Comments on: It’s Official. Agile Project Managers Earn More Money

By: Jesse Fewell

Jesse Fewell — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:53:25 +0000

David, good post. Yes, it is intresting that agile PMs make $11K more than ScrumMasters, but ScrumMasters have had a much more stable demand. However, I’d be interested to see how these compare against “project manager”. That might augment what VersionOne’s survey says.

By: Jesse Fewell

Jesse Fewell — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:49:09 +0000

Bradley, Thanks for the line. Keep up the good writing.

By: David Bland

David Bland — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:17:46 +0000

I crunched some numbers last year using Indeed.com’s free online tools that expose their job data, so you may want to start there.

For example, in my research last fall the term “Agile Project Manager” resulted in $99,000.00/yr where “Scrum Master” resulted in $88,000.00/yr.

http://www.scrumology.net/2009/10/29/agile-salary-trends/

By: Jesse Fewell

Jesse Fewell — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:59:01 +0000

As much as I would love to argue with you, I really can’t. Self-selected respondants and “hidden” raw data do make the report less compelling. And since it’s a survey sponsored by an agile company, rather than an academic research project, there is indeed a conflict of interest. However, I’m not deterred from the notion that Agile practitioners are in higher demand. To prove it, I guess I’ll have to do some more digging to find additional data, or barring that, start my own research project.

By: Glen B Alleman

Glen B Alleman — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:05:12 +0000

Jesse,
The statistical validity of this salary report is highly suspect. Since no source data is supplied and not correlations between the number of years experience and the salary is provides, this report is essentially marketing hype.

The problem starts with self selected respondents. The second flaw is “Project Manager” is neither defined nor separated from Scrum Master and represents on 18% of the respondent.

VersionOne folks need to go back to their high school stats class and pay attention this time.

Nice try though

Glen B. Alleman
VP, Program Planning and Controls
Aerospace and Defense
Denver, Coloroado

By: Jesse Fewell

Jesse Fewell — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:28:13 +0000

Pawel, I think you have a point. The survey drew “1,466 completed surveys with 2,786 respondants from 89 countries.” Nearly half (48%) of the respondants had more than 10 years of professional experience, but only 27% were at least 40 years old. So the survey was definitely skewed towards younger mid-career professionals. Is this because VersionOne primarily draws respondants online? Is it because agile engineering practices (TDD, CI, refactoring) are much more prevalent than agile management practices? I don’t know. But from the people I talk to in PMI circles, the vast majority are still relatively new to the agile space.

By: Pawel Brodzinski

Pawel Brodzinski — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:55:21 +0000

The last quote:

“While the agile community may be a young community of professionals (the majority are 39 years old or younger), itâ€™s a very experienced group with the vast majority (70%) having at least 5 years or more of experience.”

makes me thinking about whole report with reserve. Given that:

* agile is pretty new
* it has seriously taken off just a few years ago (I’d say 3-4 years)
* it is probably the fastest growing trend in project management/software development at the moment

we should have significantly more people who jumped into agile bandwagon during last 2-3 years than folks who have 5+ years of experience. And I mean at least level of magnitude difference.

So no, I don’t believe in these results. They’re flawed in some way. Either there was something wrong with questions or surveyed group wasn’t representative or there was some other reason.