Can we talk about salaries? 2016

needhelpguy

I know this has been asked before but times have changed, so it would be good to have another discussion.

For my own part, I'd like to get some feedback - I'm on €30k. This is with 2 years experience, developing mostly with Oracle technologies like PL/SQL and for E-Business suite, and a few others (multinational company). I reckon I'm somewhat underpaid, but would be interested to hear what others think.

One thing I've noticed is the stark differences between pay of similarly qualified/experienced people. We have devs with the same experience and ability sitting next to each other on vastly different pay levels. I'm talking 10k-15k differences, for contractors 100-150/day discrepancies. They don't seem to mind all that much either. I suppose some of that comes down to how you sell yourself aswell.

Do you reckon you are earning what you should be for your role? What should you be earning if not? If you're comfortable mentioning your current salary please do. It would be good to hear what technologies people work with.

lawred2

It's up to everyone to get the best deal for themselves.

If you believe you are; then take some time and create a case for yourself and bring it your line management. What's your value add etc

BrokenArrows

In my opinion poor pay is due to poor negotiating when you got the job initially.

When i started my first development job i didnt negotiate at all. I just took what was offered. At the time i saw the company as doing me a favour by hiring me.

Now i realise that you should approach being hired as you are doing the company a favour. They need YOU, otherwise they wouldnt be hiring for the position in the first place. Its hard but you need to find the value thats great for you but not too expensive for the company. You need to research the company and find out what they are paying people.

I still work for that same company, and after years of hard negotiation im being paid well. Infact i think im being paid too much which makes leaving quite difficult because i might need to take a pay cut if i leave.

John_Mc

BrokenArrows wrote: »

In my opinion poor pay is due to poor negotiating when you got the job initially.

When i started my first development job i didnt negotiate at all. I just took what was offered. At the time i saw the company as doing me a favour by hiring me.

Now i realise that you should approach being hired as you are doing the company a favour. They need YOU, otherwise they wouldnt be hiring for the position in the first place.

This will be true with experienced hires who will immediately start providing a return in productivity for their salary.

For a fresh graduate - no one will hire you with that attitude because you're going to be more of a liability and consumer of resources for the first few months.

As to the OP, I would think you're underpaid given that there's a shortage of experienced developers out there. You will struggle to get any meaningful increase from your current employer because they think in line with inflation. You'd be doing well to get 10% or more.

The only way to really get your true value is to move to another employer and negotiate hard, as BrokenArrows explained.

14ned

needhelpguy wrote: »

For my own part, I'd like to get some feedback - I'm on €30k. This is with 2 years experience, developing mostly with Oracle technologies like PL/SQL and for E-Business suite, and a few others (multinational company). I reckon I'm somewhat underpaid, but would be interested to hear what others think.

Seems a reasonable salary to me for the skillset and experience.

needhelpguy wrote: »

One thing I've noticed is the stark differences between pay of similarly qualified/experienced people. We have devs with the same experience and ability sitting next to each other on vastly different pay levels. I'm talking 10k-15k differences, for contractors 100-150/day discrepancies. They don't seem to mind all that much either. I suppose some of that comes down to how you sell yourself aswell.

Do you reckon you are earning what you should be for your role? What should you be earning if not? If you're comfortable mentioning your current salary please do. It would be good to hear what technologies people work with.

I would mention as all contractors do that they don't pocket the 150/day extra. Most of it goes on the increased taxes contractors pay, insurance, employing an accountant, providing your own equipment, your own pension, your own training and all the other costs involved in running your own company. After all the costs, about a 5-10% premium is left over, which some would say is scant compensation for the substantial extra risk taken on by a temporary worker. But in the end, it's all market priced, so the market pays no more than what brings in the workers.

But to answer your question, I'm in the low six figures range gross. I got here through an awful lot of work and sacrifice by myself and my family and approaching twenty years of industry experience. I'm also what would be called "full stack" by the young uns, so I can take you from hand written and tuned assembler on about four instruction sets all the way through to cloud orchestration on at least two cloud infrastructures and all the layers in between which is highly valuable to teams needing a jack of all trades, master of none. They are, until the Silicon Valley bubble pops again, willing to pay well for people like me.

