Great idea, but needs tech stack info also.
I don’t think either should matter, you’re paid for a job function not the tools you use, but the latter is a trap on my opinion.
I’m turning 40 this year and as such an approaching the sort of midway of my career and in my anecdotal experience you’re never paid for the tech stack. I’ve worked in startups, enterprise and startups growing into enterprises with lucrative employee stock options. I’ve worked with everything dotnet, Python, C++, RPA-tooling, Java, COBOL, SharePoint and SAP, JavaScript and now TypeScript. I’ve worked with every sort of operations setup from in-house to cloud and I very where in between. I’ve worked as a developer, then project/actual manager then enterprise architect and now developer again.
The only things that I have done that had any real impact on my pay grade level was changing jobs and doing indirect negotiations. You need to deliver solutions, you need to show the business the impact of those solutions and you need to make sure your employers know that they aren’t the only company in town who knows about the business value you being to the table.
I also encourage sharing your pay information with your peers. I’ve been fortunate enough to land some nice contracts, but because I’ve shared info with my peers I know of at least two people who went to the negotiation table where they managed to get the company to at least match my pay.
But tech stack? As long as it’s a sellers market, I’d encourage you to get good with something that is in demand that you also happen to enjoy working with. For me that is currently TypeScript front ends with node/dotnet backends that run in azure functions.
If they show the tech stack, people would be able to see if they could apply their same skills for much more money at a specific other company.
>> You need to deliver solutions, you need to show the business the impact of those solutions
Most of the time people who interview (and eventually say yes/no) are tech people, discussing business problems and solutions is cute yet pretty useless. It's funny when you interview someone and he wants to look enthusiastic and tells you the information they found from the open source - and you go like "dude, you have no clue what's happening in these walls" )
I would go even further and say for me it would be a big red flag to waste time on "business impact" - I am going in as a programmer. From my experience, my "business impact" is somewhat close to a cleaner dude. And I don't want to take on additional (unclear) responsibilities I am not sure I know much about. Thank you, but I already know and do enough in my niche which happened to be software development and is a very specialised, demanding and valuable skill to have )
This is really going to depend on the company and industry. You're never going to get a senior or principal engineer role at FAANG without being able to explain, or better yet, quantify, what business impact you had through your work as a developer. In non-software verticals where developers are seen as a cost center it's different. But in general, those aren't going to pay as well. Plus you're never going to move up the career ladder if you see yourself exclusively as a developer and don't understand the wider business.