this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
116 points (93.3% liked)

Programming

17313 readers
150 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm an 8 year data center network engineer who recently broke 100k for the first time. When I got asked my salary requirements I actually only asked for 90k as my highest previous salary was 80k with lots of travel, then I found out they gave me 100k because it was the minimum they could pay someone in my position. I've read before about people making crazy salary increases (150%-300%) and am wondering if I played it incorrectly and how I could play it in the future. I plan to stay with my company for the next few years and upskilling heavily and am eyeing a promotion in my first year as I've already delivered big projects by contributing very early. I've progressed from call center/help desk/engineer etc (no degree, just certs) so my progression has been pretty linear, are people who are seeing massive jumps in pay just overselling their competency and failing forward? Or are there other fields in IT like programming/etc that are more likely to have higher progression scales?

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)

was making 125k. Got laid off. Interviewed at another company and asked for 200k. Ended up with 185k. Got laid off again and still haven't been able to find a job. Ups and downs :/

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I played a negotiation game of spending two weeks of research to explain to my company that I should be paid $165k, based on roles similar to me.

They said, "Well those are in expensive cities." And I said, "They're all remote jobs. And they're all hiring."

They came to the table with 155k, which was 30k more than a month prior. The scary part was a few months later, fucking Musk fired a bunch of Twitter people, and triggered the layoffs. So now I can't do that negotiation again.

[–] Obi@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 year ago
[–] MajorHavoc@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

So now I can't do that negotiation again.

You can and you should. Musk's layoffs and the ones that followed are a coordinated press campaign. The total impact on unfilled jobs for IT professional programmers was a tenth of one percent.

But according to the news cycles, without Musk's microservices there's plenty of us to go around now. /s

Yes. Companies are hiring slower right now because there's less venture capital money sloshing around, but they're accumulating company-ending-event technology debt while they do it.

Mark my words they will be desperate for your talents and paying accordingly soon. I predict another big hike in base pay as the game of chicken ends in a mad scramble. We will also see more companies paying long term consulting rates instead of staff rates for IT solutions.

Source: As a developer who hires developers, I'm watching this trainwreck from both sides of the track.

[–] thisisnotgoingwell@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've heard from some friends/family that are trying to break into entry level cybersecurity or programming roles and it's extremely difficult right now, why do you think there seems to be such a high demand for skilled workers but seemingly no demand for entry level?

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee 24 points 1 year ago (9 children)

When someone asks what you were paid or what your salary expectations are, ask them what the budget is for the role. They have one. They will not want to tell you, and you shouldn’t tell them your expectations

[–] teichflamme@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago (14 children)
[–] lustrum@sh.itjust.works 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They offer someone else the job

[–] teichflamme@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Yeah, exactly. People upvoted this take that won't work for 99.9999% of people lol

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (13 replies)
[–] custom_situation@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

even then, a position may not be for a certain level so they’re can be a fairly wide band of pay depending on how the interview goes.

i think most folks vastly overthink it. just ask for the money you want to make. either it’s in the ballpark or it’s not. all this “don’t say a number first” stuff is bullshit imo.

you definitely do want to know if your desired pay matches their range though. that’s very important.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] Astroturfed@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You just learned a valuable lesson. Always add like at least 25% to what you think you can get. Unless you are very aware of what the salary range should be. They'll almost always make a counter offer if you've gone over. It's hard to walk it back if you lowball yourself though.

Hell yeah this is the way. Negotiate for 25% more, and expect to land at 10-15% more.

I like the tip someone said where if they want you to name a number, you reply with, "Im currently in the middle of interviews with positions whose salary range from (range 1 to range 2)".

[–] ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

140-150 is pretty average for a senior DevOps/AWS person. Coding and terrorism/AWS will pay more then networking in general.

[–] nul@programming.dev 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Did you maybe mean to say Terraform, or am I missing a key aspect of my job role?

