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Ask HN: How can I calculate my market value?

44 points by sexy_panda ↗ HN
Hi HN,

I'm looking for advice on calculating my market value.

I live in central Europe and work as a Cloud Architect, that also does DevOps and pretty much everything required project-wise.

I make 32k per year and it seems hard getting an average market pay. I have no university degree, but 6 years experience in IT, 3 years experience in CI/CD and 2 years experience with AWS and IaC.

How can I figure out my market worth?

Edit: I have little experience with negotiations and the job market, that's why I ask.

56 comments

[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] thread
pc86
First and foremost there is no magic formula. Your market value is whatever someone is willing to pay you, and there's no rule that this will increase linearly (or at all) over any arbitrary period of time.

You say you want "average market pay." What do you think "average market pay" is for a DevOps engineer with your experience and educational level? Why do you think that? Where are the employers hiring folks at those wages? I'm focusing on more thought-based questions since you asked about calculating your value as it is today, not necessarily just "how do I make more money" which has different answers.

fileeditview
Where in Europe? 32k seems very low for your role.. I am not sure how people without university degree are paid but I still think it should be a lot higher if you have all the required skills. Also maybe clarify what cloud architect means exactly.
f6v
> I am not sure how people without university degree are paid

That won’t matter in Berlin startups.

jstx1
Your market value = the best offer you can get. There's no point in looking for a formula (there isn't one). Look for better paying positions and interview for them.
mfrommil
1. Talk with others in your industry, at your company, or in similar roles to you. You'll at least get an idea of your potential range.

2. Interview and get offers. Your market rate is what the highest bidder is willing to pay.

3. Someone on HN shared this years ago and it helped me tremendously, it's better than any other blog post or book I've ever read about negotiating a job offer. Highly suggest reading it:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

throwawaynay
1 * how_much_you_can_convince_someone_to_pay_you

if 32k is normal for your country look elsewhere maybe

3pt14159
Your market value isn't a single number. I've more than doubled my total compensation before merely by happening to get into the right crowd. If you're hitting a compensation ceiling but you're sure your tech chops are up to snuff, consider networking (including online / over OSS) or reaching out to a recruiter that does international placement. Once you work with some expat or remote Americans you'll soon see a 5x to 10x in pay.
mmaia
That's an important point. You need to be on people's minds when they start to recruit. Your market value changes because they want you. E.g., Do people you worked with in the past try to recruit you? If not, try to acknowledge why and work on improving.
dewey
Depending on what your current "level" is you might be interested in what https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com is saying (It's mostly aimed at Senior and above). He focuses on Europa in comparison to the usual US centric advice you'll find everywhere.
tomp
Move to Switzerland, or maybe London / Berlin.
soco
Where their costs will increase as well. So while showing off with a big numeric bump in "market value", the pockets at the end of the month might show a very different dynamic.
zerr
That's not the case usually. The savings you are left after all the expenses outweigh the price differences significantly.
Toutouxc
Not about you specifically, but most people underestimate how different European countries can be from each other and how "moving a 10-hr drive away" can actually mean "not being able to understand anyone for the next 10 years, eating a completely different cuisine and being totally out of touch with the traditions and culture for some time".

Moving to a different country in Europe might not even be an option for quite a lot people.

erwincoumans
There is levels.fyi and teamblind.com and glassdoor.com, although more US oriented. Europe IT/software developer salaries seem to very slowly catch up with US, but are still much lower (even when taking cost of living and social security taxes / health insurances into account)

So try to talk to others around you, if above websites don't cover your country. Or try to move.

Jacqued
I think in Europe there's a bunch of local markets with a lot of companies that do not want to compete for developers, not within the EU and definitely not with the US. They'd rather push talented developers to leave than raise wages (and maybe it makes sense in their business).

You need to find the pockets in the market which do compete for talent on an international (at least EU-wide) level. That may be foreign tech companies, remote jobs, maybe the very hottest of startups in your country (with stock grants). I like this article (https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...) which goes deeper into this.

