I guess I should ask for a big raise, then. And I should tell most of my colleagues that we’re seriously underpaid. I work in a software company and I don’t think anybody in our engineering department (with the exception of VP) makes 150K.[/quote]
Can’t comment on any other “engineering profession”…But wrto “software”… Find another company, polish your skillset, move up, or move out, or eventually get outsourced. One of the following is bound to happen. If you let yourself stagnant, you’ll be out the door and perpetually be undercompensated, as this industry changes so much and so frequently.
Companies are figuring out these days (the smarter ones) when outsourcing works and when it does. Again, my experience has been (especially) with a fallen dollar, cultural differences, turnover rates in India, and “fuzzy” requirements outsourcing engineering work purely based on cost to India isn’t what it’s cracked up to be..Of course opening up an entire sub-dept in India or the likes is a completely different thing, as it isn’t really outsourcing. But then again, you sort of then need to compete with the top projects. Anyway, if you feel like your company ain’t paying you top dollar or they keep waiving the “outsourcing” flag at you as an excuse for why they can’t pay you dollar and your skills are current and in demand, start looking elsewhere. Frankly some companies are really short changing folks, while others are really overpaying folks (neither are really sustainable).
For example, company X was looking for a Senior Software Engineer 7-8 years. Hasn’t found one in 12 months. Why? Company was will to pay like 90-100k full time employee, yet was looking for a specific skill/knowledge for a technology. They’ve gone through many candidates, and made several offers. Not one candidate accepted. Why? Because when they were able to find a person with that specific skillset, the billout for someone as a consultant with that skillset is like $150/hr, and people figured it’s more advantegeous to be a consultant working on short $150/hr+ 6-month contracts than to be a FTE on some company. Company Y on the other hand was paying ridiculous comps for top Java/J2EE developers. However, was quickly learned, they reason they were doing this, is they need to “quickly rampup”. Translation: I don’t know what exactly we need to do, but I got money for a project, and I’m told to hire like crazy (with the caveat that I can fire equally quickly).
As far as LJ…From an engineer’s perspective. I’d love to live in LJ if I had an insane amount of money…But from a functional perspective, I don’t think it’s really practical. Most of the homes are older, and i like the convenience of getting on the freeways and to sorrento valley/56 quickly. The first thing I’d probably would end up doing would be a teardown in LJ, but again that would require an insane amount of money, which i don’t have.
