In keeping with our new format: Monday will be days that we take the time to answer specific people’s questions about careers in the Valley.
1. Do you know what’s the expected salary for a person with 10 years of SW experience? Companies want to negotiate with me from what I currently make.
qubelife.com - Short question, difficult answer. Salaries are an EXTREMELY personal and touchy subject. The easiest thing to start with is to use salary.com as a benchmark. Please note the use of the word benchmark here. Every company and person has their own limits, for the most part this site is accurate for the one sigma area, with the correct job description. Be warned industries such as “software” are very broad. This can be anything from embedded firmware writing (embedded C), driver writing (C or C++), OS porting, application writing (Java or C++) to anything in between. Depending on the industry it may also include proficiency with other technologies like graphics or networking. There may be supply and demand problems in some sectors of the industry while there are an excess of workers in another.
There are few things to keep in mind here: the years of experience as well as the next steps to be taken in your career. If you’re happy with what you’re doing (happy being a relative term), then you should expect people to be negotiating from your current salary. If the job has an increased amount of responsibility (manging people or a technology direction), you should expect a healthy increase in pay.
We have seen exceptions to this. During the boom here in the Valley, you could walk through a door with “engineering” on your resume and get an automatic 15% bump. Those days come and go (but man… they are fun when they’re happening.)
Here’s how you need to think of salary, the more responsibility you have and the more direct impact on your company’s business, the higher you should get paid. Most people get caught up in the “I do more than he/she does” argument for salary. When the reality is: are you the one who says “I was just doing as I was told” or are you willing to take the bullet when a mistake creates problems? Salary is typically rewarded to those who need to make difficult decisions and stand by them.
2. Would you take a paycut for an interesting job?
qubelife.com - Another tough question. The general thinking is to NEVER take a paycut. However, the factors that weigh in here are: career growth (upside), personal happiness and how much is the paycut.
If you are making a job change in the same relative field, it is not recommended to take a pay cut. You can make up for the paycut in the short term with sign-on bonuses or in the longer term with additional vacation or PTO.
Many people make serious changes to their careers, in which case a drop in pay may be unavoidable as some of your work experience is no longer applicable. If you take less responsibility, then you may also have a drop in pay.
There are an increasing number of schools of thought that are putting happiness before pay (it seems to work for a lot of Europe). This is also called “work/life balance” or several other soft sounding terms. You need to know what makes you happy. I’ve known people who have quit jobs that paid them double digit percentages more than the “comfortable job” they return to.
In terms of being about money: First balance, living within your needs vs. your wants. if you can live within the means of what your job can provide, then there is less need. If you are having problems living within the means of your job, you may have other issues. Then, if you want the big house and fast car, you need to be aggressive in your career growth.
As you mature, some people place more emphasis on spending time with family or having specific conveniences around that are very difficult to put a financial value on. Also, for some, the people you work with and what you are doing may hold more attraction than negotiating additional salary.
This position is from this emailer’s (10 years of experience). If you’re coming out of school, the general rule would be to NEVER take a pay cut until you know what you like to do.
