When it comes to pay it all comes down to how much it’s worth ie how much money have you saved/made me?

Help desk – rubbish – you are usually helping one person with one issue

Excel programmer – rubbish as you are usually dealing with small issues.

Nurse/teacher – See help desk (which is completly s*it in my mind).

Football – Loads as it makes your club loads.

Business Process Programmer (SAP, Oracle Apps etc..) Loads. A mate spent 3 months coding a new subsystem to make a warehouse run more efficently. The warehouse productivity inc by almost 50%. How much money did that save them? They even layed off staff! (not so good kama)

Best way to make money is to sell stuff if you have the gift and no morals. IT your looking at around £1000/day tops. Selling – no limits.

don’t forget, IT managers and IT consultants are classed as working in IT and their wage will generally be quite a bit higher than 35k, even outside the city.

As for people who actually do stuff on computers/networks/hardware/software, I’d say the average is distinctly lower. Developers and programmers, despite what people have said above, don’t earn a huge amount IME, certainly not outside the city. I earn more than 35k but I’ve been in the game 20 odd years, have an extremely wide range of experience but I’m a techie at the end of the day which limits my earning potential.

If I let go of the reins and became a consultant or similar I could double my wage quite quickly I reckon. But I prefer messing about with things and fixing stuff, proper hands on bits and pieces. It’s very sad that so many companies regard their techies as monkeys and pay their managers far more. Without quality technical staff the companies would die but they’re treated like crap as far as I can see.

Someone who is highly skilled as a technician is just as valuable to a company as a good consultant but they’re treated as tools and their pay is restricted accordingly. Pretty diabolical.

My earning potential as a permie developer would be 40-50k depending on location, although some recruiters are taking the mickey a bit now with salaries. In a few years time I could be an architect and be on 60-70k tops in my line of work. Beyond that I’d have to be some kind of CTO or some such.

Mate of mine is a contractor in Switzerland. He’s got the same qualifications as me, graduated at the same time, roughly same experience and he is doing a similar job but earning close to 100k. Go figure.

Yep I’m with Samuri on this – as a fellow techy with 20 or so years at it. Havin been a consultant, contractor and now back on the permie architect side – all of the above 40k salaries begin to seriously impact your ability to ride bikes, have a life and generally live life as a human…

GrahamS: I’m a Software Engineer, not too far from you, and am on slightly less than you are (just over £30k not inc bonuses). I graduated 5 years ago, I don’t think you are getting hard done.

Everyone knows contracting can be lucrative and is a good way to accumulate a variety of skills. However most contracters I know are struggling a bit atm.

IT is such a broad spectrum. If you are a decent programmer / developer and work in high tech companies in Cambridge (where I live), then £35k is pretty low, but that’s one extreme of the spectrum – we’re talking people who design the OS for the phones you all use, not IT help desk people saying ‘try a reboot’.

Do people actually design the software that phones run on? I’m not sure that if I had anything to do with that I’d actually want to tell anyone.

‘hack’ might be a better term 😉

>Do people actually design the software that phones run on?

Where do you think it comes from ? 🙂

>Do people actually design the software that phones run on?

Where do you think it comes from ?

Well, i always assumed the one on my old Motoroloa RAZR was an elaborate practical joke.

Thanks Sandy, but to be honest if you’re only a couple of grand less than me after graduating five years ago, when I graduated 12 years ago, then I am getting a bit pumped really 😳

Footflaps: yep i’ve done firmware level stuff. Not phones, but medical devices (doing that at the mo in fact). Also done cash machines, military radios, telecoms monitoring, oil industry – all sorts really in a variety of languages. That’s one of the advantages that makes up for the pay.