Wages in IT

I'd be curious to know what other people who have either done the TOGAF training or are TOGAF certified think about the course. I've actually done the TOGAF training myself but never sat the exams (my organisation paid for it but I resigned before I could sit the exams).

Honestly, my opinion of it isn't very high. It's great for ticking a box when it comes to job applications and I think recruiters and execs who don't know any better probably think it's excellent. However, my view is that there's very little practical benefit to it. I wasn't any better at my job after I'd completed the course than before and neither were the rest of my team who did the training or got certified.

 

my 2c.

Wages are stagnant thanks to huge influx of foreign workers. I can't remember the last project I worked on where the actual technical people weren't on some sort of worker visa. It's an absolute disgrace & the quality can be awful (you get what you pay for...) Some are good, but my anecdotal experience is the good ones bail ASAP to USA/UK/Europe.

Almost all of the leadership/decision making roles are held by locals & still seem to offer career progression, so transitioning into delivery or PMO stuff (program/portfolio/project management or support staffer work until you can push up into decision maker roles) is still viable, but it's going to be an exercise in frustration because the people you're "managing" are under-skilled, under-paid & unmotivated. Not to mention some of the more colourful opinions I've seen by some of these workers regarding concepts like "women in the workplace", "having a female boss" or "not lying to your manager."

Even the government stuff is the same. Project starts with **** people who don't want to be there & around the 9-12 month mark they normally end up paying more than they would have if they'd just staffed it correctly in the first place to get a dozen or more big4 consultants at $x,000 a day * xx many resources * xx many days to fix it.

I've heard unofficially that my current fed gov project has cracked the $5m mark in big4 consulting fees (not to mention the fees for the technical resources they are wheeling in) to fix issues caused by hiring "senior developers" for $70k - $100kpa. So instead of hiring a pro day 1 for $700/day, we've got consultants <5 years out of university getting paid $60 - $80kpa by a consulting firm charging $3,000 a day to tell us what we already know, "pay peanuts, get monkeys" & now the whole thing blows out on time & cost.

Do we go hire some actual talent at $700/day (the MINIMUM market rate for this niche area of tech...)? Nah, we just hired nearly a dozen more $70kpa resources who will get sent on a 5 day course (at the project's expense.. Why?).. Then in 6 months when the 1-2 quick learners have bailed to the states/europe/anywhere else with their new skill set where people will actually pay the $700/day they are worth. We'll be left with the rest expecting to be spoon fed how to do their jobs & the project will continue to be over time & over budget.

I've just learnt to accept that if they are Govt or ASX200 (*and not ASX10 who normally understand you get what you pay for), the project will be over time & over budget and you're going to have to suffer a lot of fools along the way.

 

Is it a consultancy that would have a SOW in place with the client (like a Deloitte, Accenture, etc.) or a recruitment agency (like a PeopleBank, Robert Walters, Clicks, etc.)? If the former, they would be charging much higher rates to the client so you could in turn ask for a higher rate. If the latter, then there's probably not much you can do. Their "cut" is normally fixed and not negotiable.

Is this for a developer or software engineer role or an architect role? I would have thought it'd be very unusual to have to do an actual coding test for an architect role.

 

@Plutus an Android team leader / senior developer in London can get up to £700 per day, which is around $1250, versus maybe $900 here. Living costs are similar to Sydney, the only disadvantage is the weather.

I'm not sure of salaries in Silicon Valley, but I understand that they're pretty high. The Bay Area has a reputation for being expensive, but I don't know if it's worse than Sydney or Melbourne. (The Bay Area median house price is around $800K US, or $1 million Aussie.)

@jyeung80 the coding test is for an Android developer role. I should try out for a few more architect positions, but I've got out of touch with the enterprise stack.

I took a brief look at AWS and Google certification earlier. Might be worth it to get those on my CV.

The test is for a Big 4 consultancy, though I'm being sent in via a recruitment agent. Naturally both want their cut, and the rate reflects it.

