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by cleandreams
3615 days ago
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I thought this was an interesting article and then I read the comments. Oh dear, a bunch of white guys kvetching and clutching their...pearls. Your deprivation moves me. Really. Anyway I had a point to make, as a software engineer for 30 years and a woman. (The proportion of women in the field has fallen by half since I started my career.) For my last job I went with a high end recruiting agency and the recruiter got me to raise my salary request by 25K. I ended up getting 10K above her suggestion. It was interesting to see that indeed I was undervaluing myself. In this I find that I was pretty typical of female engineers. I'm glad I took the recruiter's advice. By the way my salary seems to be exactly in line with the salary of men with my experience, from these charts. |
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Both men and women are uncomfortable negotiating up (I've heard that women are much more hesitant about this, but I don't know the research that well and never sat on the hiring side of salary negotiations), and low asks are probably the biggest mistake anyone can make: $10-20k doesn't mean shit to the manager that wants to get you on their team if you negotiate it at hiring time, but if you try to get that bump during annual raise period, that's almost impossible to achieve at any large-ish company (it means either nixing raises for other people on the team or calling in VP-level favors, which most managers don't have the ability to do).
In tech nobody is ever going to tell you to piss off for asking for $10k more than they can offer, they're just going to negotiate you down (if even that - most of the time they'll just say "yes" or split the difference). Now, if you're $50k+ out of line, that could be another matter, but that's why you do some research and don't go crazy with your ask.
The rule for contracting is more brutal, but also a bit simpler: you should always be losing a lot of business because of how high your rate is, somewhere between 25% and 50% is my rule of thumb. If clients are saying "yes" without negotiating or at least complaining, you're definitely charging too little.
Protip: you can look up top salaries at most non-profits online, they have to report them for I think the 15 highest paid employees. Pick a smallish one in your area, look at the engineers there, and you've got an anchor for senior engineering rates. Non profits might not be 100% competitive with for-profit companies, but the better ones have to be somewhat close as far as base salary (they don't offer stock or other perks, usually) if they want good people.