Salary negotiation is crucial, and the experts out there have some useful pointers for those who are starting out in their careers.
“You should try to negotiate your salary for a few reasons,” says New York Times bestselling author Ramit Sethi. “The first is that a single $5,000 raise in your 20s, if you properly invest it, can be worth more than a million over the course of your career.”
There are 2 key strategies to negotiating a salary:
The Noel Smith-Wenkle Approach: This approach advises that you don’t tell the employer how much you want.
The Jack Chapman Method: This method says to only discuss salary negotiations after you’ve been offered the job, and to always let the other side make the first offer.
It’s also very important to research the market, the company and the value of your skills beforehand. This means you can counter any offer you get with a well-informed response.
Sethi notes that “80% of the work of negotiating should be done even before you walk into the room”. You need to know the general range of salary for the positions you’ve just been offered. This information puts you in a stronger bargaining position. It’s also useful to have a developer portfolio, to show your worth to potential employers. Companies want to see what you’re capable of, and what you can bring to their team.
USA: According to CNBC, the top-earning summer interns for 2017 were at tech company Facebook. Glassdoor reports that they earned an average of $8000 dollars per month. This is equivalent to an annual salary of $96 000 - while the average American only makes $51,350 per year working full-time!
UK: Statistics from CW Jobs in 2018 showed that the average salary for a web developer in the United Kingdom is £47,500.
South Africa: PayScale reports that senior software engineers in South Africa can earn an average hourly rate of R320. This translates to an average annual IT salary of R567,996 a year.
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These programming languages are in high demand, so learning them make you more likely to attract appealing job offers and a good salary.
• A high-level, versatile language
• Growing rapidly in popularity
• Estimates say that by 2019 the number of active developers in Python will outstrip those in other languages
Average salary: Payscale estimates a yearly average of $91,062 for data scientists working in Python.
• Released by Google in 2009
• A popular innovation from the Google brand
Average salary: Currently estimated at $79,985 per year for Go developers.
• Developed by Microsoft
• Used in most Microsoft products
• The application of Microsoft’s .NET software framework
Average salary: C# developers can expect an average of $79,954 per year.
• Closely associated with machine learning
• Good data processing and statistical analysis capabilities
Average salary: Currently estimated at $77,722 per year.
• Very well-established
• Relatively simple to learn
• Widely used by big multinational companies
Average salary: Estimated at $73,268 per year.
