Why Other Tech Talent Gets Paid More Than You

Published in

The Startup

5 min readSep 16, 2015

Can you imagine talking to a colleague who has the same title, 3 years less experience, and has a higher salary than you? I’m thinking your day will be immediately ruined.

The fact of the matter is, this is reality for many people. The better programmer or designer doesn’t always have a higher the salary. So, how can you make sure that you’re getting paid what you’re worth?

Here are 7 ways that you can improve your salary.

1) Take advantage of the candidate market.

Here is a powerful graph from Harvard Business Review

Use this information to leverage your salary negotiation. It’s not something you can show a future employer and go “Hey, look it’s a candidate market! Pay me more!”.

This is more useful for you to know that when you are negotiating pay that you have more wiggle room than you would normally expect. If you really are great at what you do, then you can negotiate a little bit harder to get what you deserve without expecting too much push back.

The demand is currently much higher than the supply.

2) Take advantage of the 500,000 open U.S. Tech Jobs

500,000 unfilled tech jobs is a HUGE number.

Not only is it a candidate market, there are tons of open tech positions available. What this means is that some professionals are taking advantage of market conditions by leaving their jobs and finding new higher paying jobs.

Granted this statistic is for the U.S. market only, I can only imagine similar trends are happening worldwide.

3) It’s proven that you’ll get a higher salary by leaving your current job

Look no further than this in-depth analysis on Forbes. Here are some interesting stats from the article:

Employees who stay in companies longer than two years get paid 50% less.
The average raise an employee can expect in 2014 is 3%.

Below is another powerful graph from the same article. It’s clear that finding a new job is the easiest way to bump your salary.

4) Avoid the question “what is your current salary?” like the plague.

When speaking with a recruiter or hiring manager you will often get the questions “What is your current compensation?”

If you state your current salary and it is much lower than they were expecting, your raise might not be as high as it could be. Now, some recruiters it is in their best interest to get you the highest salary, but you can’t always assume that for everyone involved in the process.

What I have seen work the best is to either pass on answering that question or offer your desired compensation instead.

When it comes to desired recommendation always start at the high end and don’t be modest.

5) Share your work publicly on a regular basis

For programmers, GitHub and other open source platforms have made demonstrating your work easier than ever. Obviously, you can’t share the work you’ve done for your current company, but sharing side projects and passions that you’ve created puts you one step ahead.

The same thing goes for designers and marketers. Hiring managers and recruiters want to see your work publicly. Impressive public work will often sway hiring manager and recruiters to pursue you harder since the world has seen your work and they believe you’re a great fit for the job.

6) Find the best technical recruiter that has vested interest in getting you a higher salary

Yes, great recruiters do exist.

At June, we’ve made it our mission to filter out the great recruiters from the bad ones.

We let tech candidates rate recruiters. This allows other tech candidates to see which recruiters are the best and holds recruiters accountable.

7) Know how much you’re worth, to the penny

There is only one way to know what you’re worth, and that’s to get an offer. There are plenty of sites that will give you ranges of what you should make based on your job title and geographic location, but nothing will be as good as seeing your name on a piece of paper next to your salary. You want to know what YOU’RE worth, not what your position is worth in a particular place.

My rule of thumb is a minimum of 3 interviews per year even if I’m happily employed. If I’m extremely happy, I’ll only interview twice.

If you’re picky about who you interview with and want to make sure it’s time worth spending, June allows you to get paid to speak to recruiters, literally. You set your price, and if the recruiter thinks you’ll be a fit for a job, they will reach out to you and you will be compensated for your time.