1

I just had a job interview for what would be my first full-time job (as a junior back-end engineer in Munich - prior to this I was studying at an engineering school 'Epita'). During the interview I was asked what salary I wanted.

I was unsure how to answer, but I have agreed to email them back this week with my response.

How can I find out the typical salary for a given role and how should I best communicate my salary requirement in the email?

seventyeightist
  • 1,407
  • 13
  • 15
Grégoire
  • 29
  • 1
  • Did you already give them an answer? If yes, are you planning on asking for a different salary? – sf02 Oct 17 '19 at 17:24
  • Nope I didn't answer yet (I have to send an email this week) – Grégoire Oct 17 '19 at 17:25
  • 1
    Welcome to workplace.se! A specific question like "average salary for X role in Y location" is likely to be too individual to be on-topic here, but your question could perhaps be edited to reflect a more general sense of "how to determine the level of salary to ask for ..." etc. Are you asking us for a specific number or an approach to answering that (interview/email) question? – seventyeightist Oct 17 '19 at 17:42
  • @seventyeightist Ok, sorry It is my first time posting on Workplace ^^ I think both answer would be interesting. – Grégoire Oct 17 '19 at 17:53
  • 1
    Unfortunately if we allowed this sort of question, we would get thousands of them. Different ones for Munich, Nuremburg, Regensberg, Berchtesgarten - and for each one a question for junior back end engineer, senior front end, intermediate full stack - and that's just in software development. What you might do is edit to ask if there is a website that lets you find typical salaries in Europe. – DJClayworth Oct 17 '19 at 18:06
  • Simple. You should have answered with the salary you wanted... different question is what the average salary is on your location, something that can be found with a Google query (what have your searches yielded so far?) – DarkCygnus Oct 17 '19 at 18:07
  • @Grégoire just to be clear - I was suggesting you edit your question to be more generally applicable (since I wrote that, a couple of others have commented with a similar thing). We can't answer with an individual number but can probably answer (if you edit the Q) with e.g. how to find out typical salaries for a role, how to respond to a hiring manager asking for your preferred salary (e.g. should you name a number right away, give a range, give a general comment that doesn't name a specific number? I don't know the best answer to that but others will!), etc. – seventyeightist Oct 17 '19 at 18:20
  • I've proposed an edit to the question that I think more closely reflects what we can answer here (without changing the meaning substantially). It is 'awaiting peer review' but feel free to roll it back if it doesn't suit. – seventyeightist Oct 17 '19 at 19:11
  • https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary/results?l=Berlin%2c+Germany&ed=1&ex=0&ff=1&dr%5B0%5D=BackendDeveloper&tl%5B0%5D= – Daniel Roseman Oct 17 '19 at 20:12
  • Possible duplicate of How can I determine a reasonable salary to ask for? – gnat Oct 17 '19 at 21:42

2 Answers2

1

There are websites that provide such statistics, including StackOverflow jobs or Glassdoor. Googling something like "[job title] [location] salary" can be helpful as well.

That being said, only you know how much you are worth. You should explore some of the salary negotiation questions on this website to get a feeling of the standard of professional behavior.

aaaaa says reinstate Monica
  • 8,942
  • 4
  • 32
  • 44
1

If you have friends or upperclassmen from school who work in a similar field in a similar location, you can ask them for advice on what they are being paid. Based on that, you can go to the company and say something like "after talking to some friends of mine in a similar industry with similar experience, I feel like I should be asking [this much]", and then see what they say. Your number probably won't be too far off the real "correct" number assuming your data from your friends is recent (i.e. don't ask someone 10 years older than you, they'll give you a number that's way too low because wages rise over time).

Ertai87
  • 45,600
  • 9
  • 73
  • 144