More calculations

Ok, after my recent blog entry where I complained about my salary, I figured out that to lift my mood a bit, I should look at some statistics about the salaries for people with MSc degrees in Finland. TEK (the Finnish Association of Graduate Engineers) compiles salary statistics on a nearly yearly basis, but alas they only publish those for their members on the web site.

Anyway, a survey they conducted for the year 2005 shows that things that affect MSc salaries are

• focus on computer science (+7.7%)
• employed by the private sector (+13.8%)
• working in the Helsinki metropolitan area (+7.8%)
• male gender (+5%)
• emplyed by a company with 250+ employees (+2.1%)
• 5+ travel days per year (+6.4%)
• 2.5+ hours of overtime work per week (+3.9%)

There were more things, but these were the criteria that I figured I could meet. So by multiplying those, the overall benefit would be +56.5%. TEK also suggests that a fresh MSc should get paid 3070 euros/month. Now if you take into account the supposed +56.5% increase, that would amount to about 4800 euros/month of gross income. And I'm assuming that TEK's statistics don't take bonus arrangements into consideration.

Then assume that with the overtime work, the average working week would be 40 hours long and there are four weeks in a month for a total of 160 hours of work/month. That equals 30 euros/hour. Also, considering that I'll hopefully be graduating in four years, this'll have to be adjusted with inflation. I can't be arsed to get any statistics on that, so I'll just add a yearly inflation of 1% to that, for a grand total of about 4990 euros/month. So now I know what I should be aiming at...

And now I have to admit that I don't feel any better. I would've been happy with the three grand that TEK suggests. But now because of these damn statistics, 3k sounds sort of... Well... Small. Not to mention my current salary. Oh well, I think it's time to get back to Kotler & Keller, lest I want to ever graduate.