Lmaoooooo yes. Although some tf is terrorism.

lmao I was thinking the same. Like damn I gotta start working some on some defense contractor stuff

[–] 0x0@programming.dev 17 points 1 year ago

99% of the time, the only way people get a raise around these parts is by switching jobs. There's never budget until you resign.

I haven't seen any huge increase 'cos I don't have access to manager's records.

[–] glad_cat@lemmy.sdf.org 17 points 1 year ago

It’s only a sample of one but I almost doubled my salary by switching jobs. I was bullied and harassed in a shitty startup for more than 3 years. I got fat, almost had a depression and I was not doing anything interesting. Even my skills were decreasing.

A bunch of managers asked me once to do something illegal. HR was also telling me to do this because "it’s an order from the bosses." That was the last straw and I told them to fuck off, and I resigned.

I was underpaid at this shitty company, but I accidentally found another job at a good company with nice people. My salary almost doubled overnight. I don’t want that much money but it was nice "fuck you" to my previous manager that I deeply thanked for being such an asshole.

[–] Lasso1971@thelemmy.club 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Two years ago our software lead left. Me with 3 years experience was the most knowledgeable person on the team. He left because we had gotten acquired. 3 months later they gave me a raise from 92 to 103k, which I showed annoyance with. 6 months later the new company decided to throw money at the people they couldn't afford to lose so I went to 128k. 6 months later I went to 143k

This is on a small team at a government contractor

TLDR: 51K (56%) in 1 year without switching companies

[–] nomecks@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

I worked on a team where everyone but one employee was making 100k+. He was the only one who worked his way up the ranks, and he was only making 49k. I pointed out to him that his job title didn't match everyone else on the team, as titles matched pay bands. He got more than a 100% raise when he showed our manager.

[–] steal_your_face@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago

Was making 80k at my last job, asked for 110k when interviewing and my new job offered my 125k, then after a year they bumped it to 145k. I work in devops.

[–] josh_dix@programming.dev 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I didn't finish my degree so ended up going ops -> devops route.

Salary include estimated benefit values (ending salary) 12/hr -> 50k (60k) -> 70k (80k) -> 115k (125k) -> 115k (counter offered 185k upon resignation which I rejected) -> 190k -> 210k

There's a lot more to the story but that might give an idea of possible bumps. Each jump I took mostly to progress my career where they were looking for skills that built on top of what I had already been doing. I went from like a windows admin, to network admin, to windows/network automation, to ansible automation for anything (and other devops-y things), to a cloud consulting company which focused on automation, to a internal platform architect on a team, to a small business where I'm pretty much the infrastructure wizard, with a junior team member, who does the infra deployments, changes, design, cicd for dev and own team, etc.

When I took a pay decrease from 125k -> 115k it was because the weekly cash was still slightly better but the benefits were far worse. I mostly took it because I needed to get to a cloud focused company to progress my career where I wanted it to go and my company at the time couldn't get me any meaningful experience in cloud stuff at all. The pay jump after that really proved that the experience was worth it. I kind of wish I never joined the 190k company and instead took the counter offer. The 190k company I ended up really not liking leadership's direction and handling of things.

Super happy now at 210k company where I am a bit of a manager. I really like the people, responsibilities, etc. Pay is pretty great, more than I need for sure, so paying extra on the house and good bucks in retirement for later. Of the higher paying places I've been at it is the only one I feel fulfilled and not constantly frustrated.

[–] thisisnotgoingwell@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That's great, can you elaborate what you mean by ops>devops? Do you support infrastructure or applications? I know devops is kind of a catch-all term now for automation, did you work on understanding cloud deployments from the POV of the servers/application or from infra?

I only ask because some of what I do is considered "devops" in the sense that I'm working on network automation, but a lot of times when I hear people discuss devops they're talking about supporting applications

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] bender@insaneutopia.com 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't wait to be asked how much I am expecting to be paid. I generally ask the HR person what the salary range is for the role. You have 8 years experience so you can demand the top end of that pay scale.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] loganmarchione@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[–] vector_zero@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

65k->72k->80k->92k->106k->113k->118k->277k

See if you can pinpoint the year I got into a big tech job.

