FWIW, my first programming job only paid $45,000 a year. What a ripoff.
Unfortunately, this leads to a prisoner's dilemma situation where each individual worker would be better off if everyone shared their salaries, but each individual worker is slightly better off if they don't share their salaries.
FWIW, my first programming job only paid me $32k a year. But I was straight out of high school (no college), and I thought it was a princely sum because I was getting paid more than my Ivy-League grad high school teachers were getting.
You don't get to choose the world you live in, you only get to choose the choices you make. If you want to move from one world to another, you have to figure out how to get the rest of the world to make those choices.
That's my plan, at least.
Reading this kind of thing on HN makes me feel ill; my W-2 says $47k. Maybe I need to make some changes.
If for nothing else, you should have a business just so you can claim more expenses and reduce the amount you have to pay Uncle Sam (from my understanding, all you need to have is a profit motive -- not necessarily profits).
Plus you don't get taxed at source so you can take that extra 30%+ you get each paycheck to pay a tax person to figure this all out for you in time to save up for the tax hit at the end of the year.
Aside from that, contracting can help get bump your salary up. Fresh out of college I was making less than $47k and then easily tripled my salary within a year of contracting (although I was working insane hours and basically used all of my allotted overtime hours). It isn't always great for mental health or work/life balance, but it can be a great shot in the arm in terms of providing needed work experience and money.
So if anyone has resources for a web developer in Portland looking to break into contracting, I'd love to hear from you.
That said, take a look at this: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Location=Portland-OR/Sal... The median salary for an SE in Portland is $67k.
So, yeah, it's negotiating time.
So 6 months later I got them to raise it to 50, and a few months later they they fired the other programmer (my boss, who was making $85k) and expected me to do the work of both he and I, which I was capable of doing. They told me they just gave me a raise so I shouldn't be greedy.
I left of course. They hired my replacement at $90k after having a consultant do the job for three months at typically high rates. I would have accepted $60k! I just didn't want complete disrespect.
A year or so later I was making $80k and found out another guy at this company was making $40k. What the hell? I don't thing anyone should be so royally fucked.
Companies that do this deserve no loyalty. Salary information should be public as long as they persist in such behaviors.
No company deserves "loyalty". You need to get that dinosaur of a concept out of your thought process. We're free market entities now. We act completely within our own interest and the "invisible hand" makes sure everything turns out alright in the end. [1] Loyalty is for family and friends.
[1] Of course your own interest isn't a simple amount question. If another company offers me 5k/yr more I wouldn't drop what I'm doing at the current company and move for that. My reputation is part of my market value so I have to avoid angering my "customers" as much as possible (within reason, but the best choice is to just not take customers that will likely end up hating you later). Ideally, when I leave they'll all hope I come back some day.
On the other hand, if I could make a living doing freelance web development, then I could build that up until I have an income that employers would need to match (rather than just throwing me the low end of the offered salary-range).
Don't quote something way out of the range of the company you want to work for, but don't undersell yourself either. You'll probably get what you asked for... £15-25k is dirt cheap anyway, for any large corporation, but that £10k makes a whole lot of difference to your life.
Working for a salary, you can easily get stuck on projects that aren't portfolio-worthy, don't teach you anything that useful, and which you only have a small hand in anyway. And naturally it's comparatively much harder to get pay increases. One solid project that impresses people can take you from charging $50 to $100 an hour as a freelancer overnight. Try convincing your boss to double your salary after 3 months just because you've been shipping good code.
As for breaking in, talk to as many people as you can. Go to meetups, talks, events, whatever is happening, in both the programming AND (very importantly) business/entrepreneurship categories. Just chat and share ideas. If you're confident and you've got brains, people will recognize it, and you'll soon need to beat offers away with a stick. The first gig is the hardest to get because you have nothing to point to in your portfolio. Do this one for free if you have to, or build things on your own. Whatever it takes to get something finished that you can use to prove your competence.
Meanwhile I know people who finished their CS degree and never got a programming job. I know one guy who's a decent programmer, only got a couple of interviews, one only because he offered to work for 14k, but ended up working in a bank admin job for 13k for years before finally getting a secondment to an SQL/Excel position at 18k or so.
I don't know, man. Just seems there's a disconnection between the salaries you guys talk about on HN and the salaries that are realistic for me. Bearing in mind if it's a graduate job then there's going to be many gaps in your knowledge (unless you're exceptional), so it seems you should bite the hand off the first place that offers you a job and the chance to become a more complete developer (after which you'll have a much stronger negotiating position, but until then, as an unproven dev companies can justifiably look at you as a liability).
2. Go contracting
If no one would put up with these low wages they would be forced upward.
But I do like the idea of selling your skills on a freelance/contracting basis, and foregoing all the noise of the industry hiring practices. I'd definitely give that a shot before taking a 18k-24k job. Seriously doubt £25+k for a first, junior dev role is on the cards though.
£18,000 is what I got at my first job over 15 years ago. I know things are tough in the UK for you young 'uns now though.
Commercial experience isn't as good as having some nice websites in your portfolio IMHO.
If you're making more, I'm not sure how showing your salary data can help you personally.
Status, at least when you transition.
In investment banking, people would quickly discover what the top bonus was for their year and report it when they moved on to jobs in, for example, private equity. The banks saw it as symbiotic and would confirm inflated compensation. It made the ex-analysts get better jobs but it also made the firms look more generous, so it was seen as win-win.
It becomes an issue when next year's class expects the middle bonus to be last year's top bonus.
I think it was pretty good considering I had not graduated college... so I was getting paid to learn.
I started at $25 an hour. I quickly learned the business, and realized I could make it better. So i spent my nights building an app to do it better. They loved it, became the new thing we used. 6 months later my contract ended. I asked for more... and oh yeah did I mention I was a junior programmer (the code was exactly what you would expect, so I had some good leverage) to me $27 an hour was pretty good. I was 19, and making more than my Dad (he always said this is the benchmark I'm supposed to pass).
about 4 years later I'm now making $77k with about 5k or 6k bonus. I moved to Boston, so I think without a degree, its reasonable but I would definitely be making quite a bit more had I finished college.
I'm Hoping to quit my job soon, and start off on my own. The project I did for a $2/hr raise after 6 months could've been worth millions... and I'm sure I could do it again, seeing better ways to do things is kind of my thing.
How is that a ripoff? That seems right at about average for starting salary programming.
Unless he (or she) is working as a game dev, he is grossly underpaid. (Even if he is doing game dev he'd be underpaid, just the standard for pay would be much lower for his industry.)
(Fun fact: jrockway was once a PHP programmer. And, we did not use source control there. And a web developer did a "push" and overwrote my weeks worth of programming. Then I knew it was time to find a new job :)