The reality is I spend time applying for a job which claims a "competitive" salary for a "network architect", and eventually find it's in the 35-45k range "depending on skills"

Those companies then run off to government saying "we can't employ anyone"

Fortunately more and more job listings on linked in are listing ballpark salaries so it's easy to ignore them, there's a few coming up which are reasonable salaries for what they want too IMO, so that's good.

I get why employer's tendency is to withhold pay information. But ultimately, it's a waste of my time and their time if we're not close enough. So disclosure seems win/win.

Employers are still used to an employer's market, where they could string desperate applicants along, then hit them with, "This is the salary, take it or leave it." They're slow to adjust to today's job market.

Not when the objective is to increase the companies Visa quota not to find talent at market rate.

I assume you're not in the USA? As a network architect, even non-coastal jobs are easily had for $120,000 and go up from there...

I don't think that's true at all. If it were so easy, why don't I have one? More people are paid below $110k than above (median).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't seem to agree with you: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

They report a median of $116k.

Ok, so it's $6k off. That's still $4k short of the $120k mentioned. Meaning you still have more people making under that amount. Especially when accounting for location (they state midwest).

How big an environment are we talking about? More then about 50 servers, you're underpaid if you aren't making 6 figures.

I don't think it's controversial to assume that most non-helpdesk IT staff are being underpaid for the value they bring to their companies.

I'm not a network administrator. I have training in that space. If it were really that easy to find a job paying that, then I would go do it.

You should look around.

I have. Nothing has panned out. Very few things have even look good.

Levels.fyi Teamblind.com Leetcode.com

study these 3 for 6 months and you will easily get over 200k.

I can't. My family mostly consumes all my free time. I'm also not able to relocate since my wife doesn't want to. $200k would be highly unlikely in my area.

PS I hate how people say 'easily' for salaries that are basically double the median for devs. If it was easy, everyone would have it.

I've seen decent salaries in the UK advertised, hell I even had an interview for a 2nd line support role, fully remote, for £75k ($100k) - a small pay rise, but far less varied and thus less interesting than what I currently do, so I decided to thank them for the opportunity during the interview and put them in touch with someone I knew.

For an interesting job I could be happy with £75k. In fact in the last 20 minutes I've had contact on linkedin for a pre-sales network architect, which sounds like it could be varied and relatively interesting.

However they only list "competitive" as the salary, which I would assume means £35k ($50k)

Agreed. I'd be happy to see a range, any range, rather than vagueness.

My experience is that once you remove the "rockstar" from a team (and by this I mean that they leave) the other employees take over their tasks and responsibilities without issues, and everything works fine. Which makes me believe the rockstar effect is quite often just a myth.

I have similar experiences. Some people like to be in the forefront. Others, like me, fill in the gaps and don't care about being "seen". When I lead, it's because there's a need for my leadership. I don't micromanage. I do what is necessary for the team to perform. That's it. If someone else needs or wants to fill that leadership role, then I allow them to take the spotlight.

yup, it's easy to "do it all yourself". The real rockstars are the ones who quietly mentor the other team members over and over again until they are up to speed on their own.

I've also noticed a tendency of "rockstar" types to entrench themselves. They'll bury some esoteric process/scripting/infrastructure or combination of the three somewhere knowing that it's a bit fragile but easy to fix. All so they can just say, "I fixed it" after the rest of the engineers have been trying to keep production running for 4 days.

The actual reality is that your salary is not tied to your value, but to your negotiation skills (carried mostly by your leverage when you receive the offer)

Yes, but your ability to negotiate is directly tied to your value to the company. You can't negotiate without any leverage.

This is what most people get wrong in this field. The only relationship between cost of labor and value is the upper bound. Which means no for-profit company would hire someone for less value than what they expect to get in return for that person.

But the actual cost of labor (your compensation) is dictated by market forces just like any other commodity. Why would anyone hire you at $100k/year if they have someone else, just as good as you, that they can hire at $50k/year?

Your ability to negotiate is tied to your leverage, which more often than not is competing offers (including your current job). That has absolutely nothing to do with value, other than the upper bound I mentioned above.

"The reality is that not everyone brings equal value to an org. Some are rockstars and others are meh. It’s natural, and you should be incentivized to improve."

I agree. But that's not incompatible with transparent pay. If this other person is producing more value and getting paid more, great. But show me how that value is twice my own. Those measurements should be going on in performance reviews. Largely, nobody cares to do this in a just way. It's basically just opinions, which are easily biased.

The way to do this fairly and transparently is piecemeal pay. Just like how instead of paying a factory worker £x per hour you can pay £y per widget. If superstar Bob ships 10x widgets he gets 10x pay and everyone will agree it is fair. Note CEO total compensation is usually £x per y% increase in share price or revenue. Salespeople get x% for each sale, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

You could always make things easier with min wage regs etc by giving a low living base wage and then a generous bonus based on what you ship.

The performance measures for software dev are already extremely subjective. "Widgets" only work if they are the same. Each software functionally is vastly different in scope and complexity. The quality is very subjective too. Did they build it to be extensible/future-proof? Maybe that's good, or maybe that's a waste by your manager's opinion.

right but most people don't actually want this unless base pay already covers all their cash flow needs. quality of life is much better with a consistent $80k salary than making $100k on average but with huge variance.

And the reality is that wages don't follow the "rockstarability" of employees but whatever crap the employer could get away with at the time of hiring. Lying and misleading included in that.

This is a bs argument. If there is actually a "rockstar" and a "meh", they should be at different levels with clear payscale.

Why is it that you think that? For a small to mid sized company, developer roles of [Junior Dev, Dev, Senior Dev, Principal Dev, Architect] are not uncommon. In that scale, someone who "is an individual contributor, with the ability to mentor others" fits into "Senior Dev". It is entirely possible to be _amazing_ as an individual contributor... or be just barely able to fulfill the role. But moving up in the ladder isn't correct, since that indicates a change in roles.

For large companies, that distinguish between "role" and "level", sure. But a LOT of companies aren't big enough to do that.

Rockstar/meh is perhaps rather untactful or even false way to describe situation. But level thing is not gonna solve the issue because company can't keep too much of difference in level if they both have same "X" years of experience. It will again lead to visible dissatisfaction or even lawsuits.

That's BS. I can't sue my company because I'm a midlevel dev with 10 years experience and an MS, just because a coworker of mine who started at the same time is 3 levels above me in a manager role probably making 2x what I do.

My dissatisfaction has nothing to do with that person's performance. In fact, I was glad they gave him a distinguished rating when we worked together - he deserved it. What I do have a problem with is that the department breaks enterprise policy by mandating a manager pick someone for a bad rating to balance out the high rating. They picked me. My dissatisfaction is solely with the broken policies and not with someone being justly rewarded.

> can't keep too much of difference in level if they both have same "X" years of experience.

This is not true in general.