questions or comments...

hahaha...not sure if any of you listen to the [annoying] Tom Leykis...

one of his young minions called in asking what he should major in that will make him a lot of money....guess what one of Toms suggestions were...

average in category...

for example

average architect in NY makes $xx,xxx
average 22 year old makes $xx,xxx
average 2 yr exp. makes $xx,xxx

etc. etc.

and averages of a combination of categories would be nice too!

Please include information on "date of entry". Posts from two years ago aren't as valuable as ones from the last six months.

Key fields

Salary
Years of Experience
Location
Size of Firm
IDP Completed (yes/no)
Registered Architect (yes/no)
401K (Yes/No)
Number of Hours Per Week
Other Comments

The salary poll is great. I just wish it had average salary graphs based on either experience, location or possible all of the criteria.

There is such a large response, it's a shame not to visually see the results as a whole.

Good luck Paul.

quick question... do y'all want posts of job offers or only current jobs/accepted offers?

i think most ppl just put there accepted offers but it be nice to see offers as well

I would like to see some charts of all this info summed up and organized into different categories.

I'd caution against excessive "norming" of medians. I think most peole here with at least some professional experience know what national median bands (with a corporate bias, admittedly) are... Say, for m.arch, green intern 45-55, jr arch/designer 50-65, int arch/designer 55-70, sr arch/designer 65-75, project arch/assoc 70-90, sr assoc 80-110, principal 90-stratosphere, etc

The outliers are the interesting ones and the ones that
may signify the start of a new trend. If project arch are all of a sudden coming in with 110+ offers at the big corporates in, say, NYC i'd want to know about it, as it may signify a tightening labor mkt there, and maybe a signal to some others there to start thinking about how to renegotiate.

We just need to rely on people's honesty

Searchability!

location
size
salary range
years experience

these must all be fields!

its good, but it could be a whole lot better!

There are also bunch of real salary data at www.jobs-salary.com Can not find chart or other statistical information there though.

maybe I missed the option, but is there a way to search a specific city/region in the Salary Poll?

This thread has been around for well over a year now. When can we expect the roll-out of the new salary poll? And 86 the current one.

Also, are people including benefits into their total salary? If I added my bonus, 401k match, reimbursed mileage, reimbursed exams, prof dev allowance, expense acct meals, etc. I could puff my salary by tens of thousands. Maybe I will so I can blend it with the seemingly high salary of many on the current salary poll.

Amen, Aquapura.

Dear Archinect,

If you don't want to expend the resources to do a truly useful salary poll (as opposed to the tantalizing but mostly useless one now available), that's perfectly okay.

But don't start a thread seeking input for a new and improved one, then drop the subject. Or, if you really are working on it, let us know the progress.

Respectfully,

Citizen.

could you put all this information into a sweet graph or perhaps a pie chart based on age experience location etc? I think a pc could do this but not an apple.

imho, the archinect salary poll is here in a voluntary basis, and it is for quick reference only; all i would suggest is a filter for location (by US State, and maybe International) and a filter for years/experience.

Would be great to have a salary poll that is filtered by region.... SOON!

Why have we been talking about this for almost 2 years and not doing anything?

Simply being able to search by city/state would be useful...

Please make the list searchable by city or metro area.
thanks.

from a student's perspective, it also may be interesting to see where people graduated from.

I wish that a group such as this or the AIA for that matter, could fight for the financial benefit of its members. I mean really, go through architecture school, IDP, ARE, Architect 1,2,3...., Senior Architect, Principal, and final the pinnacle of achievement, PARTNER!!!!!!!! All after 35yrs of earning $30-$90k and watching your friends who got law and business degrees earn $300k/yr. Not to mention all of the insurance, liabilities, and general disrespect you receive from many clients and the public. Not to mention the neverending quest of Interior Designers to stamp drawings. Wanna stamp? Follow the steps outlined above. No I'm not at this position yet and I love to design and run a project but its hard to turn a blind eye when you see it happening right before you. We need these groups to fight for us. Those who say its not about money are right....partly. We go to work everyday to make money for life. Don't be a sucker working too hard for too little.
Also, those of us who are graduates but not licensed are not INTERNS!
We are Graduate Architects. Interns are those still in school and are virtually working for free.
Sorry I've strayed a bit, so what would I like to see in this poll?

Age
Race
Sex
City
Salary
Experience
Degree
IDP progress
ARE progress
AIA member?
Do you plan on staying in the profession?

to re-iterate, date of submission/entry is key. it'd be great to see how others in my region are doing at about the same time... some of those salary postings are from 3+ years ago.

I think it would be helpful to know where respondents went to school (doesn't have to be so specific as to identify the person....just ivy league, large state school, small private, etc).

I think it would be helpful if the new salary poll actually got done.

I understand this is a labor of love, but seriously, it has been almost 2 years since this post began, and still same old salary poll.

Post began on: 04/30/06 8:40

you should also allow the reverse. If i'm looking for a job, am 25 yr old and planning on looking in NY, there should be a search engine where i put in my criteria and it gives a list of people and the salaries+benefits they've received.

hi there

so for my own purposes i went ahead and created my own sortable spreadsheet from the stuff posted on the salary poll. i used all of the data from new york employment starting in april of '07 (basically the past year).

i'd be happy to share it, but i'm struggling a little find a good way to post it online -- anyone have any suggestions?

Should be able to sort by age, salary, years experience, licensed or not, possibly other information, if able to put the categories into the poll - current poll pretty much depends on user to fill in general information about skill-sets, certifications, other benefits offered by firm, type of work, etc.

nerd

you could set up a simple, free google pages site
..and since you are happy to share just post it there and then post the link in this thread

im sure we would all be greatful

My suggestion is to add more categories for the type of workplace they are working for. There are so many architecture related fields that many of us are working in such as development firms, construction companies, demographics research, government, retail brokerage design agencies, and other specialty type companies that usually are hired as consultants and typically command higher fees. Thus, their employees make more.

