Chief technology officer
Pay range: $128,017 to $212,100.

Project manager
Pay range: $77,265 to $112,615.

Help desk support
Pay range: $79,033 to $109,838.

Database manager
Pay range: $59,843 to $83,325.

Web developer
Pay range: $57,823 to $87,113.

These numbers had to be pulled out of the air or via a very bad source. There is no way that this is an average range here in Indianapolis.

Just last year I applied for a web developer job at the Indy Star and I am almost certain that their salary would have been nowhere near that salary range, even for someone who has done this sort of thing for over a decade. Most places in Indy might offer $40k if you’re lucky, and I actually had a few tell me that $30k was as high as they could go. AND these were companies that listed their jobs in Career Builder. How hard is it to check your figures when the data should be right in front of you?

Kids, don’t let these numbers fool you into selecting the IT field. Trust me, they are in no way average and outside of Indiana you need to consider the cost of living differences. There are plenty of jobs out there that make better money if that’s all you’re after.

And if you really want to go into the IT field, I suggest paying your dues for a few years to get a feel for the corporate world, and if you’re the entrepreneurial type, start a consulting business on the side that you can groom into a full-time job. I know that’s not for everyone, but I am extremely happy that I am doing what I’m doing. It is a little nerve-wracking at times, but at least you have some say over what you do and how much you make.

This has me asking the question, what ettique should people take when forking open source projects?

License wise, yes, you can do pretty much whatever you want without asking the author(s). But in the past *every* person who has made updates or changes to software that I have written has notified me of the changes and have either asked permission to place it for download on their web site (if the changes signifficgantly changed the functionality) or if I’d like to incorporate the changes in a new version of the software (giving credit where credit is due).

While the forking without notice does irritate me a little bit, the cheap “dumb” and “beta” insults he throws in is what truly irritates me. I mean, come on, how pompous is that? If you want to improve the software, fine. But if you want to knock the original code why not start from scratch and write your own software?

I have no problem admitting that this BETA software is very rough (to say the least) and has been on the backburner for quite a while. But functionality wise, this does serve it’s purpose for what I needed, albeit not very pretty.

Anyway, enough of that nonsense. Bottom line, if you want to fork my software, please ask first. Just because it hasn’t been updated in a while doesn’t mean that it’s dead.

UPDATE

It just occured to me that about 99% of the people who read my blog are probably thinking to themselves, “What in the world is ‘forking’?”

Simply put, forking is taking someone else’s software code base and creating your own software based upon the previous work.

Clear as mud now?