Thursday, July 14, 2011

Developers salary

As a developer I'm always searching for jobs offers on the Internet. I'm always wondering how much they can pay me for this position? Here, in Poland talking about salary in job is taboo. There are only few offers in IT which we can see salary before we go to the conversation.

It is rather strange and many of Polish companies are abusing this fact - I've been on countless interviews, wasted huge amount of time to get there, to obtain some information about company, etc. only to hear that they can give me only about half of my financial expectations.

I must say that I'm disappointed about that. Many of my friends from University or from my few past jobs are working for very small salaries according to what they can.

I think that in Poland we must wait couple of years to catch up to other bigger coutries in this topic. In my opinion on every job offer should be information about salary (it could be with some margins). It would spare everybody some time.

According to that I've googled some about developers salaries and I've found interesting article - "How much should you pay developers?".
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/07/how-much-should-you-pay-developers/
Author of it says about few principles about financing development team.

Firstly algorithm is giving points in few categories. Each point is worth some money - there are no margins - it must be clear and fair for everybody.

Secondly another principle (my favourite) is transparency. Everybody knows how much others are earning and knows why - it can clarify what we need to do to earn more - and there is no situation that I'm not satisfied because of my colleague who is earning more than I but he has less experience. It is clear for everybody and team can even talk about their salaries in public.

Another principle is competetive - if we'll know that in company X we can acquire twice more for doing the same it's obvious that we'll quit our current job to take another. But if we don't know we can stay there for life. Companies should use this information.

In Poland many companies are very greedy. I've met and I'm still meeting managers who are searching for IT specialist with minimum 3 years of experience and offering them salary of a shop assistant. It's sad even more if we realize there are some people who will agree working for them.

So to sum up my point is that there should be information about salary on every job offer and we should always check if this salary is fair for this position.

Sunday, July 03, 2011

SEO

Some time ago I've been searching for book which would help me ta master techniques of SEO and SEM.

First I was trying to find some articles in the Internet but there were only single publications about it loosely connected with each other. Then I found interesting book - bestseller about SEO - "SEO Warrior".

I was kind of person that was thinking that all this SEO stuff was something we could do and forget about it. And I was really wrong... In fact the most important thing on our site is the content. Of course we could help search engines to index our site but if we don't have interesting articles and stuff it would be very hard.

We can acquire some extra traffic from social media but again if we don't have something really interesting it would be even harder. The book describes this techniques as SMO.

Another important thing about our website is external links - the more links are to our site the more chances are that someone will find us in the big world of Internet.

I must say that I was impressed by it. It's definetely worth reading. Everybody who is responsible in e-commerce should read it.

The book has also website connected with it:
http://www.seowarrior.net/

So if you're looking for companion of techniques and you're trying to prepare checklist want you need to do if you want to acquire some traffic to your website I can recommend this position as the good source of knowledge.