for senior-level developers.
- tikhonj 14y agoAt least at my school, I think CS enrollment has swelled in recent years. However, it is not the same as it was back in the bubble (well before my time): back then, the intro professors had various schemes for weeding out potential majors; now they are still trying to get most people stick with it. With that in mind, I think "recovered" is the wrong word: since enrollment back there was inflated with people just interested in a good salary, nobody in CS really wants that to happen again. As one of my professors would say, that's what the business school is for. These days there is quite a demand on the major, but I think it's actually mostly from people genuinely interested in the subject. So, purely anecdotally, my observations echo yours: CS enrollment has increased, but not to the levels of the dot-com bubble.
- pnathan 14y agoI started school around then. There was a large bloc of CS majors who just wanted a fat paycheck. I expect after 2003 or so, that bloc nearly vanished.
- Symmetry 14y agoLess and less people graduating with engineering degrees, and increasing demand.
- cageface 14y agoYep. Everybody wants a "rock star". I see the occasional job posting that indicates some willingness to train but most people claim they hire only the very best. Of course this is not actually true of the vast majority of companies and most of them could bring a smart junior dev up to speed pretty quickly but that's not the prevailing mentality for some reason.
- Timothee 14y agoThis data seems pretty useless for the most part. Median salary without taking into account the location is meaningless. On page three, they try to separate regions but "Pacific" is certainly way too wide a region to get anything from it.
- joshsegall 14y agoAgreed. And in the "what matters most" question they didn't include anything about making something useful for the customer, users, world, society, etc. Doing something meaningful is the most important factor to me.
- west1737 14y agoIt's pretty useful if you're looking for an overview of the US; it's pretty useless if you're just looking for info about silicon valley.
- flyinRyan 14y agoNo, this is wrong. Location is meaningless. A position is worth the value it creates, not "cost of living * N". Companies are capitalist entities and understand fully how value works in a capitalist system but trick workers into accepting some kind of Marxist "from him according to his ability, to him according to his need" idea of salary value. Go tell BMW you only want to pay 40% of the sticker price because you only plan on driving in Nowhere, AR. The only reason salaries would be depressed in backwoods places would be if the cost of living was drawing in so many workers that it drove salaries down. So is that the case? If you live in some low cost of living midwest spot in the road, do you get a thousand CVs before you finish writing a job description? If not, if you have trouble hiring in these areas then the salaries are too low. Nearly everyone in the US is a firm believer in capitalism but they don't generally practice it with their most valuable resource: their time.
- 3pt14159 14y agoWhen you set up a company in Toronto or New York there are clients at every corner, lots of industry meetings, and a large pool of developers to draw from as you grow. When you set up a company in Timbucktoo you get none of those things. That means that a company at the margin is happier to pay for a developer out of NY, so there is increased demand in NY than there is in Timbucktoo. This drives up salaries in NY. > The only reason salaries would be depressed in backwoods places would be if the cost of living was drawing in so many workers that it drove salaries down. Remember there are two curves, supply AND demand, and they resolve simultaneously. Workers could be leaving the region and salaries could still be going down, provided demand was decreasing as well.
- Evbn 14y agoThe article specifically excludes equity which makes it entirely worthless for buge swaths of the industry.
- xxpor 14y agoAnyone have a version that doesn't require 178 HTTP requests x 10 pages?
- suresk 14y agoNot to mention a few redirects randomly thrown in for every page. I haven't seen a website outside of MySpace that is this pointlessly slow. I wouldn't normally say anything, but Dr Dobbs is ostensibly targeted at developers.
- xxpor 14y agoWhat's the difference between a Software Engineer and a Software Developer?
- AaronBBrown 14y agoApparently, $11,000
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- f0untain 14y agoSoftware Engineer uses C++ and Software Developer use Python. (joke)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- onedev 14y agoI don't think there is a difference?
- z92 14y agoEngineers design. Developers build.
- pnathan 14y agoTongue in cheek: how seriously they take themselves and negotiate.
- guynamedloren 14y agoonly the title, which is why the breakdown is explicitly by "title" and not by "position"
- AYBABTME 14y agoWhat's the difference between an Electrical Engineer and an Electrical Engineering Technician?
- 14y ago
- bbrizzi 14y agoThe first graph doesn't mention units (thousands of US dollars assumed). No mention of the methodology used. No analysis of the results. The article is split into 10 different pages. Tab closed.
- ldite 14y agoDo people in the UK feel that these amounts (at current exchange rates) reflect the situation over here? The numbers seem a lot higher than what I've come across.