The meetings have a similar structure to most user groups: there’s a technical talk or workshop given by one of the members, and afterward the group moves on to a local pub for the “splode” part of the evening, a general discussion of whatever we want to talk about from our professional and personal lives. The guidelines for men’s participation have changed over time; the current rule is that all women are invited to attend and participate, and men are welcome as the guest of a female participant. The goal is to create a safe space for women to talk about our technical work in a friendly and open environment.

Why safe space? It’s no secret that the technology industry can be antagonistic, heavily competitive, and hostile toward outsiders who don’t immediately prove their technical competence. While not all women have experienced problems with this, many women (and men) have, and being a member of a visible gender minority often only increases that sense of otherness and hostility. Creating a group that is officially women-focused and has clear guidelines for inclusive behavior provides support in that environment. Men in the industry are part of a majority group; there are no defined “men’s user groups” or “men’s software conferences” because in many cases, that’s already what happens by default. In the open source world in particular, women make up a very small percentage of participants, and I find that having space where I feel visible and normal and not weird for being female is extremely valuable.

Besides that, having a cross-technology group where we can discuss our work with our peers is exciting. I’ve used this to present topics that don’t fit into any single-technology user group, like text game programming or privacy issues in software design, and I’ve attended other topics that don’t relate to my own work at all, but are interesting because of the enthusiasm of the women who are presenting it. It’s also a great environment for women who have never given a technical presentation before, and might not feel like they have the experience to present at a conference yet. This helps us learn the skills to move on to bigger events, meaning that over time we can encourage better representation of the women who are already present in these fields.

The best thing, the part that really demonstrates why this group is important, is seeing the effect it has on the women who participate. We’re learning to negotiate for better salaries, to find jobs we enjoy, to present our work to a larger audience, and we’re building friendships we can rely on when the problems of our industry are hitting us personally. It’s not a “fix” for the imbalances of the technology world, but a support system that helps us continue to be a part of this industry and still have fun.

Does this sound like something you want to participate in too? We meet every 4th Tuesday of the month, and you can find details on the group’s website or Calagator.

Matt asked in comments: “I’d love to see how this compares to the bay area.”

For the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metro area, the mean annual wage for Computer and Mathematical Science Occupations is $91,440. (The Portland metro area number for that was $74,890).

San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara is a separate metro for this report, and the mean annual wage there is a little higher: $109,130.

For more west coast comparison, the Seattle metro comes in at $87,620.

In comments on Hacker News, a couple of people expressed surprise that developers wouldn’t know how their wage compared to the local average. It may seem obvious if you’re already paying attention to this yourself, or work for a company that uses cost of living and prevailing wage to determine compensation, but many developers really aren’t aware of this information. I’ve seen that to be especially true for younger workers, or those who haven’t had a lot of mentoring in their career. It’s very common to assume that what a company offers you is an average amount to be paid for that job, and that other people around you are earning a similar amount. This happens even within individual companies.

Hacker News also had some interesting discussion of whether wage variance from city to city was related to how companies in those places were valued by investors, i.e. if investors penalize a company from being in Portland, that should affect wages, but if companies are getting an equal level of investment, then wages should match other cities. One of the things I’ve been wondering is whether wage variance in Portland is partly related to company revenues: I’ve seen a fair amount of anecdotal evidence that employers that are paying developers less than other local competitors are also doing less well as a business. I don’t really know where to find the data to study either of these issues, though.

Another thing on HN was a discussion of whether a company paying developers in different cities the same amount is fair. Alex from BankSimple says that they decided it was, but other people thought it penalized developers who lived in more expensive places. There’s several issues wrapped up in this: is the market for developer talent local, national, or international? Do developers have sufficient freedom to move or choose where they live that the trade-offs between bigger and smaller (more expensive and more affordable) cities is a fair choice? Much of this depends on the specific company, but given that programming can often be done from anywhere, without requiring the same built resources as other industries, this is worth discussing.

One last thing: I think all of this highlights how useful an annual wage survey for the software industry would be. I’ve been looking at the AIGA survey of design salaries and what they report. They break their data by categories like type of company, location, and whether the company’s client base is local or national or international. It makes it really easy to find out what someone at your job level, working for a similar company, could expect to earn.

QCEW data is split by industry, so programmers could potentially be covered under any number of areas, depending on where they work, but we can pick a likely area to start, like NAICS code 54151 (computer systems design and related services). In 2009, the last full year with data, there were 9,457 people working in this industry category in Oregon [2]. The total covered wages for the year added up to $722,755,908. So we can divide the two and conclude that the average annual wage was about $75.5k.

