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The recession has affected everyone on some level (re: decimated savings and retirement plans). But surely it has impacted some much more severely than others. Six and a half million U.S. residents have remained unemployed for six months or longer while the national unemployment rate remains at 9.7%.
While the unemployed and underemployed are suffering more and for longer periods of time since the Great Depression, people who have remained employed or even those who have regained employment during this time are also finding it harder to make ends meet. Few people will bemoan the $95,470 average compensation for U.S. IT professionals recently reported in Computerworld’s Annual Salary Survey when countless Americans are homeless or hungry and the median household income in the U.S. was roughly $50,000 in 2008. But IT staffers who have watched their pay slip behind cost-of-living increases over the past few years while working longer hours and receiving fewer benefits are more disgruntled than ever. According to Computerworld’s survey of 4,852 respondents, average IT compensation rose a meager 0.7% over the past year.
It’s tough to create a baseline of dissatisfaction among IT workers since each person has their own personal levels of discontent. I spoke recently to a network administrator who works for a state agency in California who feels stuck in his role. Thanks to California’s budget crisis, state workers there, including IT professionals, are facing pay cuts while enforced furloughs over the past couple of years have resulted in the equivalent of pay cuts. This network administrator is hoping the situation will improve over time. Yet he feels his career options are no better if he were to jump to the private sector.
Still, I think it’s safe to make comparisons between the attitudes of overworked IT staffers from a few years ago to the current state. If you were to go back two or three years ago, many IT workers were saying that they weren’t happy with their miniscule changes in compensation and longer hours. But they continued to hold on, hoping for better times ahead. Fast-forward to the present. Nowadays, many IT professionals are downright angry and bitter about their plight, watching helplessly as employers continue to dump more work on them while senior management continues to haul in premium pay and bonuses.
There’s been a lot of buzz about how top-notch IT workers are expected to bolt for greener pastures now that the economy is starting to show signs of life. I haven’t seen that happening yet, at least not on a widespread scale. There’s also an unquantifiable number of IT pros who have reluctantly accepted their overworked lot as the new normal.
Savvy IT leaders who want to retain their best and brightest and keep their staffs motivated will fight for a bigger chunk of their budgets to go to workers who have been instrumental in driving the cost savings their IT organizations have delivered for the past few years.
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