The consultancy was being a bit shirty earlier. Turns out I interviewed with them unsuccessfully last year, so they're making noises that I might not be suitable. They're also complaining about not being able to find decent staff. (You pay below market rates, and expect to get top guys, go figure.)

I might withdraw my application, and tell them to get back to me when they can pay me what I'm worth.

 

@Graeme That's roughly the dilemma we have. The local market rate for people with the sort of skills we need (niche developer stuff, usually salesforce or more obscure system integration work) is $700+ aud / day for mid range talent, while the OS market is even higher.

Rather than addressing that if we want to retain people we need to pay global market rates not domestic rates, we go the opposite direction & hire the dregs (<$300/day generic "developers) & attempt to upskill them.. which means they use the project as a training environment where the few competent ones bail ASAP & the incompetent ones churn out garbage.

Re Big4, I'm not a fan of that game. Work 60-70 hours a week being billed at $3,000+/day (as a senior con/manager titled SME) to take home maybe $110kpa if you're lucky, which will work out to be under $40/hr thanks to the huge amount of expected over time.. Unless you do the bare minimum & accept that they will boot you (cravath up/out model) in 3-5 years.. If you do the grind, the reward is SM>Dir>Partner track, which is a 10 year slog to make good money IF you survive it (maybe 1 in 100?) but your job just becomes management & business development.

 

WOW. I've seen a few coding tests in my job hunts, but this one requires writing an entire app from scratch. Granted I've never written an app, but that seems way too much. Normally I refuse coding tests, and feel insulted, as I've been burnt a few times in the past where I would code something up and receive no feedback or initial interview. It's hard to know what they are looking for - including test stubs, unit test cases, too much commenting, tabs vs spaces, snake case vs camel case, too much or too little abstraction, the list goes on... Everyone thinks they're the next Google/Microsoft and tries to also ask mind bending puzzles too - 2 eggs, 100 floor building, find the floor the egg breaks. And the FizzBuzz / Fibonacci recursion style questions are just painful. It's sad that they are needed.

 

I had a friend who was in a similar situation recently. He interviewed directly with one of the Big 4, got rejected, then got hired by one of the smaller firms that they ended up acquiring. I imagine it'd be pretty awkward to run into the original hiring manager in the head office

You should find out what level they're pimping you out at. If it's a Manager or Senior Manager / Director level, the charge-out rates will be well above the mid 1000's a day so you should definitely be able to ask for more. At a Consultant or Senior Consultant level, there's much less room to move.

 

Not much practical benefit, but good to have on the CV.
Especially as nowadays those hiring have little time (or ability!) to go through applicants fully so often practice a form of tick-and-flick HR.

 

I've always avoided the "big4" consultancy firms since early in my career. When I was looking, they promoted that they hired the best individuals with a range of backgrounds for their IT projects - Accounting, doctors, etc... But then I read posts and blogs where these same people have to work late reworking (and reworking again) a design in a PowerPoint slide deck. Isn't it obvious that that is what happens when you hire people without IT skills and mindsets? Which is crazy as one of the advantages of the "big4" consultancy firms is to reduce the risk of systems integration for the client.

 

@Plutus the other trouble I find is that a large percentage of agents are trying to talk my rate down. It also gets annoying when they say, "Oh, we've got a guy on X, and he's way better than you because of Y. So you can't charge that much."

It's a problem. I'm not sure of the solution, but I keep on thinking of doing my own thing.

@TheRayTracer that's a standard coding test. Most will be identical.

The Android build system allows you to compile alternative targets. I'm toying with breaking the project up into different flavours, such as:

• Main (common code)
• CBA
• Atlassian
• ANZ

Then I can put together a bunch of virtual functions / interfaces and implement them in the appropriate subsection. Would save me a lot of time, but not necessarily an optimal solution from the client's point of view.

