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Comment by sweetnectar | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I'm working as a full stack developer, mainly node.js/angular here in Austin at a small/medium sized company. The business isn't really tech, but we have a ~10 or so dev/design team. Only paid 55k per year and I feel like I won't ever get to market rate just staying here. I love the company, the culture, and the people, but I just feel way undervalued. I know I'm going to have to look elsewhere, because I need the money, but at the same time I wish I didn't have to. This is my first "real" job out of college.

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"Undervalued" is relative. To Google your skills might be worth $150k because you'd add $1.5m to their revenue. To the business you're in you may 'only' add $500k, so you're paid accordingly. You aren't undervalued so much as under-utilised - the company you're at isn't maximising the value they could get from you in the way Google could (or maybe they are; there is an upper limit). Either find a way to make a bigger impact on your company's bottom line, or change company.

To draw a startup analogy, if you decide you want to take 25% of an established $100m market that's unlikely to happen because that's really hard to do, so people don't value your startup as having a potential $25m revenue. But if you can think of a realistic way to grow that $100m market to being a $125m market then people will readily accept you potentially have a $25m revenue business. Same result, very different impact.

Within your company you need to grow the market for your skills.

So the question then is, how do you add to their revenue? Seek projects that will save them money? Seek projects that will net them additional revenue? How do you make a find a way to make a bigger impact on your companies bottom line?

If you're a developer, the sad truth is that there's probably very little you can do. Even if you removed 100% of the company's infrastructure cost center, it's only a small fraction of your company's total costs.

Unless you are in Sales, Marketing, or Senior Management, there's very little you can ever do to significantly impact revenue.

Not that Senior Management wants you to think that; it's demoralizing when combined with bonuses being withheld due to missed revenue goals.

I do agree that the connection to revenue is much clearer in other departments but that doesn't mean engineering can't impact the bottom line.

Areas where I think good engineering can help include, designing software that minimizes its support costs, attention to code quality to improve customer/users experience, improving up-time, shortening maintenance windows, metrics and telemetry that help marketing and product development understand how a product is being used.

Good product documentation (reference manuals, in-product help, etc) is difficult and often over-looked. This isn't coding but engineering input into documentation is important.

Engineers can also provide significant input into product features and directions.

Sure, we build the product. And without that product, the company is a non-starter. And if we screw it up, we can lose existing customers.

But the product by itself does not produce revenue. Only selling the product makes revenue.

So, at best, we can avoid costing the company money, but we can't make money. Even customer service can have a bigger impact on the bottom line than we do.

Increasing top line revenue is almost always a better path than cutting expenses. (The latter is finite, although sometimes easier to prove specific correlation between action and savings. Until you're working at a company with huge expenses, though, going for growth is better than cost-cutting.)

My advice to you would be to stick out at least 2 years at your first job, so you aren't labeled as a job hopper off the bat by prospective employers.

After that, start applying everywhere to feel out what your more accurate market rate should be, unless your current company offers you a significant raise to stay.

Agreed. Your first job out of college doesn't need to pay handsomely, it's just a stepping stone to build experience and a resume. The employer is taking a bit of a risk with you too since you have zero work experience most likely. 2 years is a good amount of time to stick around before checking out the competition and not looking like a job-hopper.

Just for perspective, I was making $83k/year in Austin fresh out of college (and I graduated in December 2014). I was working at a bigger tech company though up in the North side.

I agree op is really underpaid. In 2011 I accepted my lowest offer out of college at $66k (though that was with good grades at a respected state school and good internships).

Sorry but in my experience, your instincts are correct. Smart managers who will give you the serious market-correction bumps do exist but they rarely exist. Even then, you will need to have undoubted value in order to leverage a serious bump, as they will have people above them that will fight it.

In my experience, you will have to jump from job to job in order to get incremental salary increases, since yearly increases are not only shallow but percentage based(so lower salaries receive lower increases.)

I've seen many companies that attempt to thrive on lower earners, who are typically straight out of college. It's a successful cost-cutting measure that works until their products turn to shit.

I make 55k in a similar city, though it's one much worse for developer jobs than Austin. My coworker also makes about 58k, and my lead developer makes about 80k despite being really good at what he does. He could easily find a 120k+ job tomorrow. We do mostly Node.js stuff. I have about 2 years full time experience, and probably the equivalent of 4 years full time experience since I've done web dev since I was a teenager.

Job market sucks for newer devs right now. You at least have a shit load of opportunity in Austin there. Barely anything where I live despite being a big ass city.

How many years experience do you have? If you're fresh out of college and making 55K that sounds reasonable unless you're in some insane location like Silicon Valley.

Austin's a pretty hot market, from what I understand. Sounds kind of low to me.

In Boston, that's barely half the going rate for a fresh grad from a top school.

Curious about how the business is not tech but you have a dev/design team. I'm guessing it's a publicity agency but I'd be curious if it's another kind of business.

It's an e-commerce company that has a handful of brands careering to higher end consumer customers and businesses. So the core of the company isn't necessarily tech product wise, but the majority of our business is from the web.

Shoot me a message at mail [at] chrisabrams.com - I can intro you companies - if ur doing Node ur worth more. I'm a Node developer too.

Just fyi, bigcommerce is in Austin and hiring. Someone wanted me to apply and said they're paying in the 120k range.

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