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> Numbers never lie, however they are by nature extremely malleable. ;)
>
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 3:43 PM, Lynne Wright
> <Lynne -dot- Wright -at- tiburoninc -dot- com> wrote:
> > But consider situations such as mine, where my salary hasn't budged,
> but due to layoffs, my workload has doubled.
Means, medians, and averages provide meaningful and useful information, but there's a lot of variation around some of those numbers.
WolframAlpha lists the median tech writer wage as $62.7k, but the 80% range (corresponding to about 1.28 standard deviations from the median, IIRC) is $37k to $100k.
With the median yearly increase being just 2%, a salary that "hasn't budged" for a few years isn't all that far from the median, and probably about as common as a salary that's grown 4% a year. If the variance in wage changes is anything like the variance in wages, there are probably a fair number of tech writers who are making 30-40+% less than in 2001, and a similar number who are making 30-40+% more.
Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
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rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-903-6372
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