Hey, what’s up, John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com.
I got a question about how to increase your salary as a software developer.
I thought I would do a video on this.
Actually, I’ve gotten quite a few questions on this topic.
It’s a pretty popular topic, I think, how to increase your salary as a programmer, and
how to increase your salary as a software developer so I thought I’d address this
here.
How do you do it?
I can’t give you a huge amount of detail because this is going to be a short video,
but I want to give you sort of the key things that I think that I think that are going to
make the biggest difference that are going to result in the highest salary that you can
possibly get.
First of all, the first thing that you have to realize is that what you earn is a function
of how much opportunity is out there, how many chances.
So there are 2 ways to get opportunity.
So what I mean is it’s like this.
If you could get an interview with 2000 companies or not an interview, let’s say you got a
job offer from 2000 companies, 2000 companies want to hire you.
You’d probably have like a bell curve distribution of the salaries they are willing to pay you.
There will be some people that will be paying you really peanuts and then most of the companies
would be right in the middle about the average for your skill and experience.
Then there would be some that would be like, “Man, this guy is just freakin’ awesome!
We are going to pay him a ridiculous amount of money.”
They would be paying a ridiculous amount of money.
The reason why I’m starting there is because I want you to understand the principle behind
this because this principle applies if you’re trying to be a consultant, if you’re trying
to bill a high hourly rate or if you’re trying to sell a product or if you’re trying
to increase your salary.
The principle is that, it’s just that the number, the volume that you have is going
to determine how many of those people on that end of the bell curve that are willing to
pay you a lot of money, or pay a lot for your product or your service, how many of those
there are.
As a developer if you’re trying to get a job, you only need one of those.
I guarantee you in many of those situations you could get a salary that’s twice what
your salary is now if you had enough opportunity.
Now, here’s the thing about that.
it doesn’t mean that you can just send out 5,000 resumes and knock on doors and try to
find those.
The amount of opportunity you have, remember I said, job offers, I didn’t say interviews,
I didn’t say companies to apply for.
I said offers when I talked about that bell curve is because the amount of those that
you’re going to get is going to be directly related to 2 things.
One, your technical ability, your skills, what skill set do you have and how valuable
is that skill set and 2, your ability to market that skill set to market yourself.
If you want to increase your salary, what do you got to do?
Well, you’ve got to take your skill set, it’s got to be high enough, and then you’ve
got to take marketing which is branding yourself, building your personal brand, all that, you
can check out—I’ve got a coarse on how to market yourself as a software developer
if you’re interested in that.
Marketing is sort of like a multiplier to your skills.
If you have high technical skills and you have good marketing it can 100x that ability,
it can make it—it’s like a megaphone where you can reach more possible employers, you
can reach more possible clients, you can reach more possible customers so that’s the key
thing is you’ve got to have enough skill, you’ve got to have enough marketing so you
can reach more people.
When you reach more people, if you’ve got a huge range of employers that are potentially
going to give you job offers, you’re going to have a much higher chance of getting that
salary and the juicier fish.
The better your technical skills are, the better your marketing is, the bigger your
name is the more of those bigger companies, the fish that will pay you bigger salaries
are going to be out there that are going to be in your pool.
If you don’t have very many technical skills, if your technical skills are low, you don’t
have a very valuable skill and your marketing is crap you’re not going to have very many
places that you’re going to be able to get offers from, so the chances of you getting
lucky is going to be less.
Everything is probability in statistics, everything in life.
There’s always luck, luck factor but it’s about maximizing your luck.
That’s why I hate when people say, “This person got lucky.”
Bullshit!
They didn’t get lucky, they maximized their opportunity and because they had so many damn
lottery tickets that’s why they won.
Except for real lottery winners that doesn’t apply, you know what I’m saying.
Here’s one other piece I’ll throw in here.
Geographic location.
What is your pool?
If you are living in some small town in Podunk, Iowa maybe there’s only 1 or 2 employers
that have software development job.
Maybe there’s like a very small area on software development jobs.
If that’s where you’re going to live and that’s where you’re limiting your job
search, well, then you’re just artificially limited.
You’re not going to be able to raise your salary.
But if you go to San Francisco or you go to New York City or your whole—like the place
that you’re willing to search is the world now you’ve got a bigger chance.
You’re going to think about these.
This is again—there are a lot of ways to talk about it.
I can give you specific strategies to improve your skills to increase your salary, but I’d
rather give you the full principle behind it.
If you want to increase your salary this is what you’ve got to do.
You’ve got to figure out—your end goal is how could I get—the largest pool of offers
from the biggest fish possible.
That’s your end goal.
The way that you get that, is like I said, you expand your horizons so that you can look
outside, look all over the world, you can look in the expensive areas and you have to
take your technical skills times the marketing and that’s what’s going to get you there.
That’s going to create the megaphone that’s going to blast it out to all those people.
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Take care.