Re: TW Salaries--Is it me, or are people greedier? (Mild Vent)

["Elna Tymes" <etymes -at- lts -dot- com>]

"Miller, Lisa" wrote:

> ... I would add that we should also think of salary as a percentage of the
> business
> revenue.  Think about this - professional athletes and actors do make a great
> deal of money but the revenues received by the contracting agencies are also
> great.  The question should be what percentage of the revenue are they receiving
> for compensation?

Paying employees as a percentage of revenue is a wonderful socialist concept, but it
doesn't work in real life.  Revenue itself is based on market factors, which can
turn on a dime, so to speak, and respond to influences that have nothing whatsoever
to do with employee competence, ability with tools, experience in the industry, or
anything else that's measurable.  Markets are markets, and they have their own
quirks and forces. Understanding them and being able to deal with them takes special
skills, most of which are decidedly nonlinear, which is one of the reasons why
technical people so often consider sales folks as so much slime.  Yet those markets
are what creates the environment in which revenue can be collected. And revenue is
what pays developers and technical writers (among others).

> I don't have statistics for this, but I'll bet most of use
> make only 60-80% of what developers with equal experience make.  Based on my
> stated premise this would be because developers are perceived to directly add to
> the bottom line and therefore command a greater percentage of generated revenue.

I don't think so.  It's been my experience that there are fewer *truly* qualified
developers per job openings than there are people who can write adequately; thus
what they're paid is what the market is asking. What we're experiencing in Silicon
Valley is definitely a market phenomenon: truly senior writers are now able to get
salaries that are about on a par with developers.  And entry-level programmers are
getting $60-70,000/yr., which is just slightly more than what entry-level but
trained writers can command.

Elna Tymes
Los Trancos Systems


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