MADA Office Memo: Survey

Bill Anderson

The analysis of the data from the '91 MADA Survey is still not complete. The amount of data collected and the job of analyzing all of it has turned out to be much more of a job than anyone anticipated. Arvid Jedlicka continues to massage the figures with SAS on the BC/BS mainframe, and hopes to have the final analysis ready to report at the Orlando '92 conference. It will be published in the March issue of FrameWorks, as well. Not to disappoint you, however; we can report a few pieces of general information that have come out of the analysis so far-so please read on.

How much do you get paid?

The most common annual salary range for MADA members is $35,000-$50,000 (37%). However, 46% report salaries over $50,000, with 20% earning over $75,000. A bit more than half of the latter earn over $90,000. Only 13% reported salaries under $35,000.

What do you do?

The preceding salary information really needs to be compared to experience and position to be of real use. Unfortunately, that comparison is not yet available, but we can report the following breakdown of the total responses:

Position or job title

• Officer/Partner/Owner 23.5%
• Programming Manager 10.5%
• Software Engineer 54.3%
• Other 11.8%

Mac OS Experience

• Five or more years 56%
• 3-4 years experience 31%
• 0-3 years experience 13%

What's your line?

Not surprisingly, most of our members represent companies developing commercial software (46.5%). The complete breakdown looks like this:

• Commercial Software 46.5%
• Commercial Hardware 7.1%
• Software/Hardware 13.0%
• Corp/Manufacturing 3.9%
• Corp/Financial Services 2.0%
• Corp/Other 16.9%
• Other (Consulting, etc.) 10.6%

Object Pascal vs. C++

Already more than half of our members have switched entirely or in part from Object Pascal to C++ (54%). 76% say they will be using C++ by the end of 1992. 30%, however, will continue to use Object Pascal in some of their work.

Microsoft Windows

Windows is catching a lot of attention. 31% report some development experience with Windows in 1991, and that figure is expected to go up to 40% by the end of 1992. A bit less than 10% of our current members are doing work on platforms other than Mac and Windows (ie, NeXTStep, Motif, New Wave, etc.), and that figure shows no substantial change for 1992. 30% would like to see MacApp or some variation of MacApp available for Windows in 1992. Though the number of current members using MacApp shows no decline in 1992, the percentage of time allocated for MacApp development declines slightly.

FrameWorks gets around

FrameWorks is popular. Sharing the publication is commonplace. We were delighted to see that most issues get read regularly by about 2,500 developers. (This explains the complaints we got a year or so ago when we went to a lighter-weight paper for one issue, and heard such things as "This won't stand up to our usage, " and "We got FrameWorks just two weeks ago and the cover is already dog-eared.") n