Salary.com says that I’m making about 10 grand per year less than the average for my city. Anyone else try it? If so, does it look like they over-estimate, or am I just woefully underpaid?
I’ve used it also and I hope it is right. It seems to have me pegged about right but remember that this is an average and includes 50 year olds with a gazillion years experience (not starting salary). So, if you have don’t have (guess - 10-15 years experience) then you will be under the mean.
I also found the standard deviation (or was it quartiles?) info interesting to get an idea of what range is involved. If you are underpaid $10K but the lower quartile is $12k below the mean, you may be fairly paid if you lack many years experience.
JMHO,
Blink
FYI - it puts me right about the 25%. Since my position requires 5 years experience to attain (according to salary.com) and that is what I have, I consider myself fairly paid even though my salary is $11K below the mean.
Blink
Hmmm… I make more or waaaay more than it lists for my job. Kind of hard to tell, since they list 3 levels of software engineer, and my workplace has 5 levels. I’m a ‘3’, so I chose software engineer II. I make almost 15K more than the top end of that, and I make near the top of the “software engineer III”.
Yippeee for me!
Is there a canadian equivalent to salary.com? I’d like to see what I might be able to expect if salaries remain more or less stable for the next couple of years:-)
I make about 10K more than what the closest thing I can find to my job description would be (I chose IT - Business Project leader, close, but not quite). I am sure that there are people in my city, heck, my company, that do pretty much the same thing as I do, and make a lot more, and a bit less. I also know of people who do more or less the same work that I do, but as consultants and make almost * four times * what I make. But they have to travel alot, pay their own taxes, no bennies, etc.
In my experience there is always some idiot out there who is, or seems to, make a lot more than you do, for doing a lot less. Hardly anyone ever see themselves as overpaid*.
[sup]*if you find that you are overpaid, please forward excess monies to me immediately. I will invest for you and send you the receipts. I promise. Really.[/sup]
There are some reasons to be cautious with salary.com numbers.
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Salary.com pursues what is called a “benchmarking” approach to identifying typical wages. What that means is they are not surveying people all over the place - they are just talking to human resources offices at major corporations. That does provide a sense of the labor market, and makes the project of collecting the data manageable, but it probably introduces some bias into their results. Large corporations often pay more to workers in a given occupation than smaller outfits would.
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As one might start to guess based on the “benchmarking” approach - salary.com does not actually do surveys of every occupation in every part of the country. Instead, they do a single, nationwide benchmarking check on wages for an occupation, then apply an adjustment to that figure. The adjustment is probably based on some combination of general regional cost of living data (easily obtained from the federal government), and general information about the variation of wages based on city size. It might also include some adjustments for general economic factors in a region (unemployment rate, etc.) [I am sorry I cannot be more precise, but the details of these sorts of regional adjustments are often closely guarded secrets, so salary.com doesn’t just publish the formula anywhere. I suspect that anyone who has seen it has signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement so that salary.com can protect their intellectual property.] However, it seems very unlikely that they will be able to actually have surveyed every specific occupation in every specific region - so the adjustment could miss some specific factors about your occupation or location that are important.
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Finally, it is of course important to remember that averages include everyone. If I make a gross generalization based on slacker’s user name, and guess that he/she is fairly recently out of college - a wage value substantially below average is what I would expect him/her to have. Wages do grow over time, and most people who are new in jobs are paid below average. The good news there is that there is lots of room for raises over the coming years. (This is even more important to remember when looking at most data collected by states or the federal government, which is collected in big surveys, but rarely breaks occupations apart into levels as is done by salary.com)
I don’t mean to be slamming salary.com here - there information does have substantial value. However, I am not at all surprised at a difference of the this size. It seems to me to be completely consistent with the methods they use.
I am indeed just out of college, but I do have 4 years experience in my field (I worked my way through school).
And don’t worry about the gross generalization, I do it all the time. I consider it a hobby.