31–40 of 230 posts
This is how things are the world over. I once worked for a company which was happy to support a grad student in the US, but would not pay me a similar RA/tuition salary here. This, even if I had better results to show in a shorter period. Equity is alien, and generally connections/networking commands more salary than skills/knowledge. Really sad TBH.
I live in Central America, but work for a Seattle based startup as a remote contractor and make $32K.
Whenever I read about "common" salaries for programmers in the US an internal conflict unleashes on me.
On one side what I make is on the middle-high range when compared to the local market, but it seems it is low when compared to US salaries.
I often wonder if I'm fooling myself and the guys with those salaries in the US are actually more skilled than me and there is no point on comparing.
For the record I have a bachelor degree on computer science (from a local university), was Cisco CCNA certified (expired already) and consider myself to be a fairly competent full stack programmer, in the sense that I can build a web application from zero and handle everything from setting up the server and designing the DB to developing the user interface (html, css) and programming the back-end (in PHP)
I have recently reached the same conclusion that the person on the article, and I'm planning to launch a SaaS side project of my own and let the market decide the real value of my work...
Taking advice from the article to share about salary: I have 2.5 years of software development experience but no formal education. I am paid 65k/yr but as a remote contractor, so I pay my own taxes and healthcare, which effectively makes my salary about 57k/yr. I'm considering looking for a new position. What is a reasonable salary to ask for? Edit: I live in California and prefer to continue working remotely
As a hiring manager, I've interviewed people who have 5 great years of experience who I'm very comfortable hiring into those senior roles. And I've also interviewed people who have 15 years on paper but when you dig into it, it's the same one year of experience 15 times over. They're an easy pass from a hiring standpoint. Not everyone looks at candidates the way that I do, but it's still extremely common for some people to move up much faster than others. Anything you can do to be one of the group that moves up quickly will make you more money in the long run.
Things you can be looking for right now instead of money:
- Try to find a team where you're the weakest member. It may be scary, but you learn from working with talented engineers and if you're the strongest member of the team, you'll stagnate.
- If you've got more than 18 months in a position and you feel you're not learning something important, jump to a new position. Diversity of experience is usually better than a single, longer experience even if it's good experience.
- As much as it gets trashed around here, chase the latest buzzword technologies. The more technologies you can prove you know, the more you can prove your ability to learn and the more money you're likely to get offered.
- A chance to take on responsibility beyond your years. If someone is willing to offer you a senior title with senior responsibilities but only pay you a junior salary, that's worth something. The next time you jump, you'll be able to jump into a senior-paid role.
The advice changes once you get through your rapid advancement years, but for someone just starting out, I think the above is pretty solid. Focus on growing yourself...the money will follow.
I mean, it's pretty simple, but it took a long time to internalize: If you don't have anyone else making you an offer, then you're worth that amount. In this case, you were worth $42k and $56k respectively. If you'd shopped around, you'd have been worth more. But you didn't, so you weren't. That's not a bad thing, either. Security is nice, and interviews are a pain. But it really is that simple. If you don't like you…
> "that's what you're worth" Your argument is sound, but this is really unfortunate phrasing. It's actually what your work is worth. Not what you as a person is worth, and it's important to keep those things separate, both for sanity and rigor.
No one cares if your apartment is clean which is why no one pays you to clean your apartment.
I mean, it's pretty simple, but it took a long time to internalize: If you don't have anyone else making you an offer, then you're worth that amount. In this case, you were worth $42k and $56k respectively. If you'd shopped around, you'd have been worth more. But you didn't, so you weren't. That's not a bad thing, either. Security is nice, and interviews are a pain. But it really is that simple. If you don't like you…
>If you'd shopped around, you'd have been worth more. But you didn't, so you weren't. Isn't that circular logic? By that logic, nothing can ever be undervalued, because its fair value is defined by how much it's sold for. If you want to go all supply-and-demand, an employee's value is still not what they request, it's what it would cost to replace them, on average
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An increase in the number of people attracted to programming jobs does not necessarily move the supply curve of people who are good at programming.
I have a friend who suggests the opposite of the grandparent's assertion. Since every new line of code represents technical debt that must be serviced, each new programmer generates a maintenance burden sufficient to occupy the time of 2 more programmers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a friend who suggests the opposite of the grandparent's assertion. Since every new line of code represents technical debt that must be serviced, each new programmer generates a maintenance burden sufficient to occupy the time of 2 more programmers.
This assumes companies value servicing tech debt.
The normal response I see to this is for companies to hire new talent to come in and write a parallel v2.0 while the old talent nurses v1.0. v2.0 takes 6-12 months to develop, and then it works OK for a while, but since management's refusal to prioritize technical quality is really the crux of the issue, v2.0 eventually grinds to a halt as well, and the cycle repeats for a v3.0.
So they're still forced to hire to someone to help them resolve the friction caused by technical debt, and this method comes at a much greater cost than hiring someone competent and giving them the necessary resources/allowances (which, yes, includes an adequate number of programmers) in the first place. That allows the same codebase to remain maintainable (or even just salvageable) and be used long-term, without really having to rewrite the thing and throw all of the knowledge surrounding corner cases, etc., out the window for v+1.
And meanwhile I'm dreaming about making more than 500 euro/month working as a ASP.NET/C# dev
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "that's what you're worth" Your argument is sound, but this is really unfortunate phrasing. It's actually what your work is worth. Not what you as a person is worth, and it's important to keep those things separate, both for sanity and rigor.
Your value to society is the value of your work which in everyone else's context is your value. No one cares if your apartment is clean which is why no one pays you to clean your apartment.