Share your salary progression

I started with similar numbers. It‘ll rise naturally if you‘re good at it, sometimes a change of employer is required.

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Yes you can have either horizontal (expertise in your field ) or vertical (management ladder) career path.
and for sure fields experts can be paid higher than managers

i was thinking what that guy could do as a dev job that is stressful and pays well quickly and i came to the guestimation :highly capable quant dev sitting directly on the trading floor next to a trader employed by front

arturofich yeah i feel you thats why i think we should be sharing here progression and not numbers because thats an impossible reconsiliation game

Also unfortunately for some very good people i also strongly believe in management through knowledge every team that iam managing is doing a job that i have done in the past. which also means iam not objective at all here

I’m talking from experience, and afaik Google is not the only one working that way, afaik at least FB is pretty similar. Becoming a manager is not a promotion.

Also promotion happens after the fact anyway, you get promoted once you already do the job at the next level.

edit: and I’m only talking about the big tech companies (we were discussing comp level in those), I’m aware things are different elsewhere.

Well yes but some people are not up for mentoring and many seniors are not great mentors.

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Hey Nabal if we strip it down to the absolute basic which is you are becoming responsible/accountable for more people than just yourself, that is a promotion in work in life or wherever such event occurs.
so i respectfully disagree with your view

  • 2008: ~54k CHF
  • 2017: ~85k CHF
  • 2018-2020: 100k CHF
  • 2021: 110k CHF

I started working as a technician but in a smallish company, my colleagues have always been bachelors or masters and I’ve always done the same job. For severals years I was paid the bare minimum and since I hadn’t the “proper” education this was a reason to not give me much pay raises. Being skilled at what you do is rarely enough to get noticed.
In 2014 I got fed up by this company I started a bachelor in embedded sw development during the evening. I finished in 2018 when I landed a real engineer job hence the salary “raise”.

In 2021 I just started a new job in a big company, I probably didn’t ask enough. It should be a red sign when you say a number and the HR says that it’s perfectly in line with what she expects :wink: But I guess I’m still learning. At least in this new company I have way more room to grow and I know they do yearly salary increases.

I’m a bad negotiator and have a hard time judging what my salary should be. To be noted that I don’t work close to a big city such as Zurich or Geneva which seem to imply higher salaries.

@arturofich Don’t be too hard on yourself, you can look at my progression to get some hope. Seeing as you’ve been only working for 4 years I guess you are probably young so you have a lot of time in front of you maybe you haven’t even finished your studies yet. What I can tell you is that changing companies usually makes a big difference, even more so if you feel your current company is not the type to give raise easily. Education of course does a difference also which is why I decided to do a bachelor’s degree at 34 years old :stuck_out_tongue: And don’t be afraid to ask too much during an interview, it’s probably one of my flaws .

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That‘s why I switched company a short while ago. With my former employer I saw no potential for growth (technical and financial) and switched but barely make any more if you calculate it down to the hourly rate (with all benefits), but I have more work hours and potential to grow into another role I want to do which brings another financial improvement.

BTW: Salary postings without yearly hours is pretty much incomparable

Sharing in relative terms.
Same company, pharma industry but working in tech. innovation area, regular 40h work week internal.
This is only the base gross salary w/out bonus (which started being paid out with becoming permanent).

image

Seems it’s time for another step up or away. :grin:

From the 1st of June I will work as a trainee lawyer for 3’500 CHF per month, so 45’500 CHF per year (13x salaries) :wink: And I’m in my early 30 :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

What I can learn from all the members who are sharing their salary progression, is that if you want to earn more, you have to become better in your field or change company. I think that once you have a lot of experience and knowledge in a field, the salary will increase and you will also be more “powerfull” to negiotate your salary.

Also a lot of FIRE members seem to work in the IT field where there is a lot of work, news positions and news technologies.

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Good people are hard to find, from my experience of people I‘ve worked with. I once had a chance to have a weeklong course with a guy who used to work with Ken Beck and Martin Fowler. He argued that some software engineers would warrant $1million salary, because they are so good compared to the ones earning 100k. Obviously not happening because of management restrictions and performance is difficult to measure

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The more confident in your skills you are, the more of a sane financial basis you have, the more of a satisfying job you already have, the more leverage to negociate your working conditions you have.

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Google is very different from the rest of the world.

the quote here is: a great software engineer is worth 100x more than a good software engineer.
Salaries can only align on a log-scale though :slight_smile:

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Were you there too in that course?

This might be a more famous quote but I quote something I heard with my own ears :wink:

I didn’t mean to “override” you in any way. :upside_down_face:

My quote is from a book called “Work rules” by Laszlo Bock, previous HR Chief in Google.

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Interesting observation.

But what does this mean that salary follows log scale? Something like salary = log(value)? Does this make sense? Let’s take it word for word. A good software engineer is worth, let’s say, $100’000 per year of his work. So a great one is worth $10’000’000? But he will only earn log(10000000)/log(100000) = 140% of the good one? Take makes zero sense and can’t be true.

You can see this in football, where small differences in skill between top players make for 2x or even 10x salary differences. And at the very top you have the ones of Messi and Ronaldo who earn so much more than anybody else, just because they have a slight edge over the rest. And then people obsess about these salaries “how can a ball kicker earn so much!?!?”.

my response was sarcastic :sweat_smile:

Sub-80k Crew checking in. :+1:t2:

He’s in mid-thirties according to his own post.

Depends on the field you’re working in.

Tell that to someone working retail, waiting tables or cooking meals in restaurant or just cleaning rooms and façades. You’re going to hit a ceiling rather soon in terms of salary, irrespective of how good you are or become at your job, really.

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I think pay is largely dependent on how many lives are affected by your work. If you make the life of 1 person considerably better, that is still going to make less total impact than a tiny improvement for a million of people.

Just got a raised to 70k per year including tips (other 3-4k) after 6 months so don’t worry you’re not alone :slight_smile:.
But I’m still young so happy to have already this numbers

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