System i Salaries - Are they fair?

I have been a System i Admin for over 18 years. I have enjoyed every minute of it, but over the years I have seen something that does not make sense to me or other Admins in my shoes. The salaries have leveled off and are not going up at the same rate they were 20 years ago. While I am not poor or broke, I do think that System i admins are special people and due to the fact we are special we deserve a little better pay than most regular Admins.

While the System i is an easy system to work on they are usually in large IT shops and have lots of users needing lots of things from it, plus the bulk of the companies data lives on that box and it’s essential for the company to function day to day. While some servers in IT can be down the System i can’t.

So where does this leave us. While I am not going to looking up numbers and facts I can give you what I have in my head, life experiences. If I did put numbers and facts up I think this would be a News site and it really is just a blog, a place for me to think aloud and you to ponder.

I know live in Denver and when I moved here (Denver) from Atlanta my salary went down, but my cost of living went up. This is but one of my problems while in Denver. Before I moved to Denver I lived in Atlanta and my average System i pay was about $77K a year USD. Not bad. I did better some years but I would say that is still about the average in Atlanta. I am looking on job boards and it seems to be right in the middle.

Denver on the other hand is a bit worse. While I needed more money to live here I was not able to make as much money as I had in Atlanta. I would say based on my W2 and current job boards the average salary for Denver is $62K a year, still a decent amount of money but I am not sure how that works. How can I need less money to live in Atlanta and make more, yet in Denver where there is a shortage of System i Admin and a higher cost of living I can’t make enough to live like I had in Atlanta. If you take the cost of living into account in Denver I would have needed to make over $82K a year just to make the same as I had in Atlanta.

Word of caution to IT people thinking about moving to Denver for “Great IT Jobs”, I would caution you. That is all I am saying. The jobs here in IT are few and far between. I am talking about average IT jobs, not specialties like the System i or Lotus Notes. The bigger problem is people get desperate here and since there are few jobs in IT they take what they can get and the employers know that. They commonly scalp JAVA and C++ talent because they have been let go and now need a job bad. I would think twice before moving to Denver for an IT job, it may seem like the greatest job on earth but if you get let go you will end up working for whatever they will pay and it’s usually not good.

I see this problem in other markets as well. I have talked to people like me all over and the same stories are abound. System i Admins all make less than say an UNIX Admin or a Linux Admin when in fact our servers are just as important to the companies that run the System i as the companies that focus their IT infrastructure to UNIX based systems.

Are we being shorted? Does no one see our value? I am not sure…I have alwasy considered that IT people needed to form Unions, while I am no fan of Unions as they work today I think overall companies don’t pay IT people what they are worth. Most companies see IT people as overhead and not necessary and I have been told that before and pretty recently too. IT is an expense we have to incur in order to run. While I don’t agree with either of those statements and I have left those companies, I do think many places feel like that. They don’t see the true value of IT, and maybe it’s because we sit in a chair all day and don’t do any hard labor like lifting stones or digging ditches? Some places that are pure IT shops understand that if they don’t take care of the people they lose them over time to other places. Google.com is one of the places that is really a pure IT company. Everyone there is a computer person for the most part. Google takes care of it’s assets which are it’s talent. Every company in my opinion should take a long hard look at the Google model and adopt what they can in order to retain and motivate their employees.

While I don’t think we can strike for the obvious reasons, I do think we owe it to ourselves to up the anti a bit. Next time you are interviewing for a position and they low ball you because they think you will work there and are desperate please counter offer until they give you what you deserve. IT people and System i people are important. Find out what you are worth and add 5% just for good measure. If was all demand more for our skills we will over time increase the salaries of all other System i people around. It’s time to at least make as much money as the UNIX Admins out there pulling down over $120K a year while we provide the same quality of service on a cheaper server.

I would like to point out I am very happy with my current position and being compensated fairly.