(Plus it shows off my Gradle Fu and the fact that I grok hardcore OO stuff, which a lot of coders don't do habitually. The downside is if I'm cleverer than the lead who's checking the test, he'll think that I'm writing weird code, and therefore suck)

@jyeung80 I was chatting to an agent today, and it sounds as though my charge-out for the consultancy would be around the $1500 per day mark.

 

@Graeme, what is a standard coding test? That Android app request that you showed or FizzBuzz?

And herein lies one of the many faults with a coding test.

 

I used to provide potential Web developers with a coding test but i emphasised to them that it was not a make or break test. There is a minimum level of knowledge that i'd be looking for but the test was never the final yay or nay.

In one of the positions we had advertised for a medium java developer role from memory , i ended up hiring a uni grad instead of seniors who applied for the job. The reason why i hired him back then was the way he approached the test. He knew he was the underdog as i shared with him that we had a lot of seniors applying for the role when he only knew the basics but he ended up studying for the test over the weekend and done really well for a Uni grad and ended up getting the job, excelled at it and even flew him to Singapore on a work trip once...

 

I sort of got my job at Amex that way. They were looking for a uni grad, I had just finished the Grad Dip in IT - my coding skills - Best described as pass!

But before the test (a reasonably simple demonstration that you could write VB) I solidly practised the day before and when it came to the test I could do it. I did all that was required and in addition, added in input validity checking that wasn't specifically asked for. 5 of us did the test and they selected 2 of us to interview after the test based on performance in the test.

So... practise! If you haven't done some coding skill for a while a full refresher day will really help.

 

I'm probably alone on this one, but I find these "tests" strange and was never pre-warned about them during uni days. Sigh. And this is why I purchased the book Cracking the coding interview which is a great book to read just to get you into the mindset. However, I always wondered, when hiring in other industries, would ask an accountant to balance a book, ask a nurse to setup an IV, ask a mail man to deliver a package, or publicist to organize a book launch?

 

At this point I've been in IT for nearly twenty years (I feel really old saying that), and working in Android for about seven or eight.

I know this stuff.

Anyway, I got another one on Friday.

Three hours?

At the three hour mark I'd got a basic idea of a design together, created a Readme file explaining how I was approaching it, and set up the project and Github repository.

If you're going to set a test, then for Zeus's sake, please come up with a timeframe that's remotely realistic. Coding is a slow process, and setting up a project from scratch takes time.

 

Is it for a huge company? I found that a lot of large ones are like that...

From the point of view if they make times realistic, then they cannot work out who is the cream .... Something like that

 

Isn't this the same requirement? In this context does sorting equate to visual grouping on screen, or an aggregated group that is a sum for a date?

Was that "test" from a recruiter or actual bank?

I remember creating my first mobile application as a Uni project in the days just before smart phones and google maps. We had to use J2ME and were restricted to 32Kb of space (including code and icon/resources). We had some fun renaming variables to stay within 32kb.

 

The test came from the bank, I've actually seen it before. Didn't do it last time, and the HR department got a bit annoyed with me when I pointed out it couldn't actually be completed in three hours.

It was sent as a tar file, which would probably be beyond the ken of most recruiters. (That strikes me as a real nerd thing, a zip would be a lot more sociable for those of us who don't run Linux.)

The grouping requirement is different.

• The first is using a straightforward ordered list, with everything in one line.
• The second is grouping them together. In Androidland this will be done by using an ExpandableListView to provide the date field, forcing it to remain open, and then putting the transactions into groups.

I did some work with J2ME. Spent a chunk of time over a year or more writing a version of Tempest that ran on those pre-smart phones. Did a lot of work on it, didn't get paid a penny.

 

Submitted my coding challenge result about a fortnight ago. Finally got feedback yesterday evening.

"Graeme is obviously very clever, and tried something new, but it's not really what we're looking for."

Translation: They didn't understand my code, and therefore thought it was useless.

 

Well... if they can't understand it, then it can't be easily supported by others down the track. Fair enough reasoning.