| He who will not risk cannot win. John Paul Jones, 1791 |
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This week, the Israeli business daily Globes reported that the recent fall in the shekel-dollar exchange rate has resulted in an increase in dollar terms in salaries of Israeli high-tech employees. Figures released by global business consulting firm Radford reveal that the salary earned by a software engineer in Israel is close to the customary salary in the US. The survey, which covered 550 companies in 80 countries, reveals that a software engineer in Israel earns a total of $68,000 a year. For the sake of comparison, a high-tech employee in the US earns a total of $76,000 a year, and a software engineer in Russia earns $17,993 a year. In countries in East Asia, the preferred location for outsourcing, the average salary is a quarter of what it is in Israel. Software engineers in China earn $19,457 a year, and in India they earn $14,240 a year. (Globes 23.06).
Reports I'm hearing from colleagues at the big technology employers like NDS and Comverse tell me that poor designs and low levels of software engineering expertise are runner-ups to great lunches and high salaries.
There is a sense of entitlement to Israeli high-tech workers that comes from having enough disposable income, a reasonably interesting job and a fairly clueless boss that is even more interested than you in job security.
As a security and compliance professional - I can tell you that with enough security controls you can make the risk go away - if you're concerned about trusted insider theft - you can take away email and Web access and make your employees pledge allegiance 5 times a day like in Catch-22. There will be no threats of malware or data breaches but then again - that kind of setup will pretty much guarantee that your customers won't get service and your company won't win records for engineering excellence.
With high salaries and low creativity - Israel doesn't have a compelling value proposition with places like China and India.
Andy Grove once wrote - "a little fear in the work place is not necessarily a bad thing". Maybe the time has come to reduce salaries and place the emphasis on risk-taking, creativity and software excellence before the Chinese eat our business for lunch.