What if we want to know more about income by job title? For that we need the BLS Occupational Employment Survey. Here’s the May 2009 data for “Computer and Mathematical Science Occupations”: http://bls.gov/oes/current/oes_38900.htm#15-0000

The national median annual wage for this category is $72,900. In the Portland metro area, it’s $74,890. You can see that broken down further. For example, a research programmer averages $102,930 here, and the most popular job area by employment count, “Computer Software Engineers, Applications”, earns $91,300 a year.

The breakout pages that show you more about the data for each job category are pretty interesting, too: http://bls.gov/oes/current/oes151031.htm
You can use that to find out things like which industries hire the most people with this job role, and which metro areas pay the best.

What other ways can we find out about developer wages? Well, last year Eva and I did a survey of the local tech industry that included questions about this. The median annual income [5] for our survey sample (667 people, but not everyone answered all questions) was $75k. The median for people who described their job role as a software developer of some sort [3] was $80k. The range, though, was from about $25k on the low end to $200k at the top, which seems pretty significant. 46 respondents were earning less than $65k/year, and 43 earned $100k/year or more.

There’s other kinds of surveys, too. This week a Hacker News discussion [4] led to someone coding up a little webapp that lets you ask a group of people how much they earn without revealing who entered what. It only displays the results if at least four people submit their info. Christie asked people on IRC and Twitter to fill one out for Portland software developers. So far the responses range from $0-90k, with 15 responses (the lowest non-zero amount is $38.5k). It’s still too small a sample to know how it compares to our other data, but if you’re a local developer you can add your own salary and see the responses here: http://salaryshare.me/5b9f602f99f87ea1492cc056292000ae

You can also get some employee-reported data on wages through a site called Glassdoor. Here’s a search for software workers in Portland: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/portland-software-salary-SRCH_IL.0,8_IM700_KO9,17.htm
It lets you see things like the average salary for a Software Engineer at Intel is $85,427, while a Software Developer at Rentrak earns $61,500. Might be useful if you’re trying to decide which job postings to respond to, assuming they have data for the company.

Back to that variation issue: what sorts of questions can we ask about why some developers in Portland earn way more (over twice the annual wages) than others? It seems likely that there are factors including Portland’s local economy and business markets, individual characteristics like skills and education, and the specific technical markets a person is working in.

Possible reasons for higher wages:

• More education or experience
• Working for larger or more profitable companies (including companies with a national or international customer base)
• Good negotiation skills and knowledge of market wage rates
• Working in technology sub-fields where developers are in higher demand (such as iPhone app development)
• Having skills or experience areas that are particularly desirable in the current market

Possible reasons for lower wages:

• Less education or experience
• Working for smaller or less profitable companies
• Poorer negotiation skills or knowledge of market wage rates
• Working in technology areas where compensation tends to be lower (PHP web development, for example)
• Working independently or for a company that is struggling with funding or profitability
• Having skills or experience areas that are fairly common in the current market

So that’s what I have so far. It’s kind of a big data dump. I’m not an expert on this by any means, but if you have any questions about other data, who’s included in which numbers, and so on, let me know and I’ll try to find out and report back.

[1] The most notable exception is self-employed workers, who aren’t in this report because they’re exempt from unemployment insurance, which is the tax data used.

[2] Yearly average, based on monthly numbers.

[3] Software developer, software engineer, programmer, web developer, etc. The count of responses for these job titles with usable income entries was 189.

[4] If you’ve curious about the potential benefits and disadvantages for workers and companies to disclose salary info, this discussion pretty much has all the points covered.

[5] Total personal income, rather than wages, so some people may have reported a higher income due to other sources (like investments or a side business) than they would in the government wage data.

Note: Code ‘n’ Splode is a women-focused technology user group. If you need more details about the group and our guidelines for participation, see here.

• Antarctica
• The ridiculous face Kirk is making right now (he’s napping in one of those sprawled out poses)
• 
• Documentation for unconferences, code sprints, and other tech activities, and how much time it’ll take to produce the docs I want to use
• This report (PDF) on personal income gaps between Oregon and the rest of the country, and in particular the parts about lower proprietor incomes, and lower wages in higher paying industries (like technology)
• Pondering whether tech workers getting paid lower while working in Oregon is a conscious choice (maybe it’s a partial choice, but then the workers getting paid below the median don’t realize they’re paid less, so they think they’re making a smaller trade off than is actually the case?)
• Nonprofit regulations (we wrote bylaws for Stumptown Syndicate over the weekend). There’s so much good information for nonprofits in Oregon I wish I had on hand a few years ago.
• Stuff.

I started things off by suggesting a theory: that Portland’s history as a timber town has influenced our approach to economic development, in ways that are no longer useful as we switch from a physical commodity-driven economy to a digital one. I also talked a little about the tendency for investment and customers to be outside of Portland, causing money to flow into and out of the economy, but not move around inside Portland’s tech economy (we do spend our money on other kinds of local goods and services).

