Tech Industry Salaries, your expriences

[pikaporeon]

Connected question - how have you guys observed salaries scaling for MS SQL DBAs?

[just brew it!]

Connected question - how have you guys observed salaries scaling for MS SQL DBAs?

No clue what the situation is these days, as it has been many years since I did MS SQL stuff (and even then the MS SQL jobs I had were more application development, with a bit of DBA thrown in). Made pretty good money doing that stuff back in the day though.

I would be willing to bet that it is highly industry- and location-dependent. It would not surprise me at all for an experienced DBA at a Wall Street financial firm to make well into six figures, while a DBA at a manufacturing firm in the "rust belt" might be making only 40K. The former lives and dies by their data and needs to pay people enough to make up for a higher cost of living; the latter merely sees the DBA as "overhead".

[Jon]

From my experience in Canada:

Tier1 Tech Support - $50,000 (Oil & Gas Company)
Tier2 Tech Support - $60,000 (Oil & Gas Company)
Tier3 Tech Support - $70,000 (Consulting)

[MaxTheLimit]

Yeah, again in Canada, my salary was:
Hardware Analyst - $48,0000 yearly contract no benefits
Hardware Analyst ( 6 years later ) - $55,000 yearly salary with benefits

Now that my supervisor is leaving I'm looking at changing companies and it looks like I'm going to be at $60,000 yearly salary with benefits.

[AMD Damo]

Wages in the USA seem very low, but I guess its all relative with lower prices on everything.

I'm not in the IT field, I'm an apprentice auto electrician and I'm on $24000 a year. Because I'm an apprentice they can pay me under minimum wage. But everything here costs more I guess.

[pikaporeon]

I'm at 48k a year as a database analyst, this is my starting salary with no degree and just an Ontario College Diploma (This is in a suburb of Toronto, Ontario)

I did tier 1 support at a datacentre for $11 an hour.

[just brew it!]

Wages in the USA seem very low, but I guess its all relative with lower prices on everything.

IIRC historically the US dollar was much stronger versus the Canadian and Australian dollar, which would have made US wages *look* low if you didn't take the exchange rate into account. These days, however, it appears that the US $ is roughly at parity with Canadian and Australian $.

But perhaps the disparity you're seeing is a lingering effect of that...

[ludi]

Wages in the USA seem very low, but I guess its all relative with lower prices on everything.

Think in terms of exchange rates (you can quickly whip up a custom history chart on the OANDA website). The AUD has historically run somewhere around 1.3:1 against USD, even while AU and US have similar economies, so assuming no other factors, you would expect to see AU wages and prices settle about 1.3 times higher than US wages and prices for equivalent jobs and goods. Of course there are other factors, so that's only a baseline estimate, but it should get you into the right ballpark.

Things are being mucked up right now by the fact that lots of people are expecting the Eurozone to spiral into a full-out debt crash, and are hedging their bets by dropping their assets into more secure locations, like USD, thus driving up the value of USD. Hence, the 0.94:1 ratio for the past month or so.

[just brew it!]

Things are being mucked up right now by the fact that lots of people are expecting the Eurozone to spiral into a full-out debt crash, and are hedging their bets by dropping their assets into more secure locations, like USD, thus driving up the value of USD. Hence, the 0.94:1 ratio for the past month or so.

Yeah, I knew the exchange rates were historically quite different; didn't realize the runup was that recent (and was too lazy to check).

[Flatland_Spider]

I don't know if I would like software development or programming in general, mainly because I had a high school class back in 98 that I just couldn't understand (basic programming I think it was). I never had tried to key in code before that. Its also a fear of failing and never being decent at the job. Is programming easy to understand-a much more knowledgeable person told me "there are some basic rules you must get down and then its very simple, every programming language is an off-shoot of that. Sort of like learning European languages, verb forms change but many other things stay the same so its much easier to learn many different languages" Is this statement true? Is there an unimaginable learning curve or am I just looking at this in a much more complicated fashion then I should.

Theoretically, baseball is a simple game, but most people don't play pro ball. The mechanics of hitting a baseball are the same, but each team is different. Some have better defense and better pitchers.

As for the fear of failing and the job thing, you can't really think about that. Do what makes you happy. In the end doing something you like doing will make up for however crappy the pay is. As for the failure, we all fail. The trick is to get better not failing.

The learning curve depends on the programming you start with. If you start with c or c++, you're going to get a lot of information thrown at you all at once. It's like learning to hit a baseball with an all-star pitcher throwing you his best junk. Python, ruby, or basic are more forgiving than c or c++. They're like using a wiffle bat to hit a foam ball thrown slow and underhand. Java and C# split the difference. They're like hitting a softball.

Programming is just writing flow charts, more commonly known as instructions. Would you be interested in writing instructions all day then testing them to make sure the outcome is exactly what you had planned? Would you be interested in writing instructions and having other people test them, and then making revisions?

If you're interested in programming, write some code, and see what you think. Ruby has some great introductory tutorials, and Microsoft has tutorials for Visual Studio Express. If you need some ideas, create an app that keeps track of a budget for you, or write an app that randomly displays a picture from a folder when you click a button. There's an actual art to writing code, but you'll learn that if you decide to continue.