Ask HN: How can I calculate my market value?

degree is required just as a filter for the HR, honestly this seems like a too little experience to be an architect, even in central or western europe, your salary should be above 100k€ for this position, even higher if you are in a smaller company, and even higher if you are the only architect.

your worth is how much they are willing to pay you to stay, which is directly correlated with how much cheaper they can get someone that does the same from the market + onboarding costs. For architects this plays a bigger role, since you need way more context to operate than someone just managing infra, so the onboarding costs are way higher.

Even if you are living in Italy, which has a very crappy salary, you should be earning more for this position. But what would raise as a red flag for you in a hiring process would be the experience VS position.

Easily you can get more salary if you step down to a Cloud Engineer/Systems Engineer/DevOps (I know, is a culture, but positions are labeled like this) or something similar.

Also try to work for banks, the fact that they trust you is a +50% that you can ask above the market average, handling systems that control few billions requires people that you trust, and at this scale 10k, 100k, or 250k, doens't make that much difference, but a small fckup may cost 100mi to the company. Closer to the money you are, more you get from it.

If you are willing to work remotely you can do, at least, twice as that.

German market pays best in Europe but you need to speak the language. The culture is also very specific.

If you don't have family and don't mind working in other timezones, then US will have the best offer for you.

My algorithm: do many applications. Aim high, low and in between. Ask for a high salary and lower little by little.

The only true measure of your market value is what people are willing to pay you.

32k seems a bit low for central Europe but it's difficult to say without a more precise location.

There are easier (and less accurate) ways to assess your value.

1: Next time you hear from a recruiter, ask them what a rough range is for the role. If they won't tell you, try to gauge their reaction to your salary expectations. Say, when they ask, if you tell them you expect 50k and they are still willing to proceed then you can be sure that you can get a lot more than 32k.

2: Look out for salary surveys from your country (here's one from Ireland that's pretty good: https://www.morganmckinley.com/ie/ireland-salary-guide-calcu...).

3: This is probably the least accurate; look at salaries at companies that are transparent about compensation, like Buffer: https://buffer.com/salaries.

> German market pays best in Europe but you need to speak the language. The culture is also very specific.

Genuine question: do you mean to say the culture is very specific or just not American?

I'm curious to know if it is more specific than, let's say, French or Spanish.