Navision Salary Jobs

No for sure those are not correct starting salaries for an inexperienced fresh out of college NAV developer. If you think you're going to make that kind of money right away you are dreaming .

When I was on a job interview in the UK, I was told that 45K is a top-manager pay and Navision consultancy/development is rather between 25-35K. 25 for beginner, 35 for a veteran. It surprised me because I saw Java ads for 50K but maybe there is too much of us or something

I don't know whether there is a lot of us or not, but the figures strangely seem lower than that of mainstream Java etc. developers, even though it's a lot harder job, because one usually does not get nice longs specs, because the pace of projects are a lot faster, and therefore one usually has to understand business as well as tech and figure out what business goal the client might have had in mind when making a requirement and often offer a different route to reach that.

As for doing it for the money or doing it for passion... it's a complicated thing.

Being halfway between a business consultant and a programmer is clearly lot more exciting than dumbly coding specs made by somebody else in Java. And Navision's flexibility is also often a source of great joy - sometimes you can send people off to a coffee break during a training and when they came back, the functionality they complained about is already changed (of course, only in a testing database), and then they just say WOW.

On the other hand... there are some less pleasant parts of it. One of them is Microsoft itself, their ethically questionable business tactics, such as trying to achieve vendor lock-in... and there are other ethical questions as well... somebody wrote on the Navision forum that they asked MS why cost adjustment does not work with BOM Journals, they were told to buy Manufacturing AND charged for this support incident... Imagine asking a car vendor after you figure out your shiny new car has no transmission gear and he says "Oh, it's only in the Deluxe version" AND charging you for telling it.... such things are plain ridiculous. Still, they seem to get away with it and I don't like it. Therefore I often feel that working in a purely Open Source environment would be better for my ethical wellness... but Open Source ERP systems are not yet widespread and not even half as easy to develop as Navision... so I will have to stay with Navision until that changes, which if take the current speed of their development as a basis, will be at least 10 years.

There are also quality problems. Before just a couple years ago, 90% of Navision sales was trough those big solution centers who built huge add-ons and used very little from the standard functionalities: usually only the financial ones. Therefore Navision A/S was not forced to provide good quality standard functionality, Navision was mostly regarded as but a development environment, financial posting back-end and common brand name for add-ons...

Now with Microsoft it seems to change, for sure, but slowly, I don't know how long will it take until f.e. somebody takes those horrible, user-hostile TESTFIELD function calls out that violate every possible good practice for proper user interaction design. And it's just one example.

Still, if you are the type who takes great passion and pride in building really high quality solutions, Navision is still the best possible option and will remain for a long time I think, because it's development environment allows to build whole new "modules" in 5-15 days. Going with another ERP system and still having customers who cannot pay more than that would mean we either have to provide bad quality or lose the sale.

As for money... it's an interesting question. Clearly big houses and big cars make nobody happy. But the idea of saving enough to retire at 35-45 and then work on your pet Open Source projects with complete financial indepence is a juicy one, I think...