For as long as I can remember, I wanted to work in an old building with naked brick walls. My current office building is not very old, but it being a design company office before we moved in, it does of course feature some nrick walls. But somehow knowing the fact that these walls aren’t real, that these bricks are for design and decoration purposes only, it all feels fake. I still want to work in a brick wall office. But I want real brick walls, not decorations.
The company I work for – FXCC – has recently advertised in e-Forex magazine. We just received a few copies of the magazine with our ad in it. I was surprised to see that our full page ad coincided with an article about one of my previous employers – FxPro. The article is featuring a picture of George Xydas – one of my former bosses.
All of a sudden this whole Forex industry felt really really small.
Yandex, also known as “Russian Google”, recently introduced a service for salary comparisons across Russia, based on the known job vacancies. This is a handy little tool that provides a lot of insight into how things are in Russia and across. For example, I immediately checked the average salary for a computer programmer in Togliatty – my hometown.
23,000 Russian Rubles approximately equal to 530 Euros. On the same graph, average salaries for Moscow and Saint Petersburg are also indicated – 1,200 EUR and 1,500 EUR accordingly. Unfortunately I don’t have an equal or reliably objective resource for Cyprus, but based on my own knowledge and experience, I’d say at least in Limassol the average salary for a programmer would be somewhere around 2,000 EUR. Moscow’s 1,500 EUR is roughly the minimum, I’d say.
First of all, this graph once again confirms that Moscow and Russia are two different things. Prices, salaries and opportunities are very different. Even Saint Petersburg, which is the second richest city in Russia is obviously behind here. Togliatt’s average salary being almost 3 times less than the one for Moscow clearly indicates the huge difference.
Secondly, this makes me question (not that I haven’t before) all those bright and brilliant mass media reports of how fast the Russian economy is growing and of how well things are improving in the regions. With 500 EUR being an average salary for a qualified professional – economy has a very long way to go.
Thirdly, it is sad to see how stale the IT industry is in my hometown. The city of almost a million in population has only 55 vacancies for a programmer (according to Yandex only, of course). And out of those most are C++ and 1C (popular accounting software package) vacancies. There are a few web developer positions available, but for the city that large these are too few.
Here is a quote from a recent GigaOm post:
Enterprises spend $270 billion on software every year, yet some can’t even calculate the number of employees in their organizations. Shocking? Well, such was the problem for Chiquita before they moved to Workday. But rudimentary challenges like this plague every enterprise in the world, and every individual within those enterprises. When we need to derive anything beyond the basics from our enterprise software, most corporations are out of luck.
This problem is only getting worse. With 1.8 trillion gigabytes of information projected to be generated and stored this year alone, our enterprise technology is on a collision course to become utterly useless if something doesn’t fundamentally change. The data being created is obnoxiously large, with IDC citing that “by 2020, IT departments worldwide will need to administer 10 times the number of servers–both virtual and physical–50 times the amount of data, and 75 times more files.” Our software, infrastructure, and organizations are ill-prepared to manage this scale of data creation, let alone generate anything meaningful or useful with this amount of content being created and shared.
The way I see it, if you want any job security at all, IT is an excellent industry to work for. Of course, only if you are agile enough to keep up with all the changes and developments.
In a Slashdot thread on the topic of the Programmer’s Day, I came across this insightful comment, with which, having been both a sysadmin and a programmer, I have to somewhat agree. No disrespect to any programmers intended, but sysadmins have it tougher. I wouldn’t go as far as to claim that Programmer’s Day is not deserved – we all work hard, but I agree that Sysadmin’s Day is deserved more.
Having been both a sysadmin and programmer, I have to honestly say that while sysadmin day is deserved, programming day isn’t. There’s just simply much more to sysadmins that are underappreciated when compared to programmers:
- Sysadmins setup routine systems that are built by programmers (who usually get the credit).
- Sysadmins only get (negative) attention when something goes awry.
- There’s usually no mention of sysadmins anywhere.
- Unless you are very technical, you probably don’t even know that sysadmins exist!
In contrast, programmers have it nice in the sense that when they do a good job, they are seen as the heroes who created the system. People go to programmers for feature requests in addition to bug reports. Their names are usually listed in an about dialog or readme file somewhere. Also, unless you are completely technically illiterate, you know that someone has to create the software.
The final bit: the infrastructure will crash and burn without sysadmins, but without programmers, it’ll just cease to advance.
Having a Programmer Day in addition to Sysadmin Day is like having an Executive Day in addition to Labor Day: unnecessary, unjustified. In both cases, the former already has the glory on a daily basis that the latter is hugely lacking.