I've finished my classes. On May 10th, I will formally graduate with my master's degree in IT. On May 17th, I am quitting my current job and handing the reins over to a friend, whom I've been training for the last few weeks.
My professor, on Thursday, told our class that the average salary of someone graduating from our program - ranked 14th in the nation for graduate level MIS - was around $93,000.
I was startled at how high that figure was, and saddened. For you see, that kind of money is only paid in the very largest cities - New York, San Francisco, etc. Salaries approaching six figures don't exist in my city, except for some very high ranking university faculty and staff members and some surgeons at the hospitals.
Essentially, if I want to make that kind of money, I'd have to move or deal with a 1.5 hour commute into Atlanta.
"We're not moving," my husband said flatly when I broached the idea to him last. His school, where he is up for tenure as a professor next year, has told the faculty members they are now expected to be on campus at least four days a week, even if they aren't teaching classes or have online classes. It's the same misguided principal that Yahoo!'s new CEO Marissa Mayer is following - forcing employees to come in on days when they could be just as productive, or more productive, from home.
The telecommuting boom was supposed to bridge the gap between places employees wanted to live, and places that businesses wanted them to work. Unfortunately, telecommuting did not live up to its promises, and some employers learned that their staff members were missing critical communication with one another since they were not interacting face to face - or chatting idly around the water cooler.
While that face time with coworkers inspires some needed creativity, it's not something that is required every day, and in fact that daily contact for 8+ hours could slow things down more than speed it up. I think that requiring someone be in the office or on campus a few days each week is totally reasonable, but to require it daily is just going to make everyone become tired of each other that much faster (as so often happens in offices that require 100% shared meat space.)
So, fewer positions are advertised as being available for telecommuting, which means I've got three choices:
- Try to wait for a telecommuting job that promises a high salary and probably wait many months because those just don't exist any more
- Accept a position locally at a drastically lower salary than I qualify for
- Cave in and deal with 3 hours of commuting every day to the city center and back to my town, Athens, which is known as "the last suburb and the first non-suburb" to the Atlanta metro area
This is the infrastructure problem that has hit the economy hard during the recovery. There are jobs available and not enough people to fill them locally. There are people who want to work, but there are no jobs available where they live.
And for the most part, the people are unable to move to where the jobs actually are, because of spousal employment, mortgages that are under water, and cost of living issues.