Participants helped build a list of things we know about working in timber vs. working in tech, then we talked through what the effects of these things are, and what we might do about it. Here’s what we came up with:

Timber (atoms)
* semi-limited renewable resource
* fungible/tradeable commodity
* global market – externally facing
* hard to obsolete
* no 2.0? (low innovation rate)
* high startup cost/time (have to grow the trees)
* usually organized labor
* doesn’t travel (you can’t take your trees elsewhere)

Tech (bits)
* infinite
* maybe a commodity
* maybe specialized
* global market
* can be an internally or externally facing market
* rapidly changing
* low startup cost
* not much labor organization
* travels well

Side effects (what happens in the local economy as a result?)
* Regional cash flow problems
* Can we grow?
* Needs replanting
* Needs the right culture
* Tech moves internally (inside the local community)
* Cash doesn’t
* We build relationships around the tech-sharing
* But not around the cash transactions
* Business and tech people don’t speak the same language
* Risk aversion: tech is easy to share, cash is hard
* Differences in barriers to entry (are these being addressed?)

Lessons/goals (what do we want to do about this?)
* need structures for investing $$$ in community tech
* business mentoring (another camp?)
* companies should invest in the community’s tech skills
* keep projects open
* share knowledge locally
* more exposure to local products and marketplace
* local hiring marketplace
* expose businesses to local tech assets
* more directories
* programmer fund: let’s pool money to invest
* fund projects based on community value
* bring management from companies into the practitioner community (take your boss to the user group meeting)

I would not recommend giving Creepius your personal information. Even if he says he’s not going to share it with anyone. He lies.

While he was running around, getting into who knows what sort of mischief, I led a session on Portland, technology, and reporting. Christie and Melissa took notes here. I’ve been thinking about how we can improve the depth of reporting on the local tech scene, so it was fun to brainstorm further with the other participants.

Many attendees expressed an interest in attending a follow-up event, but in the meantime there’s a mailing list to keep the discussion going.

A number of us recently read the Willamette Week’s coverage of open source and the City of Portland’s engagement with the open source community. Seeing this type of coverage from a mainstream publication was a high watermark of sorts. A step forward. But how big of a step?

I asked Audrey Eschright, Open Source Bridge co-founder, the driving force behind Calagator, and local open source advocate, for her take on it [...]. What she provided wound up being—by her own admission—an accidental manifesto on open source and municipal government.

The other piece is a comic on the cycles of underinvestment reflected in discussions about Portland tech business.

I’ve been interested in how people often make comments like the ones above in the midst of the same discussions without seeing how they’re connected. If you look at it all together, it makes sense that our economic activities are so externally focused—locally, the money doesn’t move fast enough. It’s all part of the same problem.

Their next game is tomorrow evening against the Vancouver Whitecaps. 7PM at PGE Park. Join us.

A recurring theme was the need for hubs, info centers, central communication points. I said something about needing a telephone tree, which led one of those “this is too simple to work” insights: if the lowest common denominator of government technology usage is email, and we need a contact point for government to talk to the indie tech community, why don’t we give them an email address to cc, and filter or redistribute it on our side? I mean, the PDC sent out notes from the meeting at w+k, and how did they distribute that? Email. How visible is email to people not on the list? Right. But that gap, that’s just tech stuff, filtering and rebroadcasting and we totally know how to do that. So Reid will set up an email alias to use and we’ll start tinkering.

I’m also thinking about creating a tumblr for CivicApps. There’s a communication/visibility problem for the project, because they’re on Twitter, but Twitter posts are transient. They scroll off the screen and cease to exist (in our immediate consciousness). There’s a mailing list now which is great for discussion, and a news page on the site, but it’s all press releases and the link is buried at the bottom of the page. One of the things I like about Tumblr is that it makes it easy to combine content from a variety of sources, and you can configure it so other people can submit posts.

Yeah, why not. I can always delete it if it’s not useful. If you’re working on something CivicApps related you want to see posted/linked, send it to me.

One of the other things I’ve been trying to do it sort out the various needs and pieces of this. There’s the “how does the tech community talk to the government” piece. The “how do we address the business needs of small businesses and startups” piece. A professional development / community-building piece that often comes back to “we want a community collaboration space” and “getting sponsors & volunteers for events”. And some things that stretch outside of Portland or the region, like “connecting our CivicApps and OpenGov activities with the global government transparency effort”. Each one might need different tools, have different people involved.

And now I’m at the end of my lunch break, and the MEX/FRA game is over, so I’ll post this.