How does your salary compare to others? Is that job offer fair? Does a candidate have reasonable pay expectations? Take this survey so we can all answer these questions!
How does your salary compare to others? Is that job offer fair? Does a candidate have reasonable pay expectations? Take this survey so we can all answer these questions!
I think it’d be also useful to have asked about bonuses and other compensation over and above the base salary. For example, when I was at Apple, over 30% of my total comp was in Apple stock, which, being a public company, was pretty liquid and I pretty much equated to cash when I was comparing offers. I also got a 20% signing bonus and another 10% bonus almost a year later. Put that all together and the base comp woefully understates how much I got to put in the bank.
Agreed. A lot of software engineering jobs have:
Even 401k matching can be worth mentioning.
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It’s a restricted stock unit, and they exist in Europe.
The exact details can vary but basically they say we’re setting aside $x worth of shares in the company and over the course of 4 years we’ll give you those shares (which may be worth more or less by then).
Agreed! I had a really hard time finding a good phrasing for the questions because I wanted people to consider both monetary and non-monetary benefits. I had these two questions:
I asked for feedback on my questions from several people and anyone who addressed these questions noted that they were not good ones. They put too much work on the survey taker, and there’s already a good number of questions I’m asking. The alternative I could think of was to break out each of these into a bunch of questions like “What is the value of stocks you’re given?”, “How much does your health insurance cost based on this calculator”, “How much PTO do you get * how much it costs the company to employ you per day”, etc. It would have been a ton of extra questions and I didn’t think it was a good fit for this pass at the survey.
In the future I plan to turn this into a more fun/interactive process and at that point I’ll definitely put some work into making this a part of the survey. To do that, I needed some seed data and I made the call that excluding non-salary benefits was right for this version.
Thanks for the feedback! I really appreciate it.
Submitted. Very curious on the results of this so keep us posted!
I tried to submit from an incognito window, but that does not work. Is there any way this form can work w/o being logged in?
Sorry, not at this point. I wanted to reduce duplicate answers and spam responses because with all of the free form responses there’s already a good amount of cleanup I need to do on this.
You can log in with a personal google account to answer, or you can message me the answers if you’d like and I’ll add them manually.
I’d be interested in knowing if responses in Pittsburgh align with the compensation survey that Code & Supply conducted earlier this year.
Requires a google account login, sure I can fake one up.
Asks for my employer… No thanks.
Employer name (and almost all other questions) are optional
Yup, sorry it does require a google account for now. Thanks for faking one. It’s the easiest way to reduce some “noise” responses and using Google Forms was a good step 1 to get a baseline of data I can use to build out a more interesting set of visualizations and questions.
From the blog post:
Who is “we?” Who, other than yourself, will have access to individual answers?
Also, it would be nice if you provided contact info other than Twitter; you are excluding many people by requiring correspondents to sign up for a proprietary commercial service just to ask a question.
It’s the company “we”. No one but me has access.
2 proprietary commercial services at this point. If you have questions you’re welcome to message me. I’ll also add further contact options to https://calebthompson.io/salary-survey which now has the “blog post” of why I’m doing this.
Interested in freelancers? And if yes, how optimistic should we be? Average workload for me would be working 75%-ish of the weeks in a year, but that varies drastically.
If you haven’t looked yet, there is a section for freelancers.
Yes, definitely.
Interesting, I’d not considered that. I’d say if you have historical data (i.e., last year’s total income) you could provide that. Otherwise best guess of 75% * your rate would be good. Make sure to mark that you’re a freelancer so that I can factor in that you don’t get some employer-provided benefits.
We would love to see the results of this!
Submitted.
Submitted - I was quite surprised to see the result when I converted my GBP contractor rate to an annual “salary” in USD.
As an aside, is it just me or does @calebthompson bear a passing resemblance to Ross Ulbricht? :)
Huh I’ve never heard that but I suppose I kind of do.
Surprised in a good or a bad way?
I’m always surprised by how low GBP job offers seem to be (around £40k/yr., even in London, for supposedly senior positions).
In a good way, I suppose, although if I think about it the figure is a straight GBP -> USD conversion of my annual contracting income.
Yes, GBP offers can vary a lot - as you say. I’ve seen positions with very similar descriptions and seniority vary from around £65k-£95k (all in London).