Some colleagues of mine earn many multiples more than I do, but they're based in the US. There is a glass ceiling to earnings in Europe which is probably fair enough given how steeply taxes rise after a certain income threshold. After a point it doesn't really make much sense to earn more here, better to swap the earnings for leisure time.

Niall

fergalr

needhelpguy wrote: »

For my own part, I'd like to get some feedback - I'm on €30k. This is with 2 years experience, developing mostly with Oracle technologies like PL/SQL and for E-Business suite, and a few others (multinational company). I reckon I'm somewhat underpaid, but would be interested to hear what others think.

These threads are just impossible to comment on, as there is such variation in where people are at, even if they have the same number of years experience on paper. Maybe if we saw your CV, we would be able to make some guess – but there's so much individual variation is very difficult to say if someone posting on boards.ie is under or overpaid.

Case in point:

For a fresh graduate - no one will hire you with that attitude because you're going to be more of a liability and consumer of resources for the first few months.

Like, I totally disagree with this, stated as a rule. I think someone at graduate level (e.g. from a CS degree) should totally be able to be productive within the first few months – they certainly shouldn't be a liability. I know that some people who graduate would be a liability, but I certainly wouldn't aspire to that, or expect to be paid according to that assumption.

Other people do different things with their time in college, and I'm not saying any one path is strictly better - just there is a lot of individual variation.

Further, people often find it tough to assess themselves.

John_Mc

fergalr wrote: »

Like, I totally disagree with this, stated as a rule. I think someone at graduate level (e.g. from a CS degree) should totally be able to be productive within the first few months – they certainly shouldn't be a liability. I know that some people who graduate would be a liability, but I certainly wouldn't aspire to that, or expect to be paid according to that assumption.

Sorry but if I had a graduate coming in for an interview with me, and they had an attitude that it wasn't a case of why I should hire them, but what they should work for our company, then the interview would be over pretty quickly!

Most graduate developers wouldn't have experience with C.I/C.D tools and processes, the methodologies, and their code would have to be reviewed for the first few months to ensure it met the standards. They would require training and mentoring for the first while too, so that's what I meant about productivity.

fergalr

John_Mc wrote: »

Sorry but if I had a graduate coming in for an interview with me, and they had an attitude that it wasn't a case of why I should hire them, but [why] they should work for our company, then the interview would be over pretty quickly!

That is a very unenlightened attitude, in my opinion.


You are basically saying that:
- graduates are not that valuable to you,
- that you hold all the cards (presumably because they are desperate for a job, and your company has one)
- so you don't need to sell them on the opportunity of working with you.
- it's all about them trying to demonstrate why you should hire them.


Frankly, that's a recipe for hiring mediocre candidates for a mediocre organisation.

Good people almost always have options, even if they are recent graduates - certainly in today's tech industry - and will pick up on the fact they aren't valued.


More generally, staffing a role should be a meeting of interests.

The graduate should always be sold on what they will get out of the role - and the company should genuinely have the graduates interests in mind, over and above 'you should be glad to be getting a paycheck'.

No one hits their full potential when they feel they are taking role at a company that considers them expendable and not worth much; a one-sided hiring process is a bad start to such a relationship.


Of course, if that is the company's attitude, I guess it does get expensive to take on a graduate – as they will probably leave as soon as they have some experience!

Edit: I'm not trying to speak personally here, btw - for all I know you work for a very good company, and this is just my opinion on hiring - but I do believe it fairly strongly, and disagree philosophically with the post I was responding to.

John_Mc

Quite a lot of assumptions you're making about my view of the world there :rolleyes:

An interview with any company is about personality just as much, if not more, as it is about technical ability and experience.

If you walk into any interview with a know-it-all arrogant attitude then you're not going to strike any kind of rapport with the interviewer and you won't be called back for any further interviews. That's regardless of whether you're a graduate or not.

A graduate having this kind of attitude merely illustrates that they are ignorant about how complex professional software development can be, and that you never stop learning how to do things better and more efficiently.

fergalr

Don't disagree with any of that.

Perhaps I've took you up wrong - I tried to synopsize the position I was railing against, so if I've gotten you wrong, at least that should be clear.

My main point is that the interview is a two-way street, and should be thought of as such by the employer.

John_Mc

fergalr wrote: »

Don't disagree with any of that.

