December 3rd, 2008

Nobody works for a dollar

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 1:56 pm

Categories: Apple, Economy, Leadership, Salaries

Tags: Stock, Jet, Salary, CEO, Benefits, Stock Options, Investment, Payroll Solutions, Financial Accounting, Human Resources

Executive salaries, plus or minus a few jets.

Blasting across the television screen and into my living room last night was a headline that never fails to drive me batty: Execs Say They’ll Accept $1 Salary.

In this case, the self-sacrificing, willing paupers were the CEOs of the three biggest auto-makers on the occasion of their $34 billion bailouts, vowing to sweeten the deal for taxpayers by sacrificing their yearly millions.

Except, none of these boldface names actually work for a dollar. Not former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, not Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, nor its CEO, Eric Schmidt. Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs doesn’t work for 100 pennies a year either, and neither do the execs of Capital One or Pixar, all who have been the cause for previous “Works for Pennies!” headlines.

One dollar salaries are a PR move: a message to shareholders, employees and taxpayers that the bosses care, and are doing everything in their power to get the company out of the mess they’ve overseen, even sacrificing their own bottom line to save the company. They’re symbolic gestures, kind of like arriving for their meeting on Capitol Hill in hybrid cars after being chastised for arriving at the previous meeting in private jets. They’re no more retiring their private jets than they will be opening cans of soup for dinner should the bailout meet approval.

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August 20th, 2008

Oh, really? Report says techies don't care much about salary.

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 8:04 am

Categories: Job Hunting, Recruiting, Salaries, Work-Life Balance

Tags: Job, Techie, Training, Salary, Recruitment & Selection, Workforce Management, Training And Certification, Human Resources, Deb Perelman

‘That’s nice,’ say techies, ‘but we’d rather be challenged.’

HR departments and executives throw the word “retention” around a lot, but in theory at least, it’s a good thing for everyone involved, especially you. Workplaces want to find the magic blend of perks and incentives that will keep you from hopping over to the competition; they want to keep you happy.

But mostly they want to do these thing because employee turnover is costly and, in the words of a new report on the topic, “it is generally less expensive to retain good employees than find new ones” thus slowing the pace of employee departures is the best strategy to reduce personnel costs.

And here you thought it was you they really cared about…

Unfortunately, on their road to figuring out why employees leave, organizations sometimes miss their mark. Based on a survey of 200 U.S. and Candian IT executives, a new report by Computer Electronics found that the most effective means of reducing turnover were not improving salary or bonuses. In fact, the report finds that “non-financial incentives, such as enriching education and training opportunities or introducing quality-of-life factors such as flexible scheduling, can have a greater impact on retention than raising pay scales.”

In essence, this report finds that IT workers care more about perks such as training or flexible schedules than they do about the size of their paycheck, and you’ll have to excuse this writer’s jadedness because my first reaction was, “Oh really? Money doesn’t count?”

Well, I posed this question to a bunch of techies and–fancy that!–at least according to this sample size of 12, my gut was 100 percent wrong. What was the biggest reason they said they left their jobs? Boredom, in the form of a lack of challenges and no new technologies to work on.

A software developer in San Diego says he leaves jobs because he’s bored. “Keep challenging the technical folks, so we are engaged and learning, and we’ll generally be happy,” he said, a sentiment echoed by a product manager in Israel, who said that if there was no new or interesting challenge, he’d be “out the door.”

A network administrator in San Francisco agreed as well, saying he “cant work for the same company anymore than two years, unless the equipment or topology changes all the time.”

Another techie, a web developer in Philadelphia, says that people don’t go into technology for the money. “They do it because they love what they do. They truly enjoy the challenges and achievements of working in this field,” he explained and considers his field “fortunate that we are also able to make a living at this.”

So what do you think? Do you agree with these techies that they care more about being challenged than dollar signs when choosing a job, or have I just managed to poll across a particularly earnest group of IT pros? Why did you quit your last job?

July 23rd, 2008

Do college degrees get you anywhere?

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 5:57 am

Categories: Economy, Education, Offshore Outsourcing, Salaries

Tags: Job, Wall Street Journal, Degree, Salary, College Degree, Payroll Solutions, Benefits, Recruitment & Selection, Productivity, Human Resources

Doesn’t take you as far as it used to.