[–] jigsaw250@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As a person who makes about 50k, that could be any one of them for all I know. Seriously though, 160k is quite the raise.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] LoamImprovement@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

When I started at the company I currently work for, my then manager saw how hard I was working and negotiated an 11% raise on my behalf during my first annual review, and another 10% following. She was cool as hell and protected me from the upper management bullshit that was going on at the time. She left because they had her working 65+ hours every week for a CEO who was/is pissing away the company's capital and goodwill with clients.

My current manager is the bullshit, I haven't had a raise since my old manager left three years ago and I've been looking off and on for something else while I steadily lower my effort to be commensurate with my effective pay.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] IronSage@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

41k -> 60k -> 70k -> 85k -> 100k -> 110k (2018-2023) That 41 -> 60 felt huge. 60 -> 70 felt like a drop, it was a job change and I lost overtime and we were paid every 2 weeks instead of twice a month. (26 paychecks instead of 24)

These days, what makes all the difference are the bonus programs. My income is generally 25% higher than my base through company stock programs, bonuses and high performance grants.

[–] ishanpage@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm from India so these numbers might be a bit weird. My yearly comp has basically gone like this from 2017 to 2023

$0.7k -> $3.6k -> $4.8k -> $20k

[–] philm@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

$0.7k annually? Is it anyhow possible to live with that low salary in India? I can't even live a month with that here, even if I don't buy anything but the cheapest food and live in the smallest apartments here...

[–] ishanpage@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

It is possible to live on that, there are people who live on less than it. Personally all of it went to supplementing my Mom's income so we could survive.

There are plenty of entry level jobs in India that offer those kinds of wages. There are more that offer less.

Yes, it's exploitative.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

The simple answer is, maybe. You could have had more if the competition wasn't better. But you will never know if they were. My advice would be to focus on the fact that you just got a big raise, and enjoy the work. In a year, ask for more, say 10%, and if you're good and fit the culture, they'll do it. If not, start looking. Just be careful of jumping jobs too much.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] NormandyEssex@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I jumped from 65k to 110k switching jobs and cities, but that was the biggest. The rest were like 10-20k

[–] Stumblinbear@pawb.social 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My first "real" job (I used to work at McD's and Walmart, barely three months each) was 120k a year as a software engineer. I left that job for 200k within six months and here I happily stay

[–] MXX53@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

Over the last 5 years I have went from 50k to 90k. Same company, but recently got promoted to a new department.

[–] winky88@startrek.website 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My last raise was 10k. But that was after 7+ years of no raises (agency work, slow times). When COVID hit, our business picked up for 2 years straight and I finally convinced them it was stable enough to commit. We're a small company and they'd rather give out bonuses or assistance with personal expenses than commit to an annual salary increase (which I get), but COL has spiked in recent times, so the raise was well past due.

[–] archaeoraptor@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

I'm job hunting right now and turning over a lot of similar questions, about how much I should be asking for.

A few years back I got over 80% by switching sectors - I was underpaid at a public sector job I loved, and switched to a private sector job in the finance industry and a higher COL area. Similar to you, they offered more than I asked for because corporate had specific pay brackets for that position.

I think your pay depends a lot on the specific area/tech stack you're working in and who you're working for. Some tech stacks just pay more on average than others, bigger corporations can usually pay more than smaller companies, and private sector will always pay more than public sector (but usually with worse benefits). You can check Glassdoor or similar sites to see what people with a similar title make at the company you're applying to, but that's only helpful at really big companies where there are enough employees reporting to give a good average.

[–] Taako_Tuesday@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago

I'm fresh out of grad school, and the shift from 22k to 60k has been life changing

load more comments
view more: next ›