The law of supply and demand is hitting India as shown in a recent salary survey. Thanks to a large demand from Indian companies as well demands from the global outsourcing boom, Indian works will receive an average of 12 percent increase in pay in 2007. This is 7 percent when adjusted for inflation. The predicted increase in Indian salary was the highest increase of 45 countries surveyed.Â
Indonesians and Chinese are expected to see a real wage increase of about 6 per cent, while the Philippines and Thailand come in at fourth and fifth ranks respectively with a 4 percent salary increase. Â
With great fanfare it was announced that David Beckham was coming to the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer (MLS) for $250 million over 5 years. The number seemed impossible for a team that already sells most of the seats in its stadium that can hold about 27,000 fans for its dozen or two home games. TV revenue can’t be that much for a sport that may be in the top ten in the US market. Well it turns out that  MLS will pick up about $2 million of that, Galaxy ownership picks up about $40 million and the rest will be enhancements to Beck’s endorsements. Another thing to note is that the Galaxy ownership group has ownership interests in six MLS teams that will benefiit when David comes to town.
Salaries amongst top California’s top beaurucrats have seen some nice increases in recent months. While many go to Sacremento to sacrifice themselves to public service, the sacrifice paid nicely and now they are experiencing salary increases from 10 percent to 47 percent. That’s a lot of money to spend the lot of money Californians sent to Sacremento.
There was an article in the San Diego Union Tribune that described how San Diego’s police force are paid less than other cities. If you are famiar with the cities they surveyed, you might see some problems with differences in salaries but San Diego’s salaries don’t stand out as a problem.
 San Diego’s police salaries look to be between $0.50 and $3.00 less than Los Angeles’. That sounds fair considering the size and personalities of the two cities. In LA, police have to deal with the Bloods, Crips, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. In San Diego, police patrol a more beautiful city and thanks to this report may make up that fifty cent pay differential. Of course if San Diego police tire of the pay, they can move the freeway to Murrieta and make more money and deal with the wine country, golf courses, and Lawrence Welk Resort patrons.
The survey was interesting, especially the graph at the bottom showing minimum and maximum salaries for 19 western US cities.
I came across an article entitled Survey Reveals Gender Gap in CPA Salaries, it got my attention so I clicked through. They present a large salary gap in the survey but they provided more of a gap in data than a gap in salary.
The article mentioned that based on preliminary data there was still a rather large gap in salary between men and women. It continued to say that preliminary report did not “consider other factors such as years of experience or level of responsibility, the final report will.” Duh!
For many years have been overly cautious about giving women and minority (more) equal opportunity to seem fair and avoid legal problems. Medium to large companies also have Human Resources departments that tend to have many female employees who would are involved in the hiring, firing, promoting and rewarding employees. If there is a gender gap it’s being approved by females in many cases.
I thought I ran into a gender gap about 15 years ago when a female in the same role I was in mentioned her salary. It was what I was making two years earlier! It was about 8% less than I was making! Than I realized that I was…two years older than her…with two years more experience so it was an experience gap, not a gender gap.  Â
I guess the headline could have read “Less Experienced CPAs Make Less then More Experienced CPAs” but that makes it sound like it’s not really news.
The example amounts of compensation are amazing considering the industries that the executives represent: health care, TV, oil and mainframe computing. Sun’s CEO makes millions while the company doesn’t make anything, it has a loss?? These are cash cow industries, it’s not like they created a search engine that create googals of advertising revenue.
I have in the past made the argument defending a CEO’s salary as the competitive cost of retaining talent, pay the going rate or lose your guy/gal. But the reality is that many companies could run for weeks, days, or months in the absence of their CEO and there may be better qualified people a level or two below.
If you work in IT in the US, you may be interested in looking at a salary survey showing salaries by title and region. No big surprises but it’s always good to know what the market is like for your skill set.Â
There’s a nice article over at SearchSMB covering some of the advantages of working at a smaller organization. The article covers how some people would forgo the greater salaries at larger companies to avoid becoming “just a number”. It also mentions that bonus can be larger and directly tied to performance at smaller companies (I don’t mind getting a bonus and saying “what’s this for?” but it’s nice if it’s recognition for my efforts).
Here are a few more benefits:
Quality of work life is more likely to include flexible hours and telecommuting so you can be at that recital or little league game.
In a small company you are the IT department - you can get things done without relying on co-workers or filling out forms.
Seeing projects through from idea to implementation.
With smaller companies learning opportunities are easier to come by so there’s a greater chance that you will be working with new technologies.
College graduate salaries continue to rise for new grads. College graduates can expect to earn as much as 7.5% more their first year than grads from last year. Information sciences and systems grads see the biggest gains but still trail grads with mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering degrees.
Here’s a cool little interview with an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) guy. If you are asking “What is Search Engine Optimization?” it’s basically making your site so that search engines can find, digest, and rank your site highly.