Perhaps I've took you up wrong - I tried to synopsize the position I was railing against, so if I've gotten you wrong, at least that should be clear.

My main point is that the interview is a two-way street, and should be thought of as such by the employer.

Yeah I agree with what you're saying about it being a 2 way street. Training, working conditions (project management!!) and career progression is equally as important as salary.

Hollister11

In 2 years time I will have my Computer Science degree (hopefully :P)

Ideally I would like to go into web development (front and back end). Would a starting salary of 35K be reasonable to ask for.

Atm the moment the languages i know are HTML, CSS, JavaScrpt, PHP, angular.js, node.js and SASS. I plan to be much more experienced in these iin 2 years.

Neon_Lights

I think there's a case here for job hopping in your 20s or early 30s too many people just stay too long in their roles that they just fall into a rut, and in most big companies salary neogatiations can linger and become drawn out p***ing matches.

I started off on 22k in a graduate role in the depths of the recession, moved up to 26k in the company after a year but felt it was too slow. I managed with a years experience to get a job then on 35k and then after a year and a half moved to my current role on 50k plus a 10% bonus. Will probably look again around my 2 year mark in this to about 70k which isnt too unrealistic. I've always left my company in a better state than when I initially started my role and I've had good references.

I think if a better opportunity is out there you're better off leaving than blackmailing your boss with threats. You grow a lot faster and learn skills in multiple environments and industries.

Journeyman_1

Hollister11 wrote: »

In 2 years time I will have my Computer Science degree (hopefully :P)

Ideally I would like to go into web development (front and back end). Would a starting salary of 35K be reasonable to ask for.

Atm the moment the languages i know are HTML, CSS, JavaScrpt, PHP, angular.js, node.js and SASS. I plan to be much more experienced in these iin 2 years.

35k would be an expected grad salary at the minute I think. You should learn the OO stuff too though.

Hollister11

Journeyman_1 wrote: »

35k would be an expected grad salary at the minute I think. You should learn the OO stuff too though.

I'm decent at Java, but it never used it for web projects only desktop applications.

14ned

Neon_Lights wrote: »

I think there's a case here for job hopping in your 20s or early 30s too many people just stay too long in their roles that they just fall into a rut, and in most big companies salary neogatiations can linger and become drawn out p***ing matches.

The empirical data is very clear that in the US at least, moving job every few years in your 20s and even 30s has a big positive effect on income, assuming that the job market is liquid and where you live offers sufficient choice of role for a competitive market. I haven't seen anything in Ireland to suggest it's different here.

Neon_Lights wrote: »

I started off on 22k in a graduate role in the depths of the recession, moved up to 26k in the company after a year but felt it was too slow. I managed with a years experience to get a job then on 35k and then after a year and a half moved to my current role on 50k plus a 10% bonus. Will probably look again around my 2 year mark in this to about 70k which isnt too unrealistic. I've always left my company in a better state than when I initially started my role and I've had good references.

That's a pretty meteoric rise: 50k after is it just 2.5 years out of graduation? What's your exact skillset? Are you in finance? And are you working in central Dublin or Cork?

Niall

fergalr

14ned wrote: »

That's a pretty meteoric rise: 50k after is it just 2.5 years out of graduation? What's your exact skillset? Are you in finance? And are you working in central Dublin or Cork?

Plenty of recruiter salary survey will say that mid-level IT is 40-60 range; 3 years experience gets you into the mid-level; 2.5 is basically 3; etc

As a aside, the phrase 'meteoric rise' seems wrong somehow - meteors move fast, but they don't rise.

Neon_Lights

14ned wrote: »

The empirical data is very clear that in the US at least, moving job every few years in your 20s and even 30s has a big positive effect on income, assuming that the job market is liquid and where you live offers sufficient choice of role for a competitive market. I haven't seen anything in Ireland to suggest it's different here.



That's a pretty meteoric rise: 50k after is it just 2.5 years out of graduation? What's your exact skillset? Are you in finance? And are you working in central Dublin or Cork?

Niall

I wouldn't say meteoric, i just have a plan and an intolerance for managerial predication where you have to draw blood out of a stone and waste so much time to progress.

