Silly Austin American-Statesman article

Please post links to the jobs or tell them we've got a bunch of people around here who are looking for those kind of jobs. Mostly people with years of varied experience, not just recent grads too.

Well, they all appear to be using numbers from the AEA and the BLS. I've thought that the BLS's numbers were fudged for years, now I believe the same thing about the AEA. If you think about the number of techies that would have to be making well over $100k to bring the average number up to that figure given the number that are obviously making under $80k it just seems completely unrealistic.

I'd like to see a description from the AEA as to how they conducted their survey, what the sample size is, and most importantly, just who they are counting as "tech workers". If they say there are 68k tech workers in the Austin area, then just a handful of the largest employers make up more than 50% of that total. And sure, Dell, IBM, Samsung, Freescale, Mototola, AMD, etc. all have quite a few employees over $100k -- and probably mostly in management, but a big chunk of their employees are also well under that, probably a majority of people in technical roles. For every senior IC designer that is getting over $100k there are probably 2 QA people and 3 clean room monkeys who are making less than $50k.

Well, I don't know about that, in the survey here (admittedly small sample size) unemployed was only a couple of times more than the official government numbers... but as many former techies as I've run into doing things like wearing the orange aprons at Home Depot, you'd think that would drop the average salary down, but I suspect they don't count unemployed or underemployed.

Interesting... But it tends to support that salaries > $100k are rare for non-managers, especially since it is not Austin specific, and a large percentage of game industry workers are on the west coast were cost of living and salaries are higher. Admittedly cost of living is usually much higher than salaries in places like the bay area and Seattle, which is favorable towards Austin, but still.

Austin's game business died in 2004 when its two largest developers closed: Electronic Arts closed its subsidiary Origin Systems, followed by Acclaim Entertainment's bankruptcy. Origin co-founder Richard Garriott managed to get Korean NCsoft to open an Austin office, and Acclaim defectors started Retro Studios (now a Nintendo co.) and Inevitable Entertainment (now Midway, a Viacom cousin).

So, the local market isn't growing so much as just changing names. With churning, I've also the area also loose top talent.

As for me, I'm quickly giving up on Austin. California is certainly a more expensive place to live, but that's where the jobs are.

FYI: The center of game development seems to have moved from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles.

Yeah, I would not argue with that. Unfortunately IT salaries in general are low these days because employers are going after people who just want to work at all and are willing to take whatever they can get just to get by. That goes for programmers, QA, even project managers.

I think you are closer to on track than the people who are trying to puff up the numbers for most likely political gain.

Each particular job category usually looks like a pyramid where as salaries go up, the number of workers at that level decreases. The bulk of the workers are down towards the bottom of the pyramid which means the average salary is going to be a lot closer to the low end number than the high end number. That means closer to $60-80k than it is to $110-$130k. While I agree that software engineering positions have been the hardest hit when it comes to salary loss everything points to losses being more or less across the board. And while a few jobs have been added in categories like SAP/Oracle you mention, the number of those is relatively small to the total job market and worse virtually all of those positions are for relatively short term contracts and as we all no contract generally means no benefits (or expensive benefits cost borne on the back of the worker) which knocks the real compensation down a lot from what it appears on the surface. And contracting generally also means travel and down time between projects which eat into income.

The numbers I've heard say that approximately 1000 people work for gaming companies here in the Austin area. Seems consistent with what you are saying if a large number of them are < 10 people and we know about the larger ones such as NCSoft, Multimedia Games, etc.

What is the mix of job categories in those smaller companies when it comes to the lower paid jobs just as tech support, play testing, QA, etc., to the middle paying jobs (developers, producers, artists) and the higher paying senior jobs?

Unfortunately game companies seem to have a reputation for favoring younger, lower paid people for developers and expecting massive numbers of working hours for relatively mediocre pay for anyone except the superstars who have several big hits on their resume. It can also be a feast or famine business, especially for the smaller and lesser funded companies. From people I know who work at some of the larger companies even they aren't immune to the cyclical nature of the business, especially when long term projects get canceled or games ship and don't sell as expected.

That $110k job is way over the norm for most of the jobs you see posted, even for a lead or manager. GE is a big company, and perhaps they have uniform salary bands across the country so people in Austin are benefiting from higher costs out on the coasts. If a person can get into that kind of situation they are in good shape, but unfortunately it is rare, most companies adjust their scales to different markets at least somewhat.

As for your guess of $60k, that is in the range that would appear to be realistic for Austin. I know the Statesman is out of touch with the common man, but unfortunately they are the biggest print media for the area. And that means a lot of people are going to read what they print and a fair percentage of them will believe it without taking the time to critically analyze its bias.