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I'm a software developer in Montreal with a little over 3.5 years experience working at a company.

Since i had gotten that job straight out of school the salary was rather low. I didn't mind at the time but 3 years later, there hadn't been much improvement in terms of pay. Most jr. programmers at the company with 3+ years under their belt were making around 50-55k tops, it seemed like the ceiling.

So now that i've left the company and spent a bit of time completing personal projects to pad my resume (i recently released an open source tool that has been received remarkably well) i am ready to start the job hunt again.

I've heard anecdotes that you should aim for a 10 or even 15% raise with new jobs, is that a fair thing to ask for? That would put me at around 60-62k salary-wise.

I looked up some statistics and it seems like 65k is considered a high wage for a run of the mill junior programmer, or at least in the upper bracket... So is 62k asking too much?

I look at the salaries software developers make in the states and it annoys me that our salaries in Canada have such a low ceiling. I guess for future salary growth i'd need to transition to a management role or something.

I want to improve on my salary because it definitely undervalued the work i did at that previous company but i also do not want to come off as greedy and ask for too much.

Any advice appreciated.

nuk
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    So do you consider yourself still only a Junior Programmer, and don't plan to apply to more intermediate positions? You have some experience at a company, and now a successful open source project, it wouldn't hurt to aim higher. – Kupo Mar 11 '20 at 17:54
  • 3.5 years in a specialized industry job has given me some good 3d maths skills (we did a lot of matrix/vector maths and projection stuff at that job) but i guess i just feel like i didn't grow as much as i would have liked to while i was there. i would definitely consider myself somewhat intermediate and i think i'm due for a pay bump, i guess my big question is what's a reasonable pay increase. – nuk Mar 11 '20 at 18:09
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    Does this answer your question? How can I determine a reasonable salary to ask for? – gnat Mar 11 '20 at 18:16
  • @nuk in short? The one you can get.You can play witha lot of stats, websites, ask people, but in reality you will be individually weighted and measured when it comes to pay. – Aida Paul Mar 11 '20 at 18:26

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People pay too much attention to the title and not enough to the value they deliver to a company.

"Is getting paid $X/year too much or little for position Y?"

Depends on how much value you're generating to the company! I mean, I've seen junior developers that are slow. They take forever to learn things, they suck up a lot of senior dev time trying to walk them through relatively trivial things, and are generally just a drag on the department. I've seen junior developers that are quick. They take initiative and learn everything they can about what they're working on, their conversations with senior devs seem to fly, and the biggest problem is finding stuff for them to work on rapidly enough that they're in a position to work on.

Trying to treat both of them as "junior developers" in the same basket in terms of "fair salary" is ridiculous. If the first came up to me and said, "I'm thinking about asking for a raise, because I'm getting paid 5% less than the average Junior Dev", I'd contemplate suggesting getting a raise by switching companies. If the second came up to me and said, "I'm thinking of asking for a raise because I'm only getting paid an average Junior Dev salary," I'd probably talk with the boss and brag them up quite a bit and say that I don't think we want to lose their raw talent.

So... is $62k too much for you? No idea. Nobody here can possibly answer that. You have to figure out what sort of value you add to the company, or can add to other prospective companies.

Kevin
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  • Right, but i guess my question focuses more on the general strategy for salary negotiations. If i made 55k at my last job and switched to a new job in a similar role, i assume it's common practice to ask for a higher salary than the one in my previous job. The issue is, how much of a bump can you aim for without overshooting? – nuk Mar 16 '20 at 04:48
  • Actually, your previous salary doesn't have much bearing on things. (If it helps, think of it this way: if you were making 40k instead of 55k, does that mean your new boss should pay you less at the new job, even if you're the same person?) And, well, salary negotiations are at the tail end of the interview. If after meeting you, the hiring manager says to themself: "Holy frick, that person is amazing - we need them on our team!", then they'll jump through hoops to get you your requested salary; if they merely think, "Eh, they'll do," then you can bet they're not going to budge on offerings – Kevin Mar 16 '20 at 13:02
  • Well i mean, it should have a bearing on what my lowest acceptable salary would be, no? It would be piss poor strategy to accept a new job with a salary the same (or lower than) the salary i previously had.

    Finding a new job should be an opportunity to improve on your salary and also find a job that aligns more with your other goals (self improvement, environment, type of work, etc). So i'm less concerned with "what should X position make" and moreso concerned with how much i can reasonably request given my growth as a programmer from my last job.

     – nuk Mar 17 '20 at 15:15
  • @nuk - Uh, no. You're still not getting this. Let me give you two examples. Let's say you were drastically overpaid in that job you quit. Do you think it's "piss-poor strategy" to turn down a new offer where you're merely slightly overpaid, simply because it's less than the drastically overpaid you were getting before? Or let's say you were paid a fifth of what you were worth to the company - do you think getting a "15% raise" would actually be what you should be shooting for? What value will you add to a company? How well can you sell that addition? That's what determines salary. – Kevin Mar 17 '20 at 16:19
  • If i were in theory being overpaid, which is a weird premise because our salaries grew incrementally based on various perf reviews, then how would i even know that?

    I would not accept a job where their immediate offer was even 1% less than my prior compensation if they weren't willing to budge on it.

     – nuk Mar 18 '20 at 01:42