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Ask HN: How to overcome salary ceiling?
Let’s say you’re an experienced engineer/team-lead/architect and you’re on a mission to constantly grow professionally.
But there’s always some current market salary bracket for whatever your position is.
And this bracket tends to grow much slower than expertise of most of the senior talents i know.
How do you manage to get salary growth rate same as your skill growth rate to stay motivated?
Is there any scalable solution except faang rat race?
- ahmaman 5y agoFigure out a way to package your expertise in a different way than being an employee. Often the employment model doesn’t reward for going above the acceptable minimum. How you package and sell your expertises to the world can make a signicant difference to your income. Consider freelancing, building own product or making courses. If you have options, go for something that is not measured hourly and tied to your time, there is only so much you can charge per hour.
- aristofun 5y ago> Often the employment model doesn’t reward for going above the acceptable minimum I keep finding more and more evidence to this statement, weirdly enough
- ahmaman 5y agoI wonder why is that. Employers would benefit a great deal from employees doing more than the acceptable minimum. Maybe it is an issue with measuring value provided by each employee?
- aristofun 5y agoI guess it comes from the fundamental bottom-down business approach of minimizing costs of materials. Rarely people could identify and properly estimate the radical difference between developers of the same years of experience.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y agoNot keeping salaries up with the market rate is standard operating procedure for most businesses. They'd rather keep your salary low and deal with turnover than give you the raise you deserve. If the market rate for your position is 50% higher than what you're making now, it doesn't matter. You basically have two options. Ask for the raise or quit for someone who will give it to you. It doesn't have to be FAANG. As anecdata, I was severely underpaid at my previous job (Not FAANG, but still a very well-known Fortune 500 tech company), my direct manager fought for a promotion and raise for me, but they only gave me 7%. I quit a couple months later for a startup and literally doubled my salary, and made it no secret to my former employer that salary was my #1 reason for leaving.
- decafninja 5y agoWhat kind of company are you at? My observation has been that there is a soft ceiling somewhere in the range of 160-200k for senior software engineers at non-tech cost center companies no matter the size. If you're in that kind of company, just breaking into a mid tier or above Silicon Valley style (style, not necessarily literally located in SV) tech company will let you break through the 200k ceiling as a senior. If you're already in that kind of company and have already broken through the 200k ceiling, then yeah...I think the most "reliable" way of going further is FAANGMULA or companies in the same tier.
- aristofun 5y agoAre you speaking about US companies? I was about ~200k usd at my last job. But it looks like the ranges heavily depend on the country, not the "style" of the company (Europe companies being the cheapest).
- decafninja 5y agoYes, speaking only of US companies. My understanding is SWE compensation everywhere outside the US is significantly lower. As is the social prestige associated with the career. Possible exception for UK London financial services.
- giantg2 5y agoMaybe find a different motivation if your comp expectations consistently outpace the market. On a side note, is there any sort of resource to see what a $200k dev does that others don't? Compensation and titles just feels so random.
- aristofun 5y agoFrom my experience they don’t do anything extraordinary. Except that they tend to deliver results 2-10 times faster and produce much cleaner and scalable code. And capable of designing elegant solutions of a more complex problems than their less experienced peers can handle. And they feel/understand the requirements much better and quicker.