Main

• Home
• Post Atom Feed
• Comment Atom Feed
• Blogger Profile
• Contact
• About

Latest

• Pure Cheese & Calcium Chloride
• Skype on Dapper: Dead Still
• SAIX Local-Only ADSL?
• Botswana Goes Engrish
• Open Source People are Most Valuable
• Adding Stylesheets in Joomla! 1.5
• 10101 & Back in George
• 27 Dinner, here we come!
• Google Intelligent Word Matching
• Minimalist Design in Africa

Archives

• June 2004
• July 2004
• August 2004
• September 2004
• October 2004
• November 2004
• December 2004
• January 2005
• February 2005
• March 2005
• April 2005
• May 2005
• June 2005
• July 2005
• August 2005
• September 2005
• October 2005
• November 2005
• December 2005
• January 2006
• February 2006
• March 2006
• April 2006
• May 2006
• June 2006
• July 2006
• August 2006
• September 2006
• November 2006
• December 2006
• January 2007
• February 2007
• March 2007
• April 2007
• May 2007
• June 2007
• July 2007
• August 2007
• September 2007
• October 2007
• November 2007
• December 2007
• January 2008
• February 2008
• March 2008
• April 2008
• May 2008
• June 2008
• July 2008
• August 2008
• September 2008
• October 2008
• November 2008
• December 2008
• January 2009

IT Salaries

In recent South African IT salary comparisons it seems like a Software engineer earns about 2 000 ZAR more on average per month than a Developer / programmer, which is not an astronomical difference, but the best salary for a "Software engineer" is about 10 000 ZAR more per month than the best salary for a Developer / programmer.

I'm studying "Software Engineering" at Unisa at the moment. How exactly is this different (in practice) than developing / programming? Is it simply that the better guys are calling themselves by a different name?

But wait, it gets better. The average Web developer earns about 8 000 ZAR less per month than the average Software engineer.

Web development is a very challenging field in its own. I believe it is more challenging than desktop software development in general as you have to live within the constraints of browsers. Cross-browser compatibility issues more than makes up for cross-platform compatibility issues (which most desktop application developers seem to ignore anyway still).

Therefore, to me it would only make sense that web developers should be well paid. We also need to put up with most of the general software development issues that other developers have to put up with, and more. We also need to write code (in several languages), interact with databases, have a good system architecture, know about design patterns and principles, development mythologies, etc. And because you have so many layers (both on the client and server sides) it is often necessary to do a huge amount of planning (also on standards & conventions), especially on larger systems. Then there's usually issues like accessibility as well, unless when you're developing for an intranet environment where you know your user base very well.

I consider myself to be a general developer / programmer / software engineer as I do desktop applications as well. But I would really like to know what the big difference is between these three groups at the end of the day, particularly pertaining to their job difficulty, responsibilities, stress, skill, and therefore salary. In my opinion the three groups should be earning more or less the same.

Or am I missing any important distinctions between these three groups?

According to the English Wikipedia, it would appear that computer programming is the implementation phase of the software development process, which in turn is part of the discipline of software engineering.

Maybe a software engineer then has a broader focus, including things like analysis and architecture, while the programmers focus on the code? The survey does not seem to favour analysts but architects seem to come out on top. Therefore I guess it's the architecture side that makes "software engineers" so valuable?

I dunno. Thoughts welcome. :)

Posted by Charl van Niekerk on Friday, September 28, 2007
Get TimesURL