salary

Report: Open-source developers command up to 40 percent premium

Want to make more money as an enterprise application developer? You're in luck--if you know open source.

According to a recent report from Bluewolf Consulting, enterprises increasingly deploy open-source software, and look to specialized application development on top of it, to drive business value:

The rise of open-source software in application development puts developers with a specialization in those technologies in a position to ask for a 30 (percent) or 40 percent pay increase, Kirven says. "We've gotten more requests from our permanent-placement division for open-source developers in the last six months than in the last five … Read more

Census finds that open source IT professionals make more money

Sydney-based consulting firm Waugh Partners in conjunction with Fujitsu, IBM and NICTA ran a census that showed what many of us have suspected for some time: open source pays more. The census was conducted in open-source savvy Australia, so the results may be skewed somewhat.

Still, it was significant to see that more than 5 percent of the available IT population was surveyed with 57 percent suggesting that they don't get paid to write open source at all, while 10 percent of Australia's IT population are paid to write open-source software full-time and another 33 percent get paid to write open source at least occasionally.

As for how much money is in open source, the answer is "More."… Read more

Finfo shows snapshots of college costs, job earnings

After reviewing lots of personal finance applications, I still haven't found one that serves young adults well. Today's teenagers have already been raised on a diet of advertising, from soda vending machines in grammar school cafeterias to deceptive credit card offers at college ballgames. The newest grown-ups need better information, for instance, about the indentured servitude that could result from trusting the word of high-interest loan sharks.

You'd think that some software company would benefit by serving the hot 18-to-thirtysomething market, often referred to as Generation Debt. Yet Intuit, for one, has decided to start educating tots … Read more

Apple's Steve Jobs highest paid CEO in America

Apple CEO Steve Jobs was the highest paid chief executive in America for 2006, according to a list released by Forbes on Thursday.

Jobs only draws a dollar a year in salary, which puts him behind practically the entire employment base of the country in that category. But his stock compensation isn't bad. Jobs also owns Apple stock valued at $646.6 million last year, twice as much as the second-highest paid CEO on the list, Occidental Petroleum's Ray Irani. (Somewhere, there's a joke about an oil executive named Irani, but anyway.)

It certainly was a good … Read more

Piggy bank with a Tamagotchi twist

Leave it to the Japanese, makers of the Tamagotchi and offshoots like the "Otoizm," to bring the piggy bank to virtual life. The programmable "The Bank of Life," from Takara-Tomy, bears an LCD screen with information that reflects life in modern Japan. Spluch's description says it best: "A little Japanese man living in the screen starts off by living in a shoebox home and gradually upgrades to a luxury apartment reflecting on the amount of money in it." Call us old-fashioned, but we'll stick with the porcine variety.