Between January 1, 2002 and December 31, 2002 the Real Rate Survey collected a total of 691 rate reports.
Of these 645 were submitted by contractors either working in the United States or reporting rates in U.S. dollars .
Our Rates are collected using the form at www.realrates.com/rate_sur.htm
Our ISP statistics show that the major sources of new visitors to our site is our link to Google.com. Our site comes up in the top three Google listings for "consulting rates", "computer consultant", and "consulting contracts." We also top the Yahoo search listing for "computer consultant" too. In fact, we get about 1,500 new vistors a week from search engine searches alone.
In addition, we receive an average of 5,000 unique visitors a week referred from 400 different referring sites, many of them computer job sites.
Traffic this year has slowed from the numbers we were accustomed to see in the past. This is no surprise since many thousands of IT professionals are suffering long-term unemployment and are no longer frequenting job-hunting sites of any kind. In addition, the knowledge that the IT job market has evaporated has cut down on the number of people visiting our site because they are considering a switch into the IT field from another field. However, we continue to get rate reports on a steady basis and believe that in this tough market, the data contributed by the few people able to find jobs is especially valuable to all job hunters.
Please note that all data linked from this page is copyright by Janet Ruhl, 2003. Please email us to query about republication or other commercial reuse of this data.
INFORMATION ABOUT OUR CHARTS
Each chart displays a category, such as "Language" or "State" followed by a number in brackets. The number in brackets represents the number of rate Reports that fell in that category when we analyzed our data.
Because our contributors enter their "Technical Specialty" information in a free form field, we edit that data slightly before we run our reporting software so that we standardize the entries.
Because contributors may enter several languages, operating systems etc in the "technical specialty" field, one rate report may be tabulated under several different categories.
SORTING OF DATA
Where appropriate, we have sorted the data in our charts. High, Low, Median data is sorted by the Median rate field. Standard Deviation data is sorted on the Mean field.
GRAPHS
We have included several graphs with our data this time. The graphs were generated with Microsoft Word using the data on our charts and are in the form of .gif files. You cannot modify these charts.
However, we have also uploaded a file containing an MS Word skeleton graph which you can use to generate your own graphs using our charts. To use these you will have to have MS Word installed on your computer with the MS Graph utility included. If you are not familiar with how to use MS Graph please consult your word processor manuals.
JOB DESCRIPTIONS
Our contributors choose a job description from a picklist. The Job Description options available for the Real Rate Survey in 2001 were Operations, Technician/Tech Support/Help Desk, Programmer, Developer-Software Engineer, Sr. Programmer- Sr. Developer- Sr. Software Engineer, Team Leader, Project Manager, Functional Manager, CIO, Architect, Trainer, Technical Writer, Consultant Testing/QA, Business Analyst, DBA, Webmaster/Page Designer, Network Engineer, Systems Administrator/Systems Programmer, Other
Where possible we try to break down the data to the combination of job class and technical specialty. However, where only a few rates were entered for a given technical specialty, we will give a single value for that whole specialty without a job class. That figure summarizes ALL data for that specialty without regard to job class.
CITIES
Before generating this chart, we change the names of suburbs to that of the nearest major cities (where known.) Hence the entry for Boston would also include Waltham, Cambridge, and Somerville, MA.
INDUSTRY
Our contributors pick their industry from a pick list. The options are Aerospace
Agriculture, Automotive, Banking, Chemical, Computer-Hardware, Computer-Software, Consulting, E-Commerce, Education, Electronics, Engineering, Entertainment, Financial, Food, Government, Health Care, Hotel, Insurance, ISP, Legal, Manufacturing, Marketing, Media, Networking, Oil and Gas, Pharmaceuticals, Real Estate, Retail, Semiconductor, Small Business, Telecommunications, Transportation, Travel, Utility, Web Site Design, Other. Only industries with 5 or more reports are charted.
ESTIMATED INCOME
This data was collected for the first time in 2001. We asked rate contributors to estimate their earnings for the previous 52 week period. This was an optional field so not all rate contributors supplied annual income information.
DEGREES AND CREDENTIALS
Degrees and credentials are freeform entry fields as the credentials available to IT professionals change faster than we can keep the site updated. Because many degrees are synonymous, we have grouped all computer-related Bachelors degrees in one category and done the same with Masters degrees. This means that the BSCS category includes degrees entered into the survey as "BA/CS", "Bachelors in Comp. Sci.", BA MIS, etc.
CONTRACTOR STATUS
Contractors may work using the following tax statuses:
W-2 contractors are employees of consulting firms or clients who are paid their salary on an hourly rate basis only for hours actually worked.
IC Contractors are self-employed independent contractors who receive a 1099 at the end of the year from their clients.
Corp Incorporated contractors work through their own corporations as employees of those corporations.
BROKERS DEFINED
The term "broker" refers to any third party firm, such as a consulting firm or job placement agency, which takes a commission for placing a contractor on a contract. Most IT brokers take a percentage of the hourly rate paid to the contractor for each hour that the contractor works.
IMMIGRATION STATUS
H-IB visas are "guest worker" visas issued to professionals from other countries when an employer is able to demonstrate that US citizens cannot fill their jobs.
TN visas are NAFTA visas issued to Canadians and Mexicans for work in the US.
Green Cards are issued to to foreign citizens who have been accepted as applicants for full US Citizenship.
STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE
Our data is submitted by visitors to our site. We do not enter any rate reports into the Survey ourselves from any other source.
Because we do not offer contests or other financial incentives to our visitors (unlike other surveys) we believe that our data is not skewed by people making up junk contributions in order to qualify for contests. We do screen out the very occasional prank postings which we receive. An equal number of visitors to our site tell us that our rates and salary reports look low as tell us they look high. This suggests to us that they are fairly accurate.
We only chart categories that contain 5 or more entries. However, very small samples are not statistically significant, and you should view the means and medians in these cases as being only an approximation. Categories with larger samples sizes are more accurate. Our total numbers (All Rates) compare very well with U.S. Census Bureau figures which suggests that they are accurate.
STANDARD DEVIATION CHARTS
We have provided several charts that show the standard deviation and mean for our language, database/package, and Operating System data. The standard deviation is a statistical measure that shows the range in which 66% of a set of data points falls. This shows how loosely or tightly the data clusters around that mean. For example, if the mean Rate in a sample was $55,000 a standard deviation of $12,000 would mean that 66% of all Rates in the sample fell within a range of $12,000 from the mean, or between $43,000 and $67,000.
