ABSTRACT
Other software-related positions besides project management have broad ranges in compensation too, and there are now more than 205 total software-related occupations in the United States. This means that in order to do software cost studies, it is necessary to deal with major differences in costs based on industry, company size, geographic location, on the kinds of specialists that are present on any given project, and on years of tenure or merit appraisal results. Even if only basic compensation is considered, it can easily be seen that software projects developed by large companies in large cities such as New York and San Francisco will have higher cost structures than the same applications developed by small companies in smaller cities such as Little Rock or Knoxville. Longevity is mainly a factor for unionized positions, which are rare for software in the United States, but common in Europe and Australia.
