{"id":291,"date":"2009-08-05T18:22:20","date_gmt":"2009-08-05T18:22:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/new\/?p=291"},"modified":"2023-10-12T17:20:08","modified_gmt":"2023-10-12T17:20:08","slug":"compensating-for-chaos","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/techcafeteria.com\/?page_id=291","title":{"rendered":"Compensating for Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Compensating for Chaos<\/h1>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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This post originally appeared on the Idealware Blog in July of 2009.<\/p>

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In 2000, after spending 15 years at corporate law firms, I made a personal choice to start working for organizations that promote social good by reducing poverty<\/a> and protecting our planet<\/a>. I understood that this career move would put some serious brakes on what was a fairly spiraling rise in compensation – my salary tripled from 1993 to 2000. And that was fine, because, as I see it, the privilege of being compensated for doing meaningful work is compensation in it’s own right.<\/p>

We all know that we make less in this industry than we might in the commercial world, and we’re all pretty okay with that. \u00a0But how much, or how little, the discrepancy between “real world” and nonprofit salaries should be is a metric with little established thought behind it.\u00a0 We don’t base our pay scales on any rationale other than what we determine others are paying and what we can afford. My concern is that, by not taking a strategic, reasoned approach to compensation, nonprofits are incurring far more unnecessary expense than they might, particularly when it comes to technology support, although these thoughts apply across the org chart.<\/p>

The problem is that, when it comes to determining the market value of a nonprofit employee, we often go to nonprofit salary surveys. But job seekers don’t read those surveys.\u00a0 In San Francisco or New York, a good System Administrator can make $70-80k a year at a for-profit.\u00a0 Even if they come in to your org understanding that they aren’t going to be offered the market pay ($75k), they have an expectation that they’ll either be on the low end of it ($70k), or within 10% of it ($67.5k).\u00a0 The recent NTEN Staffing Survey puts the average nonprofit Sysadmin salary at $52k, which is about 75% of that market. So, given this scenario, here are my questions:<\/p>

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