Yet more salary surveys

Every so often I like to look at salary surveys.  On average I have changed jobs about every two years over the past two decades.  So surveys come in handy.  Here's a couple that I came across recently.

Dr. Dobbs Developer Salary Survey

This is a pretty good survey from a respected name in software.  Not really my cup of tea, but I program often enough to find it interesting.

Design News 2014 Salaries for 10 Engineering Disciplines
I check Design News a few times a week.  Usually they post/repost interesting items.  But this survey is really more of a overview of salary ranges.  There's no commentary about regions of the country, years of experience, etc.  I suppose it might be useful if you were a parent talking to your kid about how much they might make as a n engineer.  I'm in that situation for at least the next few years, so that's why I looked at it.

Yet another company

A dozen years ago the biggest risk of a startup smacked me upside the head: the company ran out of money and closed it's doors.  Since that first experience in the high-tech* startup world, I've worked at a half-dozen or so other such companies.  Over half of them are no longer in existence.

I have accepted that, but I was never happy with it.  This past summer things went downhill with my latest company.  Within a month I had offers from three companies: a temporary contract gig at a mid-sized company, a large fortune 500 type, and another startup.  Sometimes it is good to mix it up, so I decided to ride with the behemoth.  I've been here two months now - we'll see how it goes.


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* My definition of a "high-tech" startup includes actual hardware.  I'm sure a lot of smart people work at companies developing new apps for smartphones, algorithms for web-hosted databases, or some other clever software tool.  But unless it involves some newly-discovered applications of physics/chemistry/biology, it doesn't meet my criteria. That's just my bias.