Annual results time at the day job, and the good news is that the company is growing strongly and making the biggest profits in its history. Staff are constantly encouraged to ‘raise the bar’ and improve performance, and the results suggest they are doing just that. Naturally, there is an expectation that the people delivering the improvement should see the results reflected in salary levels. Much as we love our jobs, there are very few people who would still be at their desks on Monday if they won the National Lottery on Saturday .

Like most big corporations, we have a small army of HR people who try and ensure salaries are in line with the market. In my area of IT, they seem to get it about right: I did a lot of recruiting last year, and candidates accepted the offers we made, and I don’t know of a single person last year who quit on salary grounds.

While this works at the margin, it is not so comfortable for current employees. Over the past five years, salary scales have shown little movement; adjusted for inflation, they are actually declining. It is easy to hypothesise the reasons – for example, there are thousands of skilled IT people in Bangalore who are only to happy to bid for the UK’s IT business.

Is history repeating itself – are today’s UK IT workers facing the same fate as the UK coal miners twenty years’ ago? Will IT folk accept that they are never going to share in the wealth which they are helping to create? How will we persuade talented people to come into the profession?

‘Matching the market’ sounds like a plausible and responsible salary policy. In practice, it results in a small number of major IT employers watching each other, and abdicating responsibility for providing any ‘thought leadership’ for the future of their profession. The profession deserves better.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 10:56 am and is filed under The day job. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.