Negotiating your first IT salary as a developer
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.
Comparing IT salaries globally
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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