Ask HN: I am underpaid. Am I?
When I started working as a QA Engineer(Telecom products, in The India) way back in 2006 July I used to get $60 a month. Yes Its just $2 a day. And I know why.
When I passed out from college holding a degree in Information Technology. I was not fitting into the entry criteria for most of the companies and the reason was my percentage in 12th exam. It was just 51% with 4 number grace in physics. I had no idea about almost all the subjects that I studied in college, EXCEPT networking and JAVA. By the way I was good at JAVA.
Though I got my job as a QA Engineer, I used to do networking and Unix stuff to feel better at work place.
Till Dec 2008 my salary was incremented to $300 a month. Because I joined a finance project team and was doing Selenium automation. Due to this I was now part of some techies. I started working of some JAVA projects back home and learnt Web Development. and this pulled me to write some code that helps in testing, like DB comparison, data loading etc.
When I changed my job after 3 and half years in 2009 I was at $400/month. And my new salary was $500/month.
Since I already started automation and started writing innovative solutions for testing I got good hikes in my second company and I left it in 2011. I was getting $700/month.
Now in 2013 after my first hike in my current company I am getting $1200/month.
I strongly believe that I am still underpaid, because the kind of skill set I have and the work that I do is helping hundreds of people to make their life easy. I am 6+ years experienced now.
I am a Test Automation engineer, and I know JAVA, Perl, Python, Grails, Django, JS, VBScript, CSS.
What you say?