Last Sunday I was comparing salaries for IT workers and the TV was switched on a news channel. I wasn’t really paying attention until they began showing a report on the situation in Iraq.

I’m not that much interested in the war, but I wondered how much a foreign contractor in the IT field would earn in Iraq, provided he could live with the risk of working in a country at war.

In order to find a suitable comparison I decided to sample three IT jobs in different salary ranges and compare the income. Furthermore I wanted to answer this question: How likely is it to be injured and killed in Iraq? Here’s what I’ve come up with:

First of all it is difficult to find Salary information. I tried searching job sites like monster.com for openings, but there were few and usually there was no salary information. I suppose the gold rush days in Iraq are over, but still. There should be a way to find some numbers for comparison.

And there is.

The job search site indeed.com has a handy tool to compare average salaries based on a search string. I do not see a way to be sure how accurate this information is (especially given just the search strings, in my case f.ex. “Iraq, Microsoft SharePoint Administrator”), but if it’s anywhere close to the truth, it turns out that working in Iraq can make IT workers rich. At least in some instances.

Here’s the three searches I’ve conducted:

Microsoft SharePoint Administrator

In case you don’t know what SharePoint is: It’s a Portal Software by Microsoft that is often used in company Intranets for social networking, appointment planning and reporting. Comparable software includes SAP NetWeaver or IBM’s WebSphere Portal.

So here’s what indeed.com says. In the USA the average salary for this job is $68.000. However, in Iraq we have $239.000. A quick check at monster.com for USA gives salaries between 50 and 110 thousand. So this number could be somewhat accurate. The average salary thus is 249% higher in Iraq, on average.

Java Programmer

For the second term I tried a more generic search term. How much do, on average, Java Programmers earn in the USA and in Iraq? The difference this time is lower. With $72.000 per year of income in the States and $86.000 in Iraq. That’s a difference of 20%. However, I also included Afghanistan, which averaged at $102.000.

I suppose programming does not really require you to be on-site. Those jobs can even be conveniently outsourced to other countries like India. Thus bigger salary differences are expected for jobs that require the workers to be where the systems or the clients are.

Chief Information Officer

Finally let’s look at salaries for CIOs. This time you are better off working in the USA. Iraq averages at $78.000, while CIOs in America get $97.000. That’s minus 42 per cent.

Again, one has to question the numbers or speculate about whether the high paying jobs in Iraq are already spoken for and never have been offered on the market.

Calculating The Risk

Okay, now let’s suppose we’re very adventurous or simply like the daily adrenaline rush of working in a war zone (yes, I know, the war is over. But let’s be realistic here..), how likely is it to get killed?

There are casualty numbers released for military personnel that were killed in combat and while off-duty (f. ex. there are quite a few that died of self-inflicted wounds.), as well as casualty numbers for contract workers.

According to Wikipedia, 520 foreign private contractors have been killed since the beginning of the war, around 240 of them were US citizens. This includes American truck drivers, language interpreters and private military contractors (PMCs). According to this L.A. times article there are 21.000 American private contractors working in Iraq. That means the chance of getting killed is around one in eighty-eight. That equals a 1,1% chance.

In comparison let’s look at the homicide rate in America. Again, citing Wikipedia, we see that 5,8 people out of 100.000 become homicide victims in 2008. That is one in about 17.000. It’s thus 193 times less likely.

Working in Iraq seems to be a bad idea.

Also consider we should consider the following numbers.

In March 2009, 9 military deaths have been reported, however 52 have been wounded. It’s thus almost nine times more likely to be wounded than killed. And being wounded in many cases can mean that you are no longer able to continue working or have some serious condition that might last for the rest of your life.

In raw numbers a salary surplus of even $100.000 dollars compared to $50.000 in the USA can mean that if a worker is killed or wounded after 5 years with 20 years of work life left, he looses 20 * $50.000 = $1.000.000 dollars compared to $500.000 ($250.000 more than at home) he has already earned. If he has a family such calculations might help put things into perspective.

Even though Iraq has become a slightly safer place recently, the extra money is still not worth it. At least if you ask me.

(Photo Source: http://www.defenselink.mil/photos/newsphoto.aspx?newsphotoid=7673)

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