Others say it’s a billion-dollar salary… All night developer sighs

◆ Office Worker A to Z / Occasionally Office Worker ◆

A, a 30-year-old employee who works as a software engineer in a mid-sized information technology (IT) company, recently told his acquaintances, “It would be nice to have a high salary. Should I learn to code or learn,” he feels uncomfortable. Since the beginning of this year, companies have been competing for developers, and a huge salary increase has become a hot topic. However, Mr. A’s salary has only increased to the previous year’s level. Mr. A said, “Recently, the increase in developer salary has become a hot topic, but it is only a few examples.”

Software engineer B was very disappointed when he applied to Company C, which has recently become a hot topic by offering a huge turnover bonus. This is because the company changed the word that the company gave a job change bonus only if it was hired as a’senior level’ after going through the screening process. Mr. B pointed out, “I only think that I used a’trick’ to attract a large number of developers. It became a hot topic in the developer community as well.”

As competition for securing developers between companies is on fire, not only large companies but also startups are paying a salary increase and a huge turnover bonus. The day is far away and you and I announce improvement in treatment. However, not all developers benefit from this relay salary increase. Rather, there is a side where the reality of developers who have worked for a long time in poor working conditions is buried. Maeil Economic Daily’s’Sometimes Office Worker’ team listened to the story of a’normal developer’ from job seekers to management.

◆ Half of the developers “no salary increase”

According to the results of a survey conducted by an anonymous community blind of over 1,500 employees in the’IT engineer’ job at the request of the’Sometimes Office Worker’ team, 52% of the members who answered that their salary increased in the most recent salary negotiations. The remaining 48% said they did not increase. Among the respondents who answered that their salary has increased, only 6% of respondents said that their salary was increased by more than 20 million won, and only 9% had an increase of 10 million to 20 million won. Among those who raised their salaries, 40% said they rose 5 million to 10 million won, and 38% said 1 million to 5 million won. 7% answered that it rose by less than 1 million won.

However, the median annual salary of the IT engineer job among blind subscribers is increasing from 51.0 million won in 2019 to 52.5 million won in 2020 and 54 million won in 2021. Lee Yeon-ha, a data analyst at Timblind, said, “The developer job group did not rank in the top 5 annual salary among the previous job groups (30), but looking only at the rate of increase in annual salary, it is one of the five jobs that have increased the most in the past year. The annual salary ranking is 11th in 2019, 9th in 2020, and 8th as of 2021, and is increasingly moving to the top.”

However, the salary of IT engineers showed a large gap between individuals and companies. In the survey, when asked whether the treatment of developers at work is improving, only 29% of respondents answered yes, and 71% answered no. Separately, looking at the median cumulative annual salary of developers by domestic companies as of this month calculated by Blind, Amazon ranked first with 91 million won. Viva Republica (90 million won), Google Korea (84 million won), Triple (820.5 million won), and SAP Korea (80.7 million won) followed. Next, NX3 Games (80 million won), Big Hit Entertainment (78 million won), SK Telecom (76.35 million won), Koscom (73 million won), and Oracle Korea (72 million won) ranked in the top 10 in annual salary. The ranking was calculated for only companies with an annual salary of 10% or more registered in the blinds compared to the number of employees. The analyst analyzed that “If we selected the top 100 companies with the median annual salary by 30 or so occupations, the annual salary variation of the developer occupations was the largest.”

◆ Treatment varies widely depending on whether it is a’developer’ or a’coder’

Why does this gap arise? Developers agreed that even within a job group called’developer’ from outside, performance can vary greatly depending on work ability. One mid-sized IT company Chief Technology Officer (CTO) said, “A developer can share a number of people who are not good at one person with excellent work ability.” It’s a lot better to hold it,” he said.

Externally, the entire IT engineer (software engineer) is called a developer, but there are opinions that it should be classified according to roles and capabilities. Among IT engineers, a manpower who is in charge of simply creating a program (coding) through short-term academy training is sometimes referred to as a’coder’. There is also an argument that only people who can show their creativity by majoring in computer engineering at a four-year university and learning not only the ability to design algorithms, but also math and statistics, should be called as’developers’.

A developer working in a large domestic IT company said, “There are rumors that the treatment of developers is good, and the craze for coding academies blows, but among developers who have received four-year training and are currently working in a short-term academy are sometimes ignored as’coders’.” If you learn a lot of fields and are in the field, you can work on drawing the big picture, but it seems that short-term learners can only do simple coding-related tasks. In this case, the salary ceiling is low in most cases,” he said.

◆’Turn and block’ to blow up salary rise

Recently, companies are offering large annual salaries and turnover bonuses to bring in excellent development personnel because of the lack of excellent developers. Although the number of developers has increased, there are not many developers with the level of competence that companies really want, so competition among companies for manpower has become fierce. In an interview with Maeil Economic Daily in 2019, Kim Bum-joon, CEO of Elegant Brothers, pointed out that “It is difficult to create a startup ecosystem in which promising startups continue to be produced by’blocking developers’ by subtracting experienced developers from each other.” Another representative of a mid-sized IT company also said, “In Korea, there is a thin talent base with rich experience in developing commercial services and combines development capabilities and creativity. This is because it has been difficult to attract excellent personnel due to overnight work and low salary in the past decades.” .

Even if the recent salary increase is limited to some floors, there are many views that it is positive that there will be a’fallout effect’ that improves the treatment of all IT engineers. A CTO of a foreign IT company predicted, “If you look at the recent hires, it is true that the ransom of all IT engineers is also rising,” and “If treatment is improved, a virtuous cycle will be created in which more talents are introduced.”

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