As a career-long deaf white male SDET / QA Automation Engineer:
- 2013: $70000 + 3% bonus, freshly graduated with BS in CompSci, worked at big corporation in east coast
- 2014: $72000 + 3% bonus (something like 2-3% raise - got max bonus+raise due to performance), same company as above
- 2015: $74000 + 3% bonus (something like 2-3% raise - got max bonus+raise due to performance), same company as above
- 2016: $77000 + 3% bonus (something like 2-3% raise - got max bonus+raise due to performance), same company as above
- 2017: $80000 + 3% bonus (something like 2-3% raise - got max bonus+raise due to performance), same company as above
- 2017: $87000 + 0% bonus, moved to the midwest and worked at a startup, recruiter told me I'd get a bonus but turns out it's only for higher-ups or something (wasn't happy about this but still here)
- 2018: $90000 + 0% bonus (something like 3% raise), same company as above
Overall I don't know whether I should be happy with this. It's good pay and it's a medium COL in both places where I lived on east coast and in the midwest and I keep my expenses low, but I frequently read huge salaries on HackerNews, CSCareerQuestions and such. I am very effective in my QA manual and automation test duties and catch nearly everything no matter how obscure, so a lot of my colleagues value me. However, the frequent low raises and low salary jumps tell me maybe I should just stop QA altogether and do development instead which would be an easy transition because I mostly work in development side for my QA test suites.
In summary, 5 years of my career has netted me a total raise of 28.5% from $70k to $90k with no stock options or bonus or anything. Am I doing it wrong? I've also never directly asked for a raise - am I supposed to do this? I asked a few colleagues and they said they never asked for a raise and were just given what they're given. I do not know my colleague's salaries past what's posted on Glassdoor.