[Melbourne-pm] Testing the waters re an anonymous salary survey at next MelbPM meeting

Ian Macdonald ickphum at gmail.com
Sun May 15 23:52:46 PDT 2011


Hi all,

At Armaguard, we're currently in the process of hiring a Perl developer,
which will bring us to 3 1/2 full time Perl developers, and I'd be surprised
if we stopped there. Perl is very much our long-term choice for application
development for our desktop (via wxWidgets), web (Catalyst) and back-end DP
applications.

One problem we're facing, and I would think we're not alone, is the issue of
getting the budget to attract quality people; I think there's a tendency in
traditional HR and management circles to see technical staff as a
commodity-type resource, with little to be gained from extra investment.
We've recently taken back control of the recruitment process from HR and
started more in-depth technical evaluation during this process, but there's
little point to identifying the best applicants if we can't afford them.

With this problem in mind, I'd like to ask the community their thoughts on
carrying out an anonymous salary survey during the next MelbPM meeting. It
would be low-tech and simple; hand out preprinted A5 sheets at the door and
have them dropped into a box at the end. The basic questions asked would be
term (full time or contract) and salary/rate; beyond that, we'd ask for (but
not necessarily expect) years of experience and area
(web/desktop/middleware, etc).

Our goal is to gather some evidence we can take to management here to show
them what we need to be offering to attract (and retain) experienced Perl
developers.

I hope and believe there's nothing here to cause offense, particularly as
participation is obviously optional. This is clearly not a particularly
scientific survey, but hopefully any bias will work in our favour... (And if
not, we'll just bury the report and pretend it never happened, in the best
traditions of market research.)

Thoughts?

Thanks,
-- 
Ian Macdonald
Senior Software Architect
Armaguard
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