IBM i Salaries: Underpaid, Yet Highly Valued And Hard To Replace
March 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is a funny old world. In many cases, the applications that are running on the IBM i platforms of the world are trapped in a kind of time warp and so are the people who created and who maintain them. This is the only plausible explanation for the fact that salaries in the IBM i real world also seem to be in a time warp. And here we are riding up a huge wave of inflation, in something of a war footing thanks to COVID and the war in Ukraine, and it is not yet clear to any of us how much financial pain this is going to cause. And we certainly do not know if the IBM i market can respond – or will even try to – with higher salaries or other kinds of compensation.
To get a sense of what is going with programmer, admin, and manager compensation on out there in IBM i Land, we recently talked to Bob Langieri, chief executive officer at Excel Technical Services, which is based outside of Los Angeles and provides IBM i staffing and contract programming placements, and Patrick Staudacher, an IT executive recruiter at Talsco in Muskego, Wisconsin.
“While salaries in the IBM i market are going up, they are not even close to the salaries in open technologies, such as Microsoft .NET and C# and so forth,” Langieri tells The Four Hundred. “While a senior RPG programmer/developer makes on average $115,000/year, a Microsoft .NET developer makes $150,000 or more. JDE developers also make $150,000 or more. IBM i system admins make from $90,000 to $120,000, but a senior Windows Server network admin can make from $125,000 to $165,000. This year. I worked on some CIO needs and found some IBM i CIOs doing surprisingly well with total compensation, including bonuses, reaching $300,000 to $350,000.”
Staudacher, who spends a lot of time recruiting people for positions where there is a custom MAPICS XA or JD Edwards ERP system where people are looking for the full stack RPG developer to manage these applications, which have been heavily customized, often over decades, not years.
“I always see things on a bell curve,” Staudacher says. “A lot of these people have not moved companies in 20 or 30 years, even if they are doing a lot of freeform RPG or SQL, or even some open source, they just have not moved. One person I just placed, well, it was shocking because his salary was only at $80,000 a year. He loved what he did, and it was a great work environment, and the bump for him was in the range of $105,000 when he looked around – and it should have always been in that range because of the modern RPG and SQL skills, or maybe they are starting to use APIs and Python and Java and PHP.”
The more you know, the more you do, the more you are worth, which is a concept that all of us in the workforce understand.
“The people that I would call IBM i architects – they know the hardware, they do the admin stuff like the hardware and operating system upgrades, they do application development – are worth more,” Staudacher continues. “The ones that know how to do everything, they are skating up to $120,000 a year. One person with this skill set, who was even looking at DataBricks for implementing a data warehouse, was able to get a position at $118,000.
Age is becoming an issue, although it is a touchy subject to broach with employees or prospects.
“I see lots of RPG talent that are in their 60s who want to work, but companies are reluctant to replace a retiring programmer with someone who will also retire in four to five years,” Langieri explains. “And there are not lots of openings in RPG thanks to COVID causing hiring delays, and the situation is more wide open because everyone wants to work remotely. Lack of young talent continues to hurt the future of the IBM i platform.”
Not everyone in the IBM i base is close to retiring, but they are certainly getting closer by our math, which was done using the raw data of the 2022 IBM i Marketplace Survey done by HelpSystems. By looking at the results of the snap poll done during the webinar going over the survey results, we were able to calculate that 48 percent of those polled were from 56 years to 66 years in age, and another 7 percent were 67 or older. If these numbers scale, then more than half of the IBM i personnel base, on the order of 384,000 we reckon are 56 or older. That’s 210,000 people or so, and within the next five to ten years, many of them will be looking to retire.
This pattern matches what Staudacher sees in the base, too.
“I do see people who are in their upper 50s, which you can infer because they have got kids graduating from high school or are early in college,” says Staudacher. “But a lot of the folks that I’m working with are trying to modernize and do new stuff. I definitely seek such candidates out. So it could be the case that the clients that I’m trying to attract are the same ones that are attracted to me and vice versa.”
There is always such biases in any interaction and particularly when it comes to surveys of the IBM i base. Those who keep their hardware and software reasonably current and also those who tend to read newsletters and also to take surveys. These are the active IBM i shops, as we call them, and we think it represents about a quarter of the 120,000 strong IBM i base. These rest are laggards, for various reasons, and we don’t make judgments. If what they are doing works for their companies and they make less money doing what they love and no more, I say more power to them. All I want is for IBM and business partners to make it easier for them to move ahead if they really want to do that but can’t for technical or economic reasons.
