
How to 2X Your Salary as a Software Engineer - somid3
http://youexec.com/articles/how-to-2x-your-salary-as-a-software-engineer
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codingdave
Step 1 - Take a low paying job as your first software job.

Step 2 - Switch jobs for pay increases every couple of years.

Step 3 - When you get to market rate for senior devs, say, "Look! I doubled my
salary!"

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danjoc
Yeah. Correlation something something causation.

"People who switch jobs are making more money!"

"People who are offered more money will switch jobs."

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tiggybear
What is the difference between value and leverage on a microeconomic level?

Despite the common notion to "provide more value" to a business if you want a
raise, it seems most business people, and thus those responsible for employee
raises, conflate value with leverage.

Someone can double their output and easily be denied a raise because they have
no leverage. However, if you have leverage but do not increase your output,
you can likely get a raise.

So maybe we should nix the old advice about "creating more value" as it's a
very confusing and an unclear metric. If businesses see value as leverage,
employees should do the same as that's the only way they'll get what they
want.

I hope this makes sense, I've been trying to figure out the relationship
between value and leverage (at s microeconomic level) and they seem to be
almost, if not completely, identical.

Thoughts?

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goodoldboys
In my experience, just do the following:

Be generally likable Write decent to good code Connect on a regular basis with
current and former co-workers Be aggressive about finding new opportunities
(usually through people you've worked with)

I agree with most of the points the author makes here, but I don't think you
need to stay 2 years at a particular job - 1 is usually sufficient to avoid
the negative resume effects and still get some decent projects under your
belt.

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EpicEng
>1 is usually sufficient to avoid the negative resume effects

A string of one year stints would be a huge red flag to me. I would have a
hard time selling this person up as we don't hire FTE's to come and go in a
span of 12 months. Too much churn kills you, I'd likely pass unless
circumstances where extraordinary.

~~~
escherize
I've worked for many 1 year stints (everywhere I've worked besides my old
startup), and have never had a problem finding jobs.

Of course I probably wouldn't know if a place passed on me because of that.

I wonder what the probability distribution for how much hirers weight
"loyalty" or "stick-around-ness" looks like.

~~~
EpicEng
Yeah, no idea. I'm not concerned with loyalty so much as I am with dealing
with the fallout of churn. I've only ever worked at small companies on small
teams, so a single engineer leaving tends to hurt. The company isn't loyal to
them, so I expect an engineer to look out for their own self interest in the
same way. That said, one year is a pretty short time, and if they're _only_
concerned with that next pay bump then they're probably going to cause my team
some problems.

On the flip side, it's my responsibility to make sure that my engineers are
happy in their position and weren't sold on a lie.

~~~
luckydude
What EpicEng said. When I went to Sun it was more than a year before I was
really worth anything as a kernel engineer. Took that long for the kernel to
"come into focus" for me and the feedback I got from peers and management was
that I was fast (I did POSIX conformance in the kernel that first year).

There is a huge difference between being able to fix bugs and being able to
fix architecture problems. I needed at least a year before I was capable of
the latter in SunOS, probably more than a year.

~~~
EpicEng
Yup, and there are plenty of places which expect this sort of churn. Where I
work (biotech) there is a _ton_ of time dedicated up front to transferring
domain knowledge. It takes at least a year for new hires to really understand
how the lab works, how the hardware and assays work (even if they're in a more
typical IT role, they need to 'get' what the hell we're actually doing), what
the data means, etc. If I think they're likely to leave shortly after that
investment I just can't bring them on.

~~~
luckydude
Yep, that's my experience as well. I get that people want more money, I paid
my people as much as I could (about $400K in the bay area, total comp) so
there wasn't much churn.

But maybe the people jumping every year are doing more grunt stuff and the
ramp up doesn't take as long? I dunno, I'm mostly retired and sort of a
dinosaur.

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fridek
In my experience this approach doesn't really scale any higher than junior to
senior steps. I was repeatedly told "we just don't hire on levels higher than
X". I guess once you reach the famous rockstar level this again becomes a
thing, but probably the best bet at moving from 150k to 500k jobs is to stick
in one place for ten or so years.

~~~
phd514
Apart from working at one of the big tech companies (Google, Amazon, MS,
Facebook, etc), I can't see staying in one place for ten years as a good way
to move from 150k to 500k. In most of the companies I've worked (outside of
the big tech companies), going from 150k to 200k in 10 years would have been
above average.

~~~
fridek
Does moving through smaller companies in 1-2 year steps do better? They don't
seem to have that many high paying positions (maybe anymore, or in my region).

~~~
phd514
In my experience, switching among smaller companies at ~2-year intervals does
better up until you hit that area-specific level of diminishing returns. When
I was a team lead, I wasn't involved in salary negotiations, but I had access
to my team's salary data and they were all over the map based on what their
previous salaries had been, not what their value to the company was. It was
eye-opening.

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EGreg
Can someone fill me in, do most jurisdictions allow employers to report to
each other how much you made in the previous job? Or is this considered
protected data that employers cannot ask for?

Which jurisdictions have which rules?

Obviously if you don't have to disclose your previous salary you get an
advantage. The same advantage as the employer has in not disclosing the salary
they paid to the person you'll be replacing.

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codazoda
As far as I know, in my state, a previous employer is only allowed to say
weather or not I worked there and for how long. Nothing else should be
discussed, legally. IANAL

I've only changed jobs twice in my career but I included my salary
requirements in a cover letter and did not disclose my previous salary.

~~~
vonmoltke
"Can't" is not the same as "shouldn't". Any labor attorney worth their salt
will adivse their clients not to divulge more than the minimum they can get
away with, but that is not the same as not being allowed to.

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ezoe
Job switching is the most effective way to pressure the employer to raise and
keep the high salary.

If you pay well, good engineers swarm to apply the job.

Job switching is the best opportunity to negotiate your salary for both
current and next employers.

"If current employer don't pay more, I'll leave."

"If the next would-be employer don't pay more, I'll stick with the current
job."

Also, it pressures existing employers to raise and keep the high salary
because if they don't, they'll lose the good engineers to the competitors. So
the fact there are many job switching engineers benefits those who don't
switch job that often.

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acconrad
How realistic is this though? Imagine you come out of college and work for the
Big 4 making $100k. Assuming you make 10% more (compounding) every 2 years, by
38-36 you would make over $200k, by 50 you are making close to $500k. You hit
that much sooner if you change those numbers by 20%. At what point do those
returns diminish and you're having to do something more creative than simply
looking for a job every 2 years?

~~~
phd514
IMO, you see diminishing returns once you reach somewhere between ~125k (if
you're in a low-demand area) and ~250k (if you're in a high-demand area such
as the Bay Area). To get above that, you generally need to both switch jobs
and be good at what you do.

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Walkman
> One strategy to increase your salary 1.5X or even 2X across the next few
> years is to switch companies every two years.

I did exactly that and my salary is more than double in less then 4 years. I
started working after 1 year of experience, I have 5 years now.

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marssaxman
Is "double" not a verb anymore?

~~~
danjoc
I 2Xed back at 2X time to 2X check that title before 2Xing over in pain as
well ;)

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slavapestov
If you switch jobs every two years, you'll spend most of your time just
ramping up and getting to know your team, unless the problems you're solving
are so trivial that whatever you do does not justify a 2x bump in
compensation.

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myrandomcomment
This is pretty spot on based on my experience.

