Around here 40K is good money, and yes if you're any good, you'll get bumped up fast, and if you have experience that's not where you'd start. That 40K is for someone with no experience. You know, someone fresh out of a diploma mill with no long term project management skills. How many people do you know who've come out of college thinking they're god's gift to programming yet can't function in a professional programming environment right off the bat. If you don't have any experience, you'd better have some humility. You may have been raised to believe that you're mommy's special little snow flake, but in the real world you're part of a team and a community and you need to ask some questions before you decide you have all of the answers. We're not going to do everything like you learned in class, because it could take to long to refactor 3 million lines of code in 5 different product lines.
I misspoke actually. All of our programming staff has degrees, but only half of them have it in CS, and some are just associates.
The rules are simple here. If you want to make more money write something that makes the company more money. We stay in business by writing software for courts who can't afford some million dollar software package. We have court's who have only two people on staff, one of which is an elected official. It's our job to help them as much as we can, without breaking the bank. Last I checked we charge 30K for our flagship, while our closest competitor charges 1.2 million. Should we charge more, no, none of our clients could afford it. We're into help out the folks who need help, not the people who can afford to through unlimited amounts of money at a problem. Our pricing model has always been based on how much time/money we save the courts from having to do it by hand. If we add a new feature that's going save them 30 seconds on each case that gets filed then we we charge them a percentage of their labor savings. This doesn't make us a ton of money, but we're about making sure our employees have jobs and homes, and a low stress work life, not making them or the company rich.
Why am I still arguing? Because I'm trying to have a dialog with people here so that I can understand their points of view and see if I need to adjust my own, which may very well be wrong.
I've never said that there is a shortage of people with the necessary skills out there. I think that's utter bullshit, there plenty of people out there with mad skills, who just need a little training. As opposed to meeting some company's crazy list of requirements. I do think there is a shortage of people who will come to work in our area.
As far as incentives go, we have them, but they're generally not money related, which means it's harder to find the people. There are other software companies around here who offer far more money, but less perks and still can't find people. I think they hire in large metro areas then give them the option of moving here. Not really sure.
And we do get all of our work done with just the people we have. That doesn't mean we're not always looking for more. As far as attracting talent to the area goes. That's hard. There are 4, maybe 5 software shops, and one hardware manufacturer around here, plus SIUC. So there's not a lot of opportunity to jump from job to job. If you've got real talent, and a penchant for jumping from job to job you can't really do it here. It's a catch-22, there aren't enough talented people here to really lure more talented people. We're sponsoring Hack Fests with SIU, and Conferences with local schools but that all takes time, because we effectively have to build up our talent from the local population, as opposed to being able to import them. And for the foreseeable future the pay nor the community is not going to be what it is out in the Valley. Doesn't mean we're not trying to change it.