A "trick" which works in my market (in France) is to work as a contractor instead of a full-time employee. When I did this move I basically doubled my income overnight while keeping the same job title. A lot of companies will balk at an engineer asking for 70k€ as an FTE, yet have no qualms paying the same person 7-800€/day for 2 years as a contractor.

rozenmd
Don't you then lose social security, benefits, ability to rent/get a mortgage by not being full time/CDI?
d82nsjk9
> ability to rent/get a mortgage by not being full time/CDI

You can plan ahead and take a FTE position when you need to rent/loan for real estate. If you do a lot of these investments then I agree it is a disadvantage, but for most people that's easy to sort out.

rmnclmnt
Yes and no, and it depends on your requirements:

- Social security: covered by the state through social taxes (URSSAF) like employees - Benefits: you're the boss, you can be wild :) - Renting / getting a mortgage: bankers are more and more inclined to examine your situation, especially if you can provide a good track record of recurrent / constant revenue stream

In any case, I agree completely with the original comment: going solo in France is one way to break the "glass ceiling" in terms of net revenue and career path is you feel entrepreneur.

rozenmd
Oh cool!

So you can just contract for international companies out of France, pay your taxes as normal, and you still get unemployment if you get fired unexpectedly?

Jacqued
Unemployment is the one benefit you can't get as a contractor (in France, I don't know about OP's country), but it doesn't work that great for higher income professionals anyway.

When it comes to health insurance or retirement you're generally covered though.

rmnclmnt
If you are a solo contractor / business owner, indeed you cannot pretend for unemployment compensation ("chômage"). But if you care about accounting, after some time you can live off several months / years without any revenue.

One last thing: at least in France (don't other countries) you are obligated to contract for multiple clients (at least 2) per fiscal year to avoid fraudulent employment and the risk of losing a client the next day. And in this day and age, landing a new client in the IT/Software/Data/AI/whatever industry is relatively easy!

Dreadhead
1. Check known companies in your country, that provide the same kind of job. 2. Check the salaries of these companies on kununu.com or glassdoor.com
hirako2000
Your market value is the average of what people with a similar experience and aptitude get.

But while the average may say you are worth say 65k per year, the upper end is more like a million per year, and the lower end near zero.It depends on multiple factors, what industry, what location, what company and how you present during interviews.

At present it is fair to say what you are getting is below average. Doubling your salary shouldn't be difficult if you look around, especially outside Central Europe. It can be difficult since many companies only offer a contract within certain juridictions, but some companies out there are flexible since they want to select from the worldwide pool rather than a fraction of it.

To find your true value. Apply to about 50 jobs you feel you qualify for. A third of it will give you a screening call to show your worth, 5 of them will get you through the final round and probably make you an offer. Make the average of the offers you get, that's your true value now.

Of course along the way you may hit a great 2nd offer which double your income, you would be tempted to just take it and end the experiment. And you may be right to do so. You can run the experiment again after you switched jobs.

I will throw out there that the best way to get compensated for your true value is to repeat this at least once a year, because too many employers squeeze current employees compensations by not offering the increase they deserve.If you continuously look for jobs you always ensure to have the current information about your current value hence leave no chance to be stuck at some undervalued job. Of course it's draining to often be on the look out and attend interviews. But it depends how important it is to you.

DrinkWater
It is substantially more than 32k, this i can tell you with the little information i extracted from your post.

btw. if you are actively looking for something new, consider contacting me. We are looking for a lot of cloud engineers/architects/etc. -> smart.year8135@fastmail.com

mensetmanusman
It’s really hard to know,

Just this month I learned that some offhand advice I gave to a small business owner last year increased their sales by six figures. It helped me better understand why consultants can be so valuable :)

privacysoup
There are some missing pieces to help people here to guide you more.

What is your working hours? How long do you work in a week? What is the unit of your salary? EUR/GBP/USD? Also is that a net value per year? Are there any tax reductions?

mprovost
The best way is to check the market directly: do some interviews, get offers, compare. It's a lot of work but chances are that you'll come out of it much better off. If you think about it, basically nothing you do at your current job will pay off as much spending that effort interviewing. And if you're not willing to change jobs, then your market value is whatever they feel like paying you now.
trevormcneal
degree is required just as a filter for the HR, honestly this seems like a too little experience to be an architect, even in central or western europe, your salary should be above 100k€ for this position, even higher if you are in a smaller company, and even higher if you are the only architect.

your worth is how much they are willing to pay you to stay, which is directly correlated with how much cheaper they can get someone that does the same from the market + onboarding costs. For architects this plays a bigger role, since you need way more context to operate than someone just managing infra, so the onboarding costs are way higher.

