Ask HN: Salary Increases Over Time

Experience to date has been that without promotion, pay-rises within a company have always trailed inflation.<p>So either you get promoted, and at that point you've negotiated a substantial raise (to offset the real decline in earnings and to protect your actual earnings in the years after the payrise)...<p>Or...<p>You go get a job elsewhere.<p>It's a sad fact that the majority of real pay rises that I've ever seen, and that others I've spoken to have seen, have all come as a result of changing employer.<p>This is a UK perspective btw.

Varies wildly from company to company. Some will keep an eye on the market, and make sure they are paying you market rate. If you're great, they'll make sure you're paid more than market so you don't have any reason to even talk.<p>However, many companies will only open their checkbooks when you're hired, or when you have an offer they need to counter. These are the companies that suck to work for because everyone is talking and interviewing to get their next raise. How can you trust your employees?

My policy is that every year I aim for a substantial pay rise. There is no set percentage that I aim for, I basically just come up with a number that I want, and start negotiating.<p>The day that the company claims there is no more room in the budget, and I can't see any realistic chance of progression, is the day I start looking for a new job.<p>Generally speaking, the easiest way to secure a decent pay-rise is to change companies. However, most companies have some kind of appraisal system in place - don't be afraid to ask for a pay-rise. Most companies expect it, and are prepared to negotiate somewhat.<p>In the past year, I increased my salary by 50%. Know what you're worth, work out the average for your position and skillset, and demand it.<p>Working for a lower salary than the industry standard is not only bad for you, it's bad for the industry as a whole.

This will largely depend on the company - its size, its domain, and it will also depend on one's position within the company.<p>For example, the same senior C/C++/Java dev can have recurrent annual 10% raises in a larger enterprise or government outlet. He may also get irregular 20-30% performance based raises that sometimes double as retainers. While more likely to happen in a small companies, I saw it happen in larger (500+) companies too. Alternatively, he may get a year-end or a project-end bonus. finally, he can also get no increase, which is the kind of bonus favoured by the game development sweatshops.<p>No wonder there's no unified stats on this. How can there be.

In order to credibly get a raise and get paid what you're worth, you need a BATNA - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiated_agreement" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiate...</a><p>Otherwise your employer has no reason to give you a raise. If they don't think you're a risk of taking another job why would they voluntarily give you a large raise and cut into their margins?

From what I've seen with software engineering positions, you can expect roughly a 10-25% year over year salary increase. I also can't stress enough how much negotiating a higher starting salary can have an impact over your long term prospects. It's very important to know what you're worth on the market so that you can make sure that you're compensated fairly for the amount of experience AND potential that you have. Recruiting engineers usually costs about 10-20k, so companies more likely than not will give you at least a 10% increase to keep you from leaving, and more based on how much you were able to deliver and how well you can negotiate.

I'll give you some real world numbers:<p>* 2006 entered the job market as a new CS grad in Boston area. 39k salary.<p>* 2007 was given a 7% raise<p>* 2008 I asked for and got a raise to 50k (roughly 19% increase)<p>* 2009 I quit and travelled<p>* 2010 Moved to DC and found a job at 65k (roughly 30% increase)<p>* 2011 I asked for and got a raise to 85k (roughly 30% increase)<p>* 2012-first half I switched jobs in DC to 100k (roughly 17% increase)<p>* 2012-second half I left that job to travel and start my own thing<p>* 2013 Hopefully I won't be talking about salaries.<p>Two things:<p>* I definitely dug a hole for myself a few times, but I can say every job was a great place to work and I was surrounded by people I learned from every day.<p>* I never negotiated. Anytime I asked for a raise I was honest with them and I told them up front I wasn't negotiating. I gave them a number and told them that's what it'd take to make me happy. Both times they came back with a counter offer and both times I repeated I wasn't negotiating and thanked them for taking the time to see what they could do. In both cases I ended up getting what I asked for.

I've never worked at a company that had raises that kept up with the market. I've been a software developer since 1985.

