Ask HN: What kind of salary should I be looking at? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What kind of salary should I be looking at?

7 pointscodecurve8 comments

I'm about to begin the interviewing process again, the first one is lined up for next week and I have no real idea as to what I should be looking at by way of a salary.

Quick background: 21 years old. CS graduate, currently doing a Masters degree. I live in Wales in the UK. Professional experience as a developer since 2009. Co-founder of a successful startup, but my interests and the company's visions have diverged. It's a long story.

Longer background: http://danprince.github.io/

Sadly, most of the work we've done as Astral Dynamics (the startup) has been contract work from the NHS and privately owned companies and we've not been able to showcase it due to NDAs. As a result the site has been neglected. Neither the site nor the public repos in are particularly good representations of the company. It's something we're going to try and work around over the next few weeks, so if you are interested, watch that space.

I'm looking primarily at front-end development with Angular + SASS, as I've spent the last two years leading Angular projects as well as providing comprehensive Angular training for our interns. Ideally though, I don't want to end up in a specialised role, if the project and technology are interesting, then I'll enjoy it. I would love to relocate to another interesting part of the world, providing I could find work there.

Some extra perspective on my current outlook would be highly appreciated. Thanks for taking the time!

The replies you have gotten so far have been US orientated and vastly overestimate salaries here in the UK. Especially the UK outside of London.

Assuming you are in Cardiff, possibly Newport, a starting salary for a graduate is around £21,000 - £25,000. With your experience however I'd expect that £25,000 - £35,000 isn't impossible if the company wants a strong Angular dev.

My advice is that you should move to the South East of England, if it's feasible, salaries are way higher than the rest of the country.

At the moment, I'm in North Wales but the tech scene here leaves much to be desired. My first interview is in London and I'm completely open to the idea of moving elsewhere to work.

What's the differential between the salary for Cardiff/Newport and London?

The gap is quite large. Even between Manchester and London it's still large.

I've seen contracts that pay £450/day in London for experienced Rails devs.

My strategy is to look in the mirror, and say a number. $60,000. Go up... $80,000. $90,000. $100,000. Until you laugh, then step back down one. Then ask for that. I've never been turned away from a job for asking too much.

I'm looking for a good JavaScript developer to join our team of 5 in Shoreditch, London. We use JS client-side and server-side and are pretty experimental with our tech. And I'm pretty sure we could offer you a salary you'd be happy with.

Fancy a chat? Send me an email (address in profile).

What you should ask for depends on how easy your able to accomplish tasks and bring value with your work with the technology and business skills you provide to the company (How much money you generate or save vs them hiring more people to do what you do for less. Or how smooth and professional your work is compared to your peers.). You should also take into account how much money the company is generating. If your going to go work for a large bank your starting salary can be much higher versus going to work for a small or medium size business that does not have quarterly profits in the multi-millions or more.

Just be careful with the Senior level jobs, I would would not recommend going for them unless you really know the technology inside/out and develop in it with ease.

If your knocking out large applications with ease

Which are you:journeyman, junior,intermediate, senior, expert, master developer?

Regular ranges here in the USA metro areas are among the following:

For your general development:(Generic Java/C#/etc. General Website Design/Development) Journeyman:$50k-$59k Junior:$60k-$79k Intermediate:$80k-$89k Senior:$90k-$180k Expert:$181k-$250k Master:$251k-$1M+

For high demand programming languages/skills(Ruby/PHP/Java/Python/Node.js/large company Java and/or C# high performance optimization on the JVM or .NET Framework or websites and automation) Journeyman:$60k-$69k Junior:$70k-$79k Intermediate:$80k-$89k Senior:$90k-$199k Expert:$200k-$399k Master:$400k-$1M+

For specialized programming languages/skills (GPU/Cuda/OpenGL/ORACLE/C/C++/Cryptology/Game Engine development/Finance/Graphics or Animation software) Journeyman:$90k-$99k Junior:$100k-$119k Intermediate:$120k-$250k Senior:$250k-$400k Expert:$500k-$750k Master:$750k-$2M+

Also note these are for salaried positions, if interviewing for contract positions you would double the amounts since you are also covering the employers share, your own vacation, medical, dental, health, life insurance, savings, and investment income.

Just remember don't sell yourself short and get what you know your worth.

Can you define "joureyman" here? I have always understood "junior" to be the entry-level.

A Journeyman is the absolute beginner, normally this is an intern (can be contract, or salaried but normally always paid and temp to perm if things work out) or someone you take under your wing to teach them the ropes even though they have no experience in what your teaching them.

Junior developers have normally put in some time with their language of choice and can do some simple tasks but are not yet at that state to where they can do fully functional production grade applications from scratch without some assistance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com