BI and Data Analytics focused so would be doing DB and DWH Development and programming in Python, SAS, R, TSQL and Groovy in my current role. I have worked on Oracle and SAP systems in my previous roles, so I have a good spectrum to draw experience on. I've always said to myself be as versatile as possible with toolsets in the early days. End goal is to get into a data science based role where there's a bit more freedom to explore and build your own models and some more insightful data mining.

beauf

Neon_Lights wrote: »

I wouldn't say meteoric, i just have a plan and an intolerance for managerial predication where you have to draw blood out of a stone and waste so much time to progress....

That's a good strategy if you can stick to it. I've never see management change its habits, usually it just repeats the same thing over. I would be guilty of saying too long in places, and its almost never worth it.

14ned

fergalr wrote: »

Plenty of recruiter salary survey will say that mid-level IT is 40-60 range; 3 years experience gets you into the mid-level; 2.5 is basically 3; etc

It's not like recruiters are impartial here. They have a strong incentive to report as high a salary range as possible.

One of the classical ways of statistically deceiving people is to report average salary bands instead of median salary bands. It's a big difference given the lack of ideal Bell curve in salaries earned. I'll trust the CSO figures long before any recruiter's.

Niall

14ned

Neon_Lights wrote: »

I wouldn't say meteoric, i just have a plan and an intolerance for managerial predication where you have to draw blood out of a stone and waste so much time to progress.

It's still good going. Your career to date is atypical in my experience. It's also good to see some energy is returning to the Irish IT sector after so long.

Neon_Lights wrote: »

BI and Data Analytics focused so would be doing DB and DWH Development and programming in Python, SAS, R, TSQL and Groovy in my current role. I have worked on Oracle and SAP systems in my previous roles, so I have a good spectrum to draw experience on. I've always said to myself be as versatile as possible with toolsets in the early days. End goal is to get into a data science based role where there's a bit more freedom to explore and build your own models and some more insightful data mining.

This certainly helps explain your excellent progress. There is a huge shortage and massive demand for this type of role in Ireland. If you're good at it, you'll be promoted rapidly and your pay will rise quickly up until you reach the market pricing for that skillset after which things will suddenly plateau.

Still, getting to the peak market price for a skillset within five years is great going. Makes a huge difference to lifetime earnings.

Niall

fergalr

14ned wrote: »

It's not like recruiters are impartial here. They have a strong incentive to report as high a salary range as possible.

One of the classical ways of statistically deceiving people is to report average salary bands instead of median salary bands. It's a big difference given the lack of ideal Bell curve in salaries earned. I'll trust the CSO figures long before any recruiter's.

Niall

It's not totally clear to me the recruiters are only incentivised to inflate salaries. They do also need employers to come to them looking to hire, and need throughput, which they won't get if two sides of the market have very mismatched expectations.


Median isn't strictly superior to average.

You bet on the average, not the median.

The categories they define mostly remove outliers, so I think I'd actually rather see averages here - but there's tradeoffs to both.

Can you get CSO figures broken out by fine grained skill areas?

fergalr

Didn't understand that post;

14ned wrote: »

f you're good at it, you'll be promoted rapidly and your pay will rise quickly up until you reach the market pricing for that skillset after which things will suddenly plateau.

Still, getting to the peak market price for a skillset within five years is great going.

What's the skillset you are referring to here?

Do you mean that's the peak price now (50k), or the poster will reach peak in a few years ?

Don't really understand the plateau comment - obviously once you reach the peak of something you don't go any higher - do you mean something different? One thing I've noticed is its relatively easy in tech to make rapid salary progress but then gets harder to keep going - vs say, law, consultant medicine, etc is this what youre referring to?

Genuinely interested in understanding.

14ned

fergalr wrote: »

It's not totally clear to me the recruiters are only incentivised to inflate salaries. They do also need employers to come to them looking to hire, and need throughput, which they won't get if two sides of the market have very mismatched expectations.

Both sides have very mismatched expectations

Recruiters want to amp up salaries because their commission is a percentage of the salary employed. For most multinational companies, the recruiter's fees are not important, they are considered a once off cost and don't even come out of the hiring team's budget, they come out of HR. You may have noticed that the same job is spammed/posted by multiple recruiters, this is because the multinational negotiates a discounted bulk advertising/spamming package with the recruiter, so basically you must operate at razor thin margins for the advertising part, and the real money only comes in with the signing bonus.