I remember one of the most relevant comments regarding the previous poll was that it was very monolithic and made the assumption that everyone works in architecture firms and that the percentage of people that actually work at architecture firms is a misnomer and isn't accurately reflected in the poll.

my $.02

and thanks for taking this on again.

any luck yet on a way to search the thing? nerd, thanks for the personal effort. i'm thinking of moving with my girlfriend when she goes to grad school next year, and could really stand to know how much i can expect (estimate) to make in various cities where she's looking at schools.

email the archinect guy and get it on this website

Is this project even alive anymore?

It's been 27 months since the original post.

no sh*t. stop talking about it and do it already.

i agree the data is useful but the way it's presented (and gathered) is rubbish.

Besides question of validity, the main problem with the database is the way the data is collected. because of the nature of the survey only Age, Gender, Type of workplace, Salary, and to a lesser degree location are easily sortable in terms of compiling the data.

If you want to say manage the data according to experience, schools, benefits, it will require someone to sift through all the data and manually re-create a new index for each of these. (a pain in the arse)

You could set filters but since the nomenclature is all different, you're gonna get a bunch of different categories in the filter.

For example of what i mean. If you want to begin any basic calculations on salary (mean, min/max, distribution) the numbers have to standardized. In the data, currencies are different, nomenclature is different. $8000 $8K $8... pounds/ dollars/ yen etc.

For location there are multiple ways New York City is listed. Just a few examples:

1. NYC
2. NYC, NY
3. New York City, NY
4, New York City, NY, USA
5. New York City, USA
6. New YorkCity

This may not seem like a major problem when viewing an entry. Everyone knows all those refer to the same thing. The problem is when you have a large amount of information you have to rely on the computer to sort each item otherwise it becomes a manual effort which takes a long time to re-index. For the computer, and purposes of BASIC search filters, it recognizes all these as separate locations. So if you were to do a search on NEW YORK CITY, you'd end up with 1/10 of the proper data results.


I guess my first recommendation to archinect is not that it organize the data they already have, but instead create an intelligent way of gathering future data so that it can be sorted easily at a later point if they so desire.
My suggestion is to create more pulldown menus with specific parameters. If experience (in years) is a desirable variable to survey then use a pulldown menu with values 0-70, rather than leave the format open in the comments section.

those are my 2 cents.

as of now i'm working on compiling all the data and creating some basic search filters and built-in calculations for anyone who uses excel. If i have time ill make some pretty graphs for those who don't have excel.

Make it sortable by region, experience, firm size etc. Seeing Denver next to NY only clutters the data. Standardize the form and make all answers mandatory so that the information is uniform and presented in the same order for each post. Posts such as this one are useless:


24 (M) tucson, AZ, USA
$37,000
Type of work: Fulltime
Type of workplace: Boutique
pretty laid back, very smoothy
Posted: Oct, '08

What is his degree? Licensed? Probably not but we do not know for sure. Does he get any benefits? Working 40 hours or 80 hours? There are so many variables you might as well toss this one out.

I think that you should include gender and age in the search as filter items.

Office Type: Boutique? Startitect? These terms are not useful. I'd suggest including size of firm (gross revenues would probably not be accessible or accurate for most pollees) but number of employees would be helpful.
Most useful addition would be TYPE of work pollee is engaged in.
-Residential
-Commercial
-Institutional
-Educational
-Medical
-Resort/hospitality
-Civic/Public
-Religious

Thanks for doing this for us! Very helpful!

i would like to filter cities

Very interesting thread to a prospective architecture student like myself. It sounds like the project has been dormant for a while, but I'm hopeful that the admins will listen to the many suggestions to learn from the first pass and take another stab at collecting data in a more standardized way. One thing you might want to consider are these studies on architect salary. Is there any hope for an updated, searchable version in 2010...?

brayvor - most of those are for IT type 'architect' salaries. although, i don't think most of us would mind swapping places...

Heheh, yeah... I noted that too, outed - that's one of the tricky things about searching for info on architect-architect salaries unfortunately...

This thread started 3.5 years ago ..i really dont think its going to happen

There should be a new poll showing how much our salaries/benefits/perks have been slashed in the past year.

how about a new thread that acts as a poll?

i care. and i'm sure others care. if you don't care, then go away and write meaningless words on another random forum not associated with archinect. you must care, or have something to say about it if you took the time to write 5 paragraphs about how you feel about it. you say people keep repeating the same recommendations, but in the 4th paragraph you repeated another poster's words. if it bothers you, then remove yourself from the thread in your email notification. you make no sense, rdp.

has this "new" salary thread really been open for 4 years?

@ -0- I was wondering about this too... did the new salary poll never get developed?

I care, a lot of people care. There's really no good source for accurate salary data in our field, so you have to research all the snippets you can from every source.

Aside from the filters that many have commented about, the general survey form needs to have more relevant information - given how brief it is, does age really matter? Wouldn't years of experience be more relevant?

my thoughts:
education
licensure
other accreditation
years of experience
if you list a major city, it's useful to know if the firm is urban or out in the 'burbs somewhere.
other benefits

I think the bogus stuff will all come out in the wash. An employee will post too high. Some employer will see that and try to offset it by posting low. It'll all average out.

Personally, I suspect that a salary poll today will give much the same results as one 3 years ago, as salaries for much of the industry have been frozen since 2008 or earlier... for those fortunate enough to still be employed full time. Tough times.

include if companies offer beer friday