On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 09:34:58AM -0500, Lawrence K. Chen, P.Eng. wrote: > Also, I took a 40% paycut to be a SysAdmin in .edu. I just didn't know that > it would be 6 year later, and not much has changed. Most of my take home > increase, is because the federal government is taking less out now. The > University did give us 2.5% raises at the start of the year (first time we've > had a non-state raise), but I'm taking home less because my health insurance > jumped 40% this year. Though they say we were having it good before....last > year the auditors went through, and found that the state had gotten too far > off track from 95/5 or 60/40 for insurance premiums in trying to cushion us > from the hikes from the insurance companies. So, the big jump was to fix it > so that I'm back to paying 5% of my premiums. > > I wonder if I should apply for one of those jobs....only problem is what does > it say if I only do it to get another 5% raise, and would that (still) be > enough. I exceed expectations in my review every year....but merit raises are > done by cutting up the state raises, so some get less than the full state > raise and others get more....and there haven't been any since 2008.
If you jump from .edu (or .gov) to .com, assuming you don't mind staying in the job until retirement? demand a very serious pay raise. a huge portion of your pay, in the public sector, doesn't come around until retirement, so it's not reasonable to just compare money and benfits now and say you are getting 40% more in the private sector. My stepfather recently retired, and my father very shortly will retire from .edu. They both have pretty sweet defined-benifit pensions, and the both have health insurance for themselves and their dependents... for life. The latter? as far as I can tell? even if I did sell my company for a million or two (and I don't think I could get nearly that much for my company right now.) I still wouldn't be able to buy health insurance for life. So yeah; especially if you have years behind you in .edu or the public sector? it's completely fair to expect a huge premium to work in the private sector before you retire from the public sector. (It's also completely fair to put in your years in the public sector or .edu, retire, and then get a job in the private sector, now that you've solved the health insurance problem.) I mean, for the examples of my dad(s)? yeah, they have sweet benifits, but I was earning they were in my early 20s while they were in their 50s, and me with zero formal education. The private sector pays rather more now, while the public sector saves up a whole lot (perhaps most?) of your pay for after you retire, so once you start building up those benifits? It's very costly to leave before you have the age and the years of service to retire. (Of course, I'm given to understand that if I signed up for a public sector job now, I'd get a dramatically worse deal than my fathers did, so some of this is an accident of the economics when their contracts were setup.) _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
