For most of the time I have been working, pay was the one subject a team never discussed. People would tell a colleague about their divorce before they would say what they were paid. That is ending, and rather faster than most developers have noticed.
Ranges already appear on a growing share of job adverts, in several places because the law now insists on it. Rules are arriving that let you ask what the average is for people doing your job, and that stop an employer asking what you used to earn. Whatever you think of all that, plan for a working life in which your pay sits inside a published structure and your colleagues can work out roughly where in it you sit.
At some point you will learn something uncomfortable. Nearly everybody does. Usually it is that somebody who joined eighteen months after you, doing work you would call equivalent, is paid more than you are.
It is worth deciding in advance what that means, because the instinctive reading is that a person somewhere rated them above you, and that is rarely what happened. Pay is mostly a fossil of the market in the week you signed your contract, plus years of increases calculated as a percentage of that first number. Two good engineers hired three years apart can end up thousands apart without anybody ever making a decision about either of them.
So do the unglamorous part now, while it is not yet emotional. Ask your manager what the band for your role is and where in it you sit. Most of them can describe the structure even when they cannot discuss a named person. Then ask the better question: what moves somebody from the middle of a band to the top of it. The answer is almost never working harder, and hearing it said out loud is worth a year of guessing.
If it turns out you are behind, ask for a correction rather than a rise, and give them a date to come back to you on. That framing travels upstairs more easily, because it describes an error rather than a favour.
And when a colleague trusts you with their number, keep it. The awkward stretch passes. What it replaces is a quiet old habit of paying the least confident person the least.
– Asael Shinder
Top comments (0)