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Discussion on: Salary: Why "Do Your Own Research" is terrible advice

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sandordargo profile image
Sandor Dargo

As a job seeker you have to understand your worth and value. By value I mean what you can offer. And you must increase your value and prepare if you want to get such a high paying job. Preparing for such jobs takes a lot of personal time.

You have to prove that worth your money.

But it's simple (not easy, but simple) to get the right knowledge and even at European companies you can easily have 60-100% more base salary (not to mention that total income you also referred to) than at tier 1 companies.

If I consider my case, I was kind of happy with my actual employer and I wouldn't have changed for a 10-15% raise. It's simply not worth taking the risk - for me. But for a much higher increase I was happy to invest a lot of my time and take a risk.

This also means that I outright rejected doing any interviews with companies not offering those much higher salary bands. Why to waste each others time?

Therefore, these days, I consider extremely important to set the expectations from both sides quite in the beginning.

And no, those ranges are not imaginary. Even in Europe. There are companies who make enough money per employee to pay higher wages.

I have many colleagues who used to work for around 50-55k/Y and left for 80-100k/Y (base salary) and stayed in France with a French contract. Sometimes they even "stepped back" from staff/principal roles to senior engineers.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

I don't disagree with you. Not at all.
I am trying to add that once you know your business value, and realize that you could be happy with only 70% of that or something, you can have a negotiation on multiple factors, most notably for me having time to all the other things I'm interested in. And since I'm like a 5 years old who want to know everything, time is important.

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sandordargo profile image
Sandor Dargo

I agree, that's exactly why I wouldn't have taken a risk for ending up with less personal time for 10-15% extra. And to be fair, I rejected to interview with a company who is offering 2.5x my actual salary, because I researched them and I found frightening details about the WLB there.

Money is a very important factor, but not the only one.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

Amen