RELATED STORIES
The Real IBM i Legacy Is The People
The IBM i Job Environment, It’s a Changin’
Innovating And Thriving with IBM i
So You Want To Do Containerized Microservices In the Cloud?
In Search Of Next Gen IBM i Apps
COVID-19: A Great Time for Application Modernization
Club Alan: Seiden Signs Liam, Corners Youth Market
RPG Programmer Shortage Blamed For CSC’s Earnings Miss
There Is No Lack Of RPG Programmers, IBM i Community Contends
I certainly agree. 20 years ago I joked that RPG was going to pay for my retirement. But now I’m a Ruby and Rails developer and RPG salaries don’t touch RoR salaries.
TPM might remember be from the old days
Hiya Don. Of course I recognized you immediately. If you want to write some Ruby tips for IBM i guys…..
Thanks, again, to Timothy Prickett Morgan for another brilliant and hugely important article.
“While a senior RPG programmer/developer makes on average $115,000/year, a Microsoft .NET developer makes $150,000 or more. JDE developers also make $150,000 or more. IBM i system admins make from $90,000 to $120,000, but a senior Windows Server network admin can make from $125,000 to $165,000. ”
“f these numbers scale, then more than half of the IBM i personnel base, on the order of 384,000 we reckon are 56 or older. That’s 210,000 people or so, and within the next five to ten years, many of them will be looking to retire.”
That means that IBM i programmers make (cost their IBM i employers) about 40 BILLION dollars annually, while spending 75% of their time debugging rather than writing new code.
I believe that at least 50% of that IBM i programmer debugging annual cost of 30 BILLION dollars annually, or 15 BILLION dollars annually, can be saved right now by utilizing modern software tools like the Real-Time Program Audit (RTPA).
The 72% loss of value in less than one year in the IBM spinoff company Kndryl Holdings, indicates that IBM Itself cannot continue to use ancient and grossly unproductive software development tools and survive.
Very interesting yet important article Tim!
As a young RPG developer who got sucked into the IBM world a few years back, it was quite a shock! Time travel like! Now I am apart of this further decreasing small group of RPG developers who still bear the structural formats, cobol and old revised programs. But due to my dedicated burning passion for programming, I still love what I do for work, still love the RPG environment and language.
Yet there is an upset to my lovely RPG programming days, a rain shower upon my region while the sun shines bright on others. With around five years of IBM experience, and over eight in programming all together, I am within the $40,000, to $70,000 salary bracket. While money isn’t everything in life, and a good structured company with a lower median is valued over a high paying ignorant company. I can barely make ends meet with my current situation. For the amount of work, thought, and effort that is put in, I feel as if I am given a thumbs up from afar with little compensation as benefit. With another perspective, my colleagues who graduated within my year period and possess less years of experience are within the higher $100,000 to $130,000 salary bracket. While they are off around 4-5pm going to the bar for a drink after a days work, I am at the office crunching structural formatted RPG programs till night. Getting a chance to meet up with them later in the week and hearing about all the free time, good money made, and awesome coding projects they have worked on, it kills my motivation.
With the rainshowers aside, there is still light at the end of the tunnel I believe. I also picture/fear the same future and fate that awaits these RPG reliant companies. But that’s where I believe as well as other RPG developers will come in. As the few remaining developers, we either will strong arm the pay or get replaced and forgotten forever. But im betting my moneys worth that we are going to hang on tight. The boat may get rocky but we are still afloat!
TL;DR
RPG Dev, my life sucks, work non stop, underpaid, undervalued, no freetime colleagues make double for less work, praying for an uprise in the IBM/RPG world within the time to come.
It is easy for me to say that you are worth more than what you are paid, and I can assure you, I have had many years as a writer where I thought there might be greener pastures. The funny thing is I have always had an AS/400 writing job and another high-end IT writing job, and through the balance of the two, I have made the ends meet better. So, dear colleague Joshua, perhaps what you need to do is work at the level of your compensation on RPG projects until they appreciate you better and act like the precious resource that you are — and at the same time start a new side gig doing other kinds of programming that can make you even more valuable.
That’s what I would do.
Inspirational!
Thank you Tim for the kind yet powerful words! I will cherish and reflect upon them during difficult times.