Salary Survey Weirdness
Well now here’s an odd thing. In an otherwise frankly insulting article supposedly about visa fraud our old friend Don Burleson refers to Oracle Corporations salary survey for Oracle professionals which apparently shows US DBAs earning $97k on average whilst DBA staff in the rest of the world were close to about half of that salary. In a global economy this seems more than a little unlikely. However there are some pretty good reasons to take the salary survey with more than a little salt. As any graduate of a mathematical discipline (including computer science and the like) ought to know drawing statistical conclusions from survey data is notoriously difficult since the sample sizes tend to be small and the population non random. In this case as well it’s a cause for some concern that the source of the survey is a company looking to promote its own training.
In this case Oracle don’t publish the raw survey data – which is a shame – and they quote different figures for the responses to the survey which isn’t encouraging. On the front page we see
The survey was open to all Oracle Certified Associates (OCA), Professionals (OCPs), Masters (OCMs) and Experts (OCEs) worldwide as well as those not currently certified. This salary survey features data compiled from 2,655 respondents in more than 60 countries.
Whereas on the salary by region page we see
We had respondents from over 95 countries worldwide
This immediately suggests to us that the sample size could be quite small for a number of nations (on average taking the smaller number that’s 44 respondents per country, taking the figure of 95 its 27). It is of course likely that the figures for the US, UK, India, Germany,Japan etc may be quite large with other countries poorly represented. because Oracle don’t publish the data set we don’t know.
In addition there are some quite interesting breakdowns on the Oracle Website. In EMEA for example just 31% of respondents work for companies that employ more than 5,000 people, in the US that figure is over 50%. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that candidates who work at larger organisations with more employees, more databases and more money likely earn larger salaries than those who work at smaller ones.
Similarly there’s an oddity in the EMEA figures regarding experience where we are expected to believe that on starting out (0-2 years) an administrator can expect a salary of $43k, but after that first job move, obtaining certifications and showing their aptitude (3-4 years) the salary average drops to just $34k.
These sorts of oddities make me rather suspicious of the pretty graphs on the Oracle education site, but probably the killer for me is the fact that (like other governments around the world) the US Govt maintains statistics on employment. You can find these at http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#15-0000 where we have a nice category for Database Administrators and an estimated mean salary of $75k. The breakdown of these figures is almost certainly publicly available.
You didn’t provide a link to Don’s page, so I will:
http://www.dba-oracle.com/oracle_news/news_ace_speak_against_visa_experts.htm
What’s the insulting part?
James
3 Sep 10 at 2:08 pm
Well the subject of my blog post wasn’t intended to be Don, but Oracle’s dubious survey figures.
The insulting part is the painting of ‘foreigners’ as bad. I object to my compatriots when they refer to ‘ignorant arrogant Americans’ when they really mean specific individuals. Unethical behaviour isn’t a matter of nationality or race, despite what many people would have us believe.
Its also rather hard not to imagine that Don has a specific consultant in mind when he is talking about the O-1 Visa since his description seems to match one specific individual. If this is the case then this article would be of a piece with others he has written in the past.
See, I really would rather talk about Oracle than Don.
Niall Litchfield
3 Sep 10 at 4:02 pm
That is an interesting article on Mr. Burleson’s site. It seems that Mr. Burleson needs to double-check his facts because the U.S. government seems to disagree with his opinion that:
“The O-1 Visa is exclusively for distinguished scientists, so the O-1 impostors will try to convince people that Oracle is a science!… The O-1 program is is a widely-abused Visa that was designed exclusively for exceptional scientists whose skills are not available in the United States.”
From
https://www.usimmigrationsupport.org/o1-work-visa.html
” The O-1 Visa is for individuals with extraordinary abilities within science, arts, education, business, or athletics at the national or international level. Individuals with a record of extraordinary achievements within motion picture and/or television can also apply for the O-1 Visa as long as the work performed is in an area of extraordinary achievements.”
From:
http://london.usembassy.gov/ability.html
“The O-1 visa classification provides for the admission into the United States of persons with extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business and athletics, or extraordinary achievement in motion picture and television production, and their essential support personnel.”
In light of the recent DMCA actions by Mr. Burleson and copyright infringements by another individual mentioned in one of Mr. Burleson’s news articles, it appears that Mr. Burleson’s news article infringes the copyrights (assuming that he did not obtain permission to use the information/images) of a certain motion picture company (E.T. image), the copyrights of a certain cartoonist (Dilbert cartoon), Oracle Corporation (the pretty chart and statistics table), Business Week, EWeek (paragraph about MIT and Stanford), and possibly the copyrights of a couple of the quoted individuals.
While it might be true that the H-1B program is abused by certain individuals, it appears that the O-1 visa is completely different. The two types of visas should not be grouped together as they were in that article.
It seems that Mr. Burleson might need to pull that news article in light of the facts presented above. But then maybe these are just (quoting from Mr. Burleson’s Amazon comments) “questionable ‘errors’” or Mr. Burleson’s article is just a “cheap shot ‘smear job’ against an agile competitor.”
Charles Hooper
4 Sep 10 at 2:24 am
May I ask where you got this blog theme from? Did you download it for free or had to pay for it? Where can I download it from? Thanks in advance for your response!
Kieth Lanfear
4 Sep 10 at 1:32 pm
Hi Keith (Kieth?)
The theme is Journalist and you can grab it from the author at http://lucianmarin.com/page/themes/ Most WordPress themes have a link at the bottom of the page – though I’ve filled this page with a code example
Niall
Niall Litchfield
4 Sep 10 at 3:47 pm
I liked the chart label “Grand Total” on what appears to be an average.
joel garry
14 Sep 10 at 7:37 am