Even if you are living in Italy, which has a very crappy salary, you should be earning more for this position. But what would raise as a red flag for you in a hiring process would be the experience VS position.

Easily you can get more salary if you step down to a Cloud Engineer/Systems Engineer/DevOps (I know, is a culture, but positions are labeled like this) or something similar.

Also try to work for banks, the fact that they trust you is a +50% that you can ask above the market average, handling systems that control few billions requires people that you trust, and at this scale 10k, 100k, or 250k, doens't make that much difference, but a small fckup may cost 100mi to the company. Closer to the money you are, more you get from it.

fergonco
If you are willing to work remotely you can do, at least, twice as that.

German market pays best in Europe but you need to speak the language. The culture is also very specific.

If you don't have family and don't mind working in other timezones, then US will have the best offer for you.

My algorithm: do many applications. Aim high, low and in between. Ask for a high salary and lower little by little.

AdhesiveWombat
> German market pays best in Europe but you need to speak the language. The culture is also very specific.

Genuine question: do you mean to say the culture is very specific or just not American?

I'm curious to know if it is more specific than, let's say, French or Spanish.

fabian_shipamax
Not sure about that. UK/London companies can pay big bucks if they want you.
fergonco
With specific I meant strong cultural values (maybe). How Germans understand work is different from how Spanish, French or Italian do. But not only work: friendship, society, conflict, etc. And you need to learn their language in order to understand all that, which is a huge barrier. I just wanted to warn OP about that fact.

It may depend were are you culturally. I'm Spanish and I've lived in Germany, France and Italy.

lordnacho
32K of what currency?

Market worth is largely theoretical. Go and get some offers, then you have some choices about what to do.

Right now the market is very hot for HN-person skills. So go make some calls and see what comes.

dmkirwan
The only true measure of your market value is what people are willing to pay you.

32k seems a bit low for central Europe but it's difficult to say without a more precise location.

There are easier (and less accurate) ways to assess your value.

1: Next time you hear from a recruiter, ask them what a rough range is for the role. If they won't tell you, try to gauge their reaction to your salary expectations. Say, when they ask, if you tell them you expect 50k and they are still willing to proceed then you can be sure that you can get a lot more than 32k.

2: Look out for salary surveys from your country (here's one from Ireland that's pretty good: https://www.morganmckinley.com/ie/ireland-salary-guide-calcu...).

3: This is probably the least accurate; look at salaries at companies that are transparent about compensation, like Buffer: https://buffer.com/salaries.

kome
usually "central europe" is how people from post-socialist countries call eastern europe: and i guess 32k is in the high bracket there
Toutouxc
> "central europe" is how people from post-socialist countries call eastern europe

That was my first thought when I read that. We Czechs are especially guilty of [over]using "central", because the country is very much wedged into Germany, which is decidedly western, so I hear it pretty often.

On the other hand, the European part of Russia is so huge that yes, nothing except maybe Ukraine is really on the eastern third.

c2h5oh
Well, they are correct. Geographical center of Europe is in Poland.

You are confusing eastern block with eastern Europe.

kome
no, i'm just using the common definition that everybody use in (old) europe
mike_k
I would be very surprised if that is the real "high" point there. Maybe, the country is very small or lacks tech universities & engineering/math "tradition". Tax systems are very different in the region, but with 6 years or experience and intermediate/advanced English even in Ukraine capital the median is $54K, while the third quartile is $66K. Those are NET numbers for contractor-type empoloyment, though. According to the very latest salary widget here: https://dou.ua/salary-widget-test/?period=2021-12&position=S...
ultim8k
Mate, you could easily ask for 80k+ per anum. As a contractor you could easily get 500+ per day.
chrisseaton
You can't 'calculate it' you can only find it empirically.
PaywallBuster
you're probably in France?

32k can be competitive with the average local company?

But if you compare with top of the range salaries at the biggest tech centers in Europe is quite low

or with remote jobs which could pay top of the range as long as you're situated in Europe

Please see https://techpays.eu/ if you're specifically looking for the companies paying the most

If you want to get competitive salary you need to move, biggest cities/tech centers in Europe.

Ireland, UK (still?), Germany, Netherlands all have big markets with top of the range salaries

mcv
> you're probably in France?

Probably not:

>> I live in central Europe

Could be Germany, could be Hungary.