An article in the Wall Street Journal last week pointed to the declining value of your college degree, and they may indeed mean “yours” as the very first example given is of a woman who, after receiving a computer science degree from Maryland’s Frostburg State University in 1986 and doing well for several years–peaking with an $89,000 salary as a data modeler for Sprint in Lawrence, Kansas–was laid off in 2002.

From there, things only got worse, with her spending six years in a “career wilderness” of temporary and low-end data processing jobs with a nadir in 2004 when Sprint called to fill a position that sounded remarkably like her former one–paying less than one-third of her old salary.

A degree, the underemployed techie tells the WSJ, “isn’t any big guarantee of employment, it’s a basic requirement, a step you have to take to even be considered for many professional jobs.”

What the WSJ discusses has been documented elsewhere: degrees aren’t worth what they once were, but they are still the price of admission to many fields. However, there are more factors coming into play than just a lower ROI on undergraduate degrees.

One piece is salary stagnation. The typical salary of a worker with a bachelor’s degree, when adjusted for inflation, didn’t rise between 2006 and 2007, and were below–by nearly two percent–their 2001 level, according to the Census Bureau.

But an even bigger piece, as pointed out by Greg Ip, the WSJ columnist, are the ways that globalization and technology innovation have changed the economy. Now more so than ever before, the highest-paying jobs are being landed with an elite group with a particular set of skills–skills that have little to do with a college degree. Those on the other side of the wage gap are finding themselves competing for jobs with employees outsourcing firms have brought in or temporary workers on H-1Bs.

Jay Vegso, manager of membership and information services for CRA (Computing Research Associaiton), a trade group for the computing industry, doesn’t wholly agree. Though wages have been flat for the last few years, arguments that place the blame on offshoring and importing foreign labor are largely anecdotal, he notes, and will continue to be until more thorough research is out there.

“While offshoring and foreign workers play roles in what is going on with the IT workforce, I have not seen evidence that they have had a significant impact. It is even harder to prove that they are responsible for impacting the overall workforce and underemployment, which is very difficult to track,” Vegso explained.

Research released in March by the NSF (National Science Foundation) noted that most people with undergraduate degrees in computer science were doing quite well. Recent graduates (2003, 2004 and 2005) with degrees in computer and information science, when compared to several other majors, were tied with health majors for the highest median salary at the undegraduate level–$45,000.

June 26th, 2008

Where are the high tech jobs? Try Huntsville.

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 9:37 am

Categories: Job Hunting, Salaries, Wireless Workplace

Tags: Silicon Valley, Geography, Job, Huntsville, Recruitment & Selection, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Deb Perelman

In real estate, everyone knows what really matters: location, location, location. But could career choices be as simple? A new report suggests that geography could indeed be IT job destiny.

Fear not, though; this is not another report decreeing that you move to the staggeringly expensive Silicon Valley to find a great high-tech job. In fact, you’ll probably do better in some surprising places, like Huntsville, Ala., Durham, NC or Washington D.C. which at 19, 16 and 13 percent respectively were the three cities with the highest concentrations of tech workers in 2006, the most recent year that BLS data was available.

This was among other unusual findings of a new report looking at the high-tech industry in 60 U.S. cities from the AeA, a high tech trade association. Silicon Valley didn’t have the largest gains in high-tech employment, either–that honor went to Seattle, which added 7,800 jobs jobs in 2006, followed by the New York Metro area, which added 6,400. It didn’t employ the largest number of high-tech workers; New York and Washington D.C. again beat it out, with Boston and Dallas-Fort Worth closely nipping at its heels.

But it did, as the region has in the past, show tech workers the money in a way that smaller cities did not. The average high-tech wage in Silicon Valley, $145,000, was nearly triple that of Riverside-San Bernadino ($57,236)–the “fastest growing” high-tech city, according to the report–more than double that of Huntsville ($65,848) and 1.5 times that of Durham ($95,551).

Of course, there’s more to high-tech job geography than salaries and employment base; there are cost of living indexes–Silicon Valley and New York are losers in this; IT specializations–some say that you’d be better off developing software in Austin than network engineering in San Francisco–and the salient fact that the company you may want to work for has offices where it has offices.

If anything, the importance of geography in a job hunt points to the failure of technology to provide workers with truly wireless workplaces, as has long been promised as the future of work. But until that day happens, it’s nice to know that you don’t have to flee to the coasts to have a chance at landing a high-tech job.