It's my experience that getting a pay rise in the same job is rather difficult in small/medium sized companies. The only way I have so far accomplished it is to move. Opinions tend to be quite viscous, it takes a lot of energy applied over a long period of time to change a view point. First impressions count. Just like your parents will tend to always see you as a child, your boss will tend to see you as the person you were when you joined. The dynamics of this situation are so stable over time that it can push common sense to breaking point. I was recently underpaid by £10,000 according to the market rate, yet could not negotiate even an inflation matching rise in pay. Like many things this is a battle between competing forces, your desire for enough money to make your life comfortable, the companies drive for more profit, a person's desire to avoid having to think, a person's drive for power and respect, etc. If you find yourself playing a game you cannot win, change the game and move on.

I'm in a fun (and unique) situation. I work in and am paid from the UK, but am on a US Salary. I get a performance based raise on my US salary, between something like 2.5% and 5%. The fun part is that at the beginning of the year, they also set the exchange rate! It lasts for a whole year, so it can have good or bad consequences. The gods favored me last year, but who knows what the beancounters will come up this year. I could get a 5% raise but a -7% hit on the exchange. Or I could get a 3% raise and a +6.5% boost on the exchange. Oh the gloriousness of being an expat!

The thing that Ive found is that once you get into the upper-tier range (I define this as 125-150k and on average seems to include people with 5 to 10 years experience) it gets harder than before.<p>My first 5 years on average I had great raises - 15-20% on average (all mostly from job changes). Now it seems a little bit harder - I most likely can go out and convince someone to pay me 5 or 10k more but I feel my head starting to skim that glass ceiling. There are things I could do to change - I could go find a job doing financial transactions or blindly go work for the highest bidder with no care work conditions and other things, etc.<p>The point being is that developer salaries in the first part of the career can go up relatively fast but in my opinion top out relatively quickly (not such a bad thing necessarily). I think from there you need to go out on your own if you want to really make more.

The best advice I can give is - try to estimate how much you are worth to a company. It can be fairly complicated, but understanding what you bring to the table can not only give you peace of mind but can also increase your salary.<p>It's your career. Own it. Let your employer know you own it. Any good employer will support you.

IMHO the big breaks (40+%) happen at major transition points: Promotion, post-grad-degree &#38; new job. Everything should be aimed at those big 3 for long term compensation increases.<p>It's very hard to generalize on specifics. If you're freelancing, contracting or consulting, it's largely a function of how much your billing rate increases. If you're in software it's more a function of how the firm is doing, and how much credit you get for it. (If it's a weak link to how you get the credit, it's hard to point to)<p>One other note - there tend to be caps at levels within firms, so you can catch up if you're underpaid, but it's hard to break above without one of the big discontinuous jumps I mentioned above.<p>ok - one last note... You get paid best if you succeed in "line" jobs where you are contributing directly to money coming in, rather than "staff" jobs. This means that good Sales people always do well, and they'll get better comped than someone purchasing advertising from outside vendors. Likewise, a developer on a core product with get paid better than someone with the same degree and experience working in internal IT.<p>Salary reporting sites frequently get their data from H1-B applications, so the #s are reliable, but you have to be careful about timing. Someone working in banking technology in 2007 will get paid much more than the same job today.

I don't really like switching jobs often, and I'm very happy with my current position in the Boston area but here are my hard numbers: Generalist Programmer out of College, fell into C# as first position.<p>Age 25: Paid Internship at 45k/year<p>4 Months Later: Brought on at 55k/year<p>6 Months Later: Asked for raise, bumped up to 60k/year<p>6 Months Later: New position, (Owner of 5 employee company was dying of cancer), bumped up to 70k/year + 3% Bonus/extra week vacation<p>1 Year Later: Merit based raise, bumped to 73k/year (asked for promotion and mentioned possible departure)<p>3 Months Later: Promotion, bumped to 78k/year (4% bonus on new salary)<p>This isn't the norm, I started at a much lower starting rate than I should have because even though I was qualified, I didn't have any personal projects to show off my skills and just needed to get my foot in the door.<p>In the end my point is that Salary increases should not (and generally aren't) based on a % of your current salary, but on what you've shown your true worth to be. Once you hit that true worth, it's adjusted for inflation and commitment.

