Variance of Salaries

[Michael Andrew Uhl <uhl -at- VISLAB -dot- EPA -dot- GOV>]

Esteemed Colleagues:

Salaries not only vary greatly by geography and level
of experience and skill, but also by industry. My experience
has been that manufacturing and government contracts pay
better than services and many high tech industries. I recently
interviewed at a hot high tech company that sells fiber-to-the-
door systems. They hinted that I should want to work for them
at a sub-par salary to just to have their name on my resume.
Yeh, sure. Next. ;-)

A reliable method for figuring what salary you would need
in a different region to live at the same atandard you do now is
to subscribe to a newspaper with a large circulation in the
new area. Look through the classifieds at rents, salaries,
and hourly rates offered. Check out the real estate pages for
prices on comparable homes.

It's probably not a good idea to rely on a "calculator" set
up on a Web page to determine such an important factor in
your life.

I look at it this way: we income average over our lifetime.
In the lean times we earn less and in the good times we earn
more. That's all.

Cheers.

-Mike
--

Michael Andrew Uhl, Lead Technical Writer (uhl -at- vislab -dot- epa -dot- gov)
Lockheed Martin, Primary Support Contractor to US EPA
Scientific Visualization Center
National Environmental Supercomputing Center (NESC)
U.S. EPA Environmental Research Center
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina