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Strategies & Market Trends : Waiting for the big Kahuna -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Investor-ex! who wrote (17340)	4/26/1998 12:37:00 PM
From: Bonnie Bear	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 94695

The statistics for programmer salaries here in silly valley shows a good senior programmer with 15+ years experience and marketable skills commands a six figure salary. The real hot ticket right now is a programmer with an MBA...most of corporate america's problems are a lethal combination of a requirement to cut overhead costs, technical illiteracy of management, and an existing infrastructure that looks like Frankenstein's monster after endless M&A activity. Usually there are multiple IT groups with different hardware-software "solutions" run by IT directors who hate each other. A good programmer has his hands tied most of the time- he's told to re-use software on an archaic hardware platform when sometimes the right solution is to throw it out and start from scratch. Little thought is given to the way people use their computers and software, and the need for a scalable architecture that can adapt to future needs. Management waits until the business shuts down and a crisis starts before attending to the software. At that point a job-shop can come in an command a high price for programmers (or IS consultants) in a company desperate for help. The high salaries are paid to programmers because (1) they need them NOW (2) they can be dumped when the job is done with no severance (3) the companies don't have to pay social security, medical, training, etc etc to a job-shopper. The hot skills in the valley right now seem to be peoplesoft and oracle, the ads are asking for skills by these names. It suggests that companies have bought products from peoplesoft and oracle but can't get the databases to talk to each other or suit the intended purpose. It's much more the domain of the MBA than the programmer, and many times it is a set of problems the programmers can't solve because the program is 90% managerial and 10% technical. Good programmers don't want the jobs (as they can't fix managerial problems), so cheap ones will do. Turnover must be tremendous in some of these companies.