One of the best things you can do is ask your colleagues and your peers about their salary. That's the best way you can find out whether your pay is in line with "the industry".<p>Some companies have specific rules against disclosing your salary - try not to work for those people :-)<p>It may also be worth asking for an equal pay audit[0] - are you being discriminated against because of your sex, race, etc?<p>Finally, don't just look at salary. Look at the total package - pension provision, holidays, bonus schemes, company car, discount schemes etc.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance//tools-equal-pay/equal-pay-audit-toolkit/carrying-out-an-equal-pay-audit/" rel="nofollow">http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance//tool...</a>

As many others have said, the best way to get a pay rise is to get a new job. This becomes especially true if you work for BigCorp (or at least, big enough to have internal policies on pay rises).<p>I used to work with an embedded engineer who got a pay rise of 40% by quitting and getting another (very similar) job. Her manager knew that he needed to pay her a lot more but global company policy tied his hands and limited what pay rises he could hand out. I think he watched this happen over and over and over again.

You asked for numbers. I probably shouldn't do this under my real name but... who gives a fuck.<p>US, 29 years old, 6.5 years in the industry. Salary growth has been about 12-14% per year, and I've made a lot of career mistakes, hence fairly average results. I'd probably have done 18-20% if I had (a) not made those mistakes, while (b) switching employers strategically. Most of the growth, as others have noted, occurs when you switch.<p>Obviously you can't continue getting 20% improvements every year for 40 years, but if you work hard, you should be able to get 10-15% per year for a while, and then you get to a point where it's easier and more fruitful to push for more time and autonomy than salary increases.<p>What are called "performance" bonuses actually have a lot to do with macroeconomic conditions. One year, at one job, I got a 60% bonus. I was good, but nowhere near the strongest on the team. Equity allotments have a lot to do with what the board will allow. One of the reasons Facebook has been able to get so many good engineers is that the board doesn't set caps on engineer stock allotments, which is the case for many startups. Consequently, Facebook was free to offer 6- and 7-figure options packages (at valuation; <i>not</i> packages that eventually became worth that much) to engineers and get some really credible people, while many startups can't.<p>When you get into the game has an effect on what you'll make and what your trajectory will be. If I'd entered the market in 2002, I'd have entered in a time when $50k was a good salary for an entry-level software engineer. (No, I'm not kidding.) In 2006, when I did enter, it was in the $80k range. At peak in early 2012, it was about $105k.<p>Getting an increase usually involves changing companies unless you're in the top 10% for political success and can have a real career there and keep getting promotions. Why is it this way? Well, there are two things to keep in mind. The first is that salaries are low because the company is taking a risk. A good software engineer is worth $500k easily, but the salary is going to be lower because there's a risk that any specific person is not going to be any good. So what happens after someone has a chance to prove him- or herself? Well, that's the second problem. Now you've worked for cheap for a year, and if you ask for a raise, you're asking your boss to pay more for the same work. If you ask for a promotion or better work, then you're a demanding subordinate and that hurts you as well.<p>Most companies have a "real player" track that involves a promotion (and a ~20% raise, with more potential for bonuses) every 2 years, and an "everyone else" track where a promotion might happen every 6-8. If you end up on the latter track, you need to change jobs and build your own real-player track. I think the optimal leaving point (if you're on the loser track) is around 2 years of employment, because at 2 years you are likely to get a real promotion in your next job (you have to create the impression, though, that you're about to get promoted where you are, even if it's not true) whereas bolting after 6 months will just get you a lateral move and too much of that is damaging.<p>Salary reporting sites tend to be accurate regarding base salaries, but data on performance-based bonuses and equity grants seem to be dodgy. There's also a hell of a lot of false signaling that goes on there, especially in finance where employers ask about bonus history and everyone claims to have had top bonus.

I've been doing a broad job search for the last month, and my general impression is that the numbers are too low on those sites (in NYC, with 7-8 years of experience). It basically meant that I was in for a pleasant surprise!<p>I don't actually know what normal raises look like since I was in a startup and the raises tended to be huge followed by nothing for a while.

First post - yeah!<p>Federal contractor in Washington DC.<p>Average increase in salary changing company: 17% (Low 2.5% increase, High 42% increase)<p>Average increase in salary through raise: 3.2% (Low 2% increase, High 4% increase)<p>I've generally found that salary reporting sites are inaccurate as the salaries listed are double what the reality is.

When I was a Sys Admin in USA, your salary never increased unless you left the company and took a job elsewhere. Those were your raises, and it's why SA turnover is so high and how even companies just treat them as a dime a dozen now a days.

In India, salary hike when jumping the job is about 30% to 50% during first 5 years of experience.<p>Within the company, the high will be about 8% to 20%. There are always exceptions.