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1999 TPF Salary & Contract Rate Survey Results
(Published: 21st May 1999)

It's taken some time but we're just about in a position now to release our survey results for the 1999 TPF Salary & Contract Rate Survey.  The title is a bit of a mouthful, but it sounds like it would be a good idea to have one of these surveys every year...what do you think ?

But now on to the results.  We have divided them into, what seemed to us, sensible geographical regions.  Unfortunately we didn't have a large enough response to make it sensible to further sub-divide. 

n/a  -  Not enough information available

As you can see from the table there are many categories where we just didn't get any information or certainly not enough to base an average on.  Hopefully for next year's survey we will get a better response, particularly if visitors find this a useful exercise..  Obviously other factors affect the desirability of a particular job or location ( climate and cost of living for example ) and these should be factored in to mitigate any differences in salaries or rates.

It should also always be remembered, particularly in the contract arena, that for specialist skills companies are willing to pay premium rates and we know of some people earning more than double the highest rates quoted here.  It should certainly be possible to achieve these quoted rates in the various regions as they are averaged.

It will be interesting to follow trends over the next few years, as TPF becomes more like other systems, with high-level language support and increasingly standard architectures.  Does this mean that the value of the TPF programmer will decrease, or become equivalent to any other C/C++ coder ?  Or perhaps TPF will never completely give up its idiosyncracies  and it may catch on as an enterprise server in the new (Internet) Millenium, in which case we could all suddenly become hotter properties than at any time in our careers !  (I know what I'm hoping for...)

We were hoping to gather enough information to draw some more interesting conclusions and to compare and contrast employers and agencies, but evidently the average TPF'er is more guarded about what they earn than we had anticipated !?