Amazed at the number of people resigned to not earning more

From the previous posts it looks like a lot of IT people at not earning the average and never expect to earn the average, so the average is going to stay low.

Why not upskill and get a better job. People are happy to pay out of their own pockets for leisure activities. Golf lessons, gym memberships. But, when it comes to doing soemthing that will increase their earning potentialy they expect their employer to pay up.

Why not invest some of your own free time and money so you can get a better job and earn more money then you can pay for more golf lessons, Xbox games, techie t-shirts, odd bits of kit from random websites...

It's not alwys your employers job to improve your earning potential.

High Pay

Certification are usually a waste of time. Experience is what counts.

If I was to be certified for everything I do, I would need to spend a month taking exams. Technology moves so fast though that any exam is usually out of date a year or two after it's been written. I don't have time for that. In the current scheme of things you have to know where to find your help and you need to know how to use it and apply it. (I have huge and expensive cisco books on the shelf, but I never use them because the Cisco site contains more info. I have another £40 book on networking from 20 years ago - but it only has a cpl of paragraphs on tcpip!)

Certificates etc - there are ppl that make money by sitting the same exams many times (each time with a different name on the paper) When I was at uni, on one of the exam papers, the invigilator asked a baby and the babysitter to move further apart. When the baby complained he was moved to the front and only scored 10% on that paper - his other papers were 80% or more. I've worked with plenty of idiots who clearly have not passed their exams - or if they have then they have quickly forgotten what they learnt, or never understood stuff in the first place.

When companies like Amazon, Google, IBM, Plusnet, Tiscali and Tesco mess up big style, you have to question the quality of their staff - far too cavalier. These are the ones that need sacking in the current climate.

People working in the IT industry need to realise that their jobs are always on the line. Anything which can be done remotely will for large companys be done remotely. I've heard of pay rates as low as $2 per hour so that might explain why some of the large companies who are keen on outsourcing are having such a hard time of it at present. Righsourcing, leftsourcing, upsourcing, downsourcing, insourcing, subcontracting, downcontracting, etc - it's always cheap labour.

A large uk telco, popular with some large banks btw - they make many mistakes. I know a lot of the techies and asked them about some of the mistakes. Yep, outsourced.

HP. Started with just a few guys in a shed. Google started with a cpl of lads and a garage. This could be a model for the future. Outsource everything - design, manufacture, support, marketing, accounting, sales, distribution, warehousing. All you need is a couple of guys to pay the big wad of dosh called profits to. (Profits, who needs them? Pay yourself a big wad of dosh anyway while the gravey train rolls - and preferably before anyone looks under the rug.)

offshore pressures

Ive seen the offshore pressure affecting all of the market sectors, I contract and in a very specialized niche and we're seeing less emphasis on doing things properly and much more on doing them cheaply with everyones lust for results and not to pee off the board at end of year figures time. So a lot of what would have been done properly onshore has gone offshore just to massage the figures in a bid to not be slayed by the city on shareprice at results time.

The problem is the phb's cannot really see the difference in the end product, don't understand theyre putting stuff out thats not really fit for purpose and running the companies into the ground.

It will probably take several years for the bad companies to reap the rewards of what they are sowing now to stay alive, and be replaced by a new batch of people wanting to do things properly who wont do stupid things like allowing nobody technical to speak to the staff resourcing dept or recruit people by name/reputation direct, at which point there will be another equivalent of the .com boom when the majority of the trainwrecks stop happening, some market confidence comes back to IT projects and all those plumbers will suddenly be IT workers once more, and all the IT recruitment agency staff will stop being estate agents again!

To all the developers agog at the numbers, its often said that our specialized team all STARTED off as developers many years ago. Times are hard, but its about now you should be rounding off your skillset and taking a look at the next few rungs on the ladder.

Have to say, if someone offered me 36k for my next role, Id take a year off instead, but I have worked my arse off through the ranks getting to my fortunate position...

@Trevor Woolnough - Dinosaurs

Yeah, some of us old dinos still work on mainframes. There are a lot of people telling us we're going away. We've been "going away" for the last 30 years. The biggest problem is they really aren't training a lot of folks to take our place after the next big extinction.