Programming

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

200% increase once I moved to the U. S from Sweden. I'm so happy to finally leave Europe

Jumping jobs is a great way to increase your salary, but be aware that having a bunch of short stints is a major red flag in the hiring process. You may ace an interview, but who wants to hire somebody and train them with their products and db schemas, just to have them leave in a year.