by Timothy Prickett Morgan
January 12, 2009
(IT
Jungle) -- Trying to get a handle on how the IT job
market is doing is not an easy task. If you look at data from
the U.S. Department of Labor and peel out the sections of its
monthly jobs reports to look at IT manufacturers and services
companies, then the layoffs have not been so bad. But, of
course, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not look at
employment and unemployment by job type and title, but
rather by industry, so you can't get a real sense of what is
happening in the jobs market from Uncle Sam.
If I were President of the United
States, or POTUS for short, this is one of the first things I
would change. You can't manage what you don't measure, after
all.
Thanks to the lack of government
data, the job of sussing out the employment situations of
programmers, system administrators, project managers, network
managers, chief information officers, and other IT people--yes,
these are all people, with lives, not just numbers in a
table--falls to various compensation experts, online job search
engines, and IT consultancies that make their best guesses about
what is going on in the IT jobs market at large based on what
turns out to be a relatively skinny sample of data. We work with
the data they have.
Janco Associates,
an IT compensation specialist based in Park City, Utah, has just
released its 2009 IT compensation study, which you can get an
executive overview of
at this
link, and the news is not good. Thanks to a confluence of
factors, including company closures, outsourcing, layoffs,
hiring freezes, and retirees coming back into the job market
because they lost dough in the stock market, the mean salaries
in the IT space have taken a big hit in recent months because of
a glut of people looking for jobs in the market.
"The job market for IT professionals
is one of the worst that I have seen since the late 1970s," says
Victor Janulaitis, chief executive officer at Janco. "There is a
surplus of IT talent and companies are in a cost-cutting mode.
The dot-com bubble was a cake walk compared to this job market."
He meant the dot-com bubble bursting in late 2000 or
early 2001 (date it where you will) was a cake walk, but you see
what Janulaitis was getting at. The report that Janco created is
based on surveys of IT shops in the United States and Canada.
The company says it has "over 50,000 data points" in that
database; judge for yourself what that might possibly mean in
terms of the thinness or thickness of the data presented below.
At large enterprises, Janco reckons
that the average IT compensation in January 2009 across all job
titles was $77,367 in the United States. That is down 2.1
percent from January 2008. At large enterprises, IT salaries are
holding up better than at midrange shops, according to
Janulaitis. Executives at large companies averaged a total
compensation of $142,914, down 1.2 percent from a year ago. IT
middle management compensation is down 1.7 percent over the same
time frame, to an average of $78,530, while IT staff (mostly
programmers and administrators) averaged $65,956, down 0.9
percent.
At midrange companies, the staff are
not paid all that much less, and they also are not seeing
compensation declines as large as the managers. The average
compensation for IT staff at midrange shops in January 2009 was
$60,279, down 0.75 percent. The average compensation among
middle managers at midrange shops has, however, fallen by 3.9
percent to $71,830, and average compensation for IT executives
at midrange companies dropped by 4.6 percent in the past year to
$126,031. The chief information officers at companies are seeing
their compensation drop as fringe benefits and bonuses are cut.
At large enterprises, compensation (based on the mean) for CIOs
is $168,839, down 6.1 percent, and at midrange companies it is
$163,211, down 5 percent.
Janulaitis says that bonuses are
being cut all across the IT spectrum, and so is the use of
outside IT contractors to do projects as companies try to trim
costs. He adds that demand for seasoned CIOs is up at large
companies, while demand is slack for CIOs at midrange shops. For
the second time in a decade, IT professionals are putting off
retirement, or coming back into the workforce, leading to a
surplus of IT job seekers at exactly the time that companies are
freezing their hiring or letting people go. One side effect of
the supply-demand curve for IT personnel is that companies are
becoming less flexible about the work environment, which means
having to work on site and with a dress code in some cases.
Yeah, man. It might mean no more
khakis, no more flex-time. The upside is that IT is now integral
to the business, and business managers get it. But the downside
is that IT doesn't get to be treated differently, as if it were
a bunch of Web 2.0 startups that need to be creative with their
space and time. "No longer do they have the option of being
different," says Janulaitis. "For example, IT professionals now
must conform to typical dress codes. If everyone wears a
business suit so must the IT pros." In a survey done by rival
Robert Half Technology, more than a third of managers said that
formal business attire was what people should be wearing to
work. So not only is compensation down, but the dry cleaning
bills are gonna go up now, too.
