Whose salary rises faster

During recent few years we can observe significant salary growth trend in most cities in Eastern Europe. The rates go high for all qualification levels, but does the speed differ for different levels?

The following graph is the result of some extra investigation, that was triggered by the comment to one of my previous posts (IT salaries in Eastern Europe). It shows the proportion between salary weights for:

• beginner - entry level technician(0 years of experience);
• specialist - intermediate level (1-2 years of experience in particular area);
• professional - advanced level (3-4 years of experience in particular area);
• expert - a professional with 5 or more years of experience in particular area.

Before I'd processed historical salary information, I was sure that Juniors' salaries rise faster, and I had some explanation that seemed very reasonable to me:

• beginners have more areas to improve their personal qualification level. It's quite easy to move from nothing to the next stage in their professional career;
• junior's salary is usually much lower than an employer can afford. It means that it's not a problem for a company to keep her/his salary rising constantly thus increasing the person's loyalty;
• intermediate level professionals are most demanded on the market because they already have enough skills to participate in production process, and their salary still allows to be profitable.

But the figures show a bit different result. The next image contains the salary growth curve for an average IT specialist. X axis lists years of experience, 6 means 6 years of experience in particular area by October 31, 2007. You can see two graphs, one of them uses only present salary information. Another one is based on historical data for an average developer who started his career in November, 2001. These values are adjusted by the coefficient of inflation.


One more chart displays proportion between salaries of 4 mentioned categories (beginner, specialist, professional, expert). The values are also adjusted by the coefficient of inflation, so it looks like salaries were not changing during the period between years 2004 and 2006. Actually the change was just enough to compensate the inflation:

As you can see, my classification identifies only 4 levels of qualification. What is the next point in a career? - is a regular questions for almost everyone in IT. Actually, what is? I'm going to return to this topic in one of future posts, and review several options as well as the difference between employee expectations in IT and in other industries.


These 3 charts can not be re-republished without written permission from Serge Stepantsov, this blog author. However, anyone can post a link to this page.

Project Success

Scott W. Ambler, a DDJ Senior Contributing Editor, Practice Leader Agile Development with IBM Rational, and author of several best-selling books conducted a research to find out how people define projects success, and provided some statistics to his reader (Defining Success. Dr.Dobb's Portal. October 31, 2007):

• Schedule: 61.3 percent of respondents said that it is more important to deliver a system when it is ready to be shipped than to deliver it on time.
• Scope: 87.3 percent said that meeting the actual needs of stakeholders is more important than building the system to specification.
• Money: 79.6 percent said that providing the best return on investment (ROI) is more important than delivering a system under budget.
• Quality: 87.3 percent said that delivering high quality is more important than delivering on time and on budget.
• Staff: 75.8 percent said that having a healthy, both mentally and physically, workplace is more important than delivering on time and on budget.

In general, I like his approach and ideas. However, there is one thing that bothers me a bit. Despite of the fact, that Scott provides different rankings for different categories of respondents, at least 94.7% (there is no exact information about others) of respondents were IT people.

Having tough experience working with various customers, and being a customer myself, I wasn't able to identify which one of the following is usually more important: Quality, Scope, Time or Money. Each case is different, but almost all the time it's some kind of a compromise between those four variables.


Everyone would be happy to get even more than they wanted and, in additional, in supreme quality. But in real life we still have to worry about time and budget, which are usually (yet, not alway) general constraints. So I agree that quality and scope can be ranked on the 1st two places... but only after taking other constraings into account.