So recruiters always talk up salaries exactly the same way estate agents always promise they'll sell your house for more than they actually will. It brings in more candidates, extracts more fees from multinationals, and is generally a win-win for the recruiter. This is also why most multinationals offer substantial recruitment bonuses to employees who bring in a new employee, often 10-15% of an annual salary. They'd be spending similar on the recruiters.

fergalr wrote: »

Median isn't strictly superior to average.

You bet on the average, not the median.

Economics (I have an Economics degree) would say that wages should always be compared using medians. It matches better people's intuition because there will always be a few extremely wealthy people biasing the average. Same goes for salaries, a small minority earn very well and make the average higher than it is perceived by the bottom 95%.

Anyway, strictly speaking both median and average are a poor measure of IT salaries. Last time I looked at the US data there were two Bell curve peaks in the distribution, so basically most people cluster around a lower value or a higher value. Averages and medians are a bad summary of such a distribution. I've no idea if a similar structure is in Irish IT salaries, but I'm going to bet probably yes.

fergalr wrote: »

Can you get CSO figures broken out by fine grained skill areas?

Not that I'm aware of. They'll use the NACE codes, same as any national statistics agency.

Niall

14ned

fergalr wrote: »

What's the skillset you are referring to here?

He said it himself:

"BI and Data Analytics focused so would be doing DB and DWH Development and programming in Python, SAS, R, TSQL and Groovy in my current role."

fergalr wrote: »

Do you mean that's the peak price now (50k), or the poster will reach peak in a few years ?

Someone good at that skillset could easily reach 70k. Good people are hard to find, and contribute significant and easily measurable value add.

fergalr wrote: »

Don't really understand the plateau comment - obviously once you reach the peak of something you don't go any higher - do you mean something different? One thing I've noticed is its relatively easy in tech to make rapid salary progress but then gets harder to keep going - vs say, law, consultant medicine, etc is this what youre referring to?

Genuinely interested in understanding.

Sorry if I was unclear. It is 2am after all, and I am tired.

It's more that the further you rise, the less liquid jobs in your skillset become, and the riskier it is to change job because the pool of available jobs shrinks so much. Early in your career there is a well defined progression, later in your career it gets much more ad hoc. Networks of contacts start to become much more important to changing job, what you really want is someone influential in an org to think you're great and to persuade their org to hire you at any cost. But that's not easy to pull off, especially once you get children and don't have the time and flexibility to take risk or keep networks of contacts alive. All these things lead to a plateau, often below what you're worth, but it becomes too risky to poke that bear one more time.

Niall

fergalr

14ned wrote: »

So recruiters always talk up salaries exactly the same way estate agents always promise they'll sell your house for more than they actually will.

But if the vendor doesn't accept the offer, the EA doesnt get paid - so they have a competing incentive to manage expectations. The extra N% they take off of the, say, 10% increase in price, doesn't pay for the reduced deal speed.

I'm just saying you are oversimplifying a bit - they have an incentive to make the market clear and move to encourage them to be honest.

14ned wrote: »

Economics (I have an Economics degree) would say that wages should always be compared using medians. It matches better people's intuition because there will always be a few extremely wealthy people biasing the average. Same goes for salaries, a small minority earn very well and make the average higher than it is perceived by the bottom 95%.

The more fine-grained the bucketing, the less that matters, which was my point; and sometimes you do want to know the average, otherwise no one would have a crack at startups, or trying to make partner in a law firm, etc.

14ned wrote: »

Anyway, strictly speaking both median and average are a poor measure of IT salaries. Last time I looked at the US data there were two Bell curve peaks in the distribution, so basically most people cluster around a lower value or a higher value.

Big geo dispersions, also, both IT and software getting lumped in together.

Averages and medians are a bad summary of such a distribution. I've no idea if a similar structure is in Irish IT salaries, but I'm going to bet probably yes.

Not in the "3-5 year J2EE" bucket in a recruiters survey, there won't be - not any way qualitatively similar to the dispersion in "the US IT market".

Not that I'm aware of. They'll use the NACE codes, same as any national statistics agency.

I'd rather just see the recruiters' salary surveys, then.