I checked, the top paid IT person in my local Bay Area school district makes $168,000 a year (he’s the CIO). There’s a “L4” software developer making $131,000 a year. The next highest is a DBA earning $129,000 a year. So it would appear at least my district isn’t budgeting a competitive amount for technical talent. These salaries are far below market rate, to the point that many of these people might qualify for subsidized housing.
> district makes $168,000 a year (he’s the CIO). There’s a “L4” software developer making $131,000 a year.
I think that really says more about the absolutely absurd cost of living and non-rational real estate costs in the SF bay area than it does about the school district. In many places with normal cost of living, if your US W2 take home is $129k a year, you can live a very comfortable upper middle class lifestyle. Whether or not you have a spouse or partner with their own career and your combined W2 gross income might be $210k a year.
Same as what I said above also applies to absurd real estate and cost of living in Seattle, Vancouver, New York, etc.
> You have to compare the salary to local living costs to be comparable.
This is not accurate in a globalized economy, where purchasing power parity (PPP) becomes a bit of a lie. No one is going to ask you if you're from Cambodia or another country, when you'll want to rent a server from AWS, or buy an iPhone, or maybe even a car. Global corporations aren't running charities and are instead concerned with making their products profitable - if anything, they would only use your location to increase the prices of products further if you're capable of buying them, but that's not a widespread practice nowadays for a variety of reasons.
I actually wrote a bit more about it in my blog article, "On finances and savings": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings
which showed how much money i've made over the years while working as a software developer in Latvia (currently around 18'000 euros a year), which means that my ability to make savings is ~5x lower than many of the software developers in the US or other well paid countries - which directly impacts my ability to create a startup and pay for external services/infrastructure, should i so choose.
Of course, on the flip side, one can also talk about how much you're disadvantaging yourself by catering to a clientele of local companies: i generate my company ~20x less profits than an average engineer in Google would for their company.
By local living costs, I do mean whatever costs are required to live in the area one lives. Whether or not those products or services are the same everywhere or not.
But the fact of the matter is, the costs that make up the largest portion of most people's lives are locally spent.
True, but tech is not the dominant industry in all areas, and industries needing IT are not strictly limited to tech companies -
blaming education administrators specifically for not having enough funds to pay competitively is drastically different than saying there is a structural problem with the local economy such that only industry X can competitively source IT talent.
in these conversations, comparing tech job X vs other job Y is relevant, because we are talking about 'jobs and wages within local economy as a whole'
What about the many costs that stay static? Flights, smart phones, and so much more don’t become a lot cheaper just because of location. Or for flights, Departing location.
Hiring DBA or a developer for a school is extremely inefficient use of the budget. School IT must be standardized and automated to the point where you only need 2 sysadmins and few more first line support people per 50-100 schools to run operations and 4-5 companies developing school management systems for the entire national market, with standardized interoperability.
I work with school districts and there are these companies. And they are absolutely atrocious. And they make it difficult to transfer. So schools are somewhat stuck in the old way. Literally every district level person hates the software, but they can't change it.
This is where government should be able to help with regulation. Nobody should be able to enter or stay on the market without ensuring interoperability, security and accessibility and without transferring certain rights to customers. I’m pretty sure the market will remain attractive for business even with the open source requirement.
America recently had an administration that prided itself on killing two pieces of regulation for each piece it added. There's a strong social issue with even bringing up the R word right now.
That standardization and automation you're talking about costs money too. Schools deal with technical debt on the IT infra level much like SaaS companies do.
Of course, you should be able to cut a $129k/yr DBA if you just spend the millions needed to streamline the IT systems.
Simple search shows that there are 130 000 schools in the USA. Spending 10M to develop reasonable IT standards and 120M more on compliant software is just $1000 per school. And this is not a military software, it can actually be developed offshore by decent engineers earning half of that DBA salary (that is, you get 2000 _man-years_ of work for those money).
