That said, I have found that there has been a rash of companies / recruiters reaching out to relatively senior people making offers that wouldn't have been acceptable a decade ago, much less in 2023. I recently had one reach out to me (I'm in Colorado, so they're legally obligated to provide a salary range) about a job that required a very specialized skillset at a senior level that I happen to have (although it's nothing to do with what I do /now/), and the top of the salary range was $20k/yr less than what I was making doing that same work in 2014, almost a decade ago and more than $100k/yr less than I make now. There's a HUGE disconnect between management at most companies, especially in HR roles, and the actual market for specialized technical labor. At least in the US, I attribute this to HR roles treating Department of Labor stats like the gospel, when job categories in DoL aren't modernized and therefore cover such a broad range of subjobs that they are diluted and meaningless, while at the same time average salary is heavily skewed by the fact that largest employer in the US across almost all job categories is the federal government, which has a notoriously low payscale for skilled labor (which attracts exactly the sort of toads on a log you'd expect).
I am not currently in the market for a new job, but I switched roles at the beginning of 2022 and I made it a point of starting my conversations with recruiters by telling them rather directly "I have no concerns about my ability to do whatever is necessary within the job, my only question is are you willing to pay me what I'm worth?" The company I eventually accepted a position at had to go through a lot of internal bureaucracy to make my offer, but only put me through one round of interviewing before they did the legwork to make sure they could make it worth my while before running me through their entire process. I think it's especially rich that HR people think you're wasting /their/ time when they make you an insultingly low offer after extensive interviewing, especially considering there's a massive skills gap between tech workers and HR folks (who are a dime a dozen).
I think this has an angle of the artificially created "crisis/layoffs" headlines, which never clarify that there is a huge lack of senior people in the market, much bigger than any layoff could produce. In this way, they managed to trick a few people into lower paid jobs.
> I have no concerns about my ability to do whatever is necessary within the job, my only question is are you willing to pay me what I'm worth?
That is a great line to start with. I'm not looking into a new job right now, but certainly am being upfront to any recruiter that reaches out, and asking the salary and full details of the company (e.g. in case they are not upfront with the company name, which is a massive red flag to me).
I agree with everything up until this portion. I think HR can be a very difficult job, in a way that's quite similar to say security positions. If an HR person excels at their job-- you will never see them, you will never interact with them outside of paperwork, and you will never need to ask them anything. So it can be very easy to assume HR is doing nothing. In reality good HR manages multiple complex, competing organizational systems (office politics, board concerns, retention, legal, recruiting) and is expected to manage them in such a way that none of the competing organizational systems are even aware of the friction, while having none of the power to actually change anything by themselves.
The pay differential between these roles is mainly a factor of supply and demand, not necessarily due to the relative difficulty of actually doing the jobs. Most jobs which are "social" rather than "technical" are actually harder in some way, but they have as massively lower barrier of entry from a credentials/skills perspective so tend to be significantly lower paid than "technical" jobs.
Digging ditches is a lot harder than writing code all day in an air-conditioned office, yet ditch diggers who aren't credentialed machine operators get paid significantly less than software developers because the only qualification barrier to be a ditch digger is to not be physically disabled or unalive, if you can fog a mirror and walk from the truck to the hole to be dug and operate a hand shovel, you can dig a ditch.
Supply/demand doesn't care how difficult your job is, it only cares how many people are capable of doing it compared to the number of people needed to perform it. In a very dollars and cents sort of way, the time of a technically skilled person is more valuable than the time of an HR person, which is why it's very rich that they think you're wasting /their/ time, rather than the other way around in these situations. The candidate's time is actually more valuable in demand dollars than the HR person's time, especially recruiters which are one of the lowest barrier roles you can have in HR.
Not it isn't. I haven't dug ditches, but I've done other physical labor. At the end of the day your body is exhausted, but your mind is still sharp and ready for more. By contrast when programming all day your mind is exhausted, but your body is ready for more. Different types of hard, but both are very hard in their own way.
Actually most ditch digging these days is done with a machine. I don't know how hard that is, but I assume it moves more to the repetitive mental work side.
There's hard as in effortful, which certainly you could make the argument that many jobs eclipse software or other technical positions.
And there's hard as in difficult, or technical, or complicated, etc. This is more difficult to describe since what's complex or impossible to one person is trivial for another.
The second bucket is how most technical jobs play out. It's easy to write off the "get skilled" requirement of these jobs, but that's usually a difficult endeavour itself, usually involving a few years of higher education (in the normal case)
It has nothing to do with difficulty. There is simply more demand for software engineers than hardware engineers and supply & demand takes care of the rest.
I switched from being a Windows admin to a Solaris admin in the 90s and got a pay bump of something like 60%
In many ways, I found Solaris to be easier. Windows was wildly unstable in the 90s.
This is heavily reflected in hardware security. Very few devices are not tire fires, even before IoT took off. My best guess as to why is that many hardware engineers are next to the hardware in Shenzhen and their wages act as an anchor for the rest of the industry. Either that or I've listened to too many bunnie talks and played too much Shenzhen I/O.
My theory is it comes down to the margins on software vs hardware products. If you look at software, in a certain sense, your unit margins are infinite - your variable costs are nothing(well, besides the literal bandwidth) to copy a piece of code and sell it to a second customer. With hardware, for every unit of your product, you have raw material cost, mfg, transport, etc. At scale, there's less $ to go around.
I always ask what they're targeting first, but if they decide to be cagey, I'll throw out a range where the low end is comfortably above what I'm currently making, enough that I would actually consider the offer.
I already get paid pretty well, so I think this has saved myself and others quite a lot of time.
(I also tend to reply to recruiter emails with a polite "no, thanks, but can you share the pay range for this role?". Maybe half reply with numbers, which is enough to keep a good sense of where the market is at.)
In my case, they knew my current salary and expected salary from the first call.
They didn’t commit to anything beforehand, and maybe that’s my mistake. OTOH it is quite a bet to spend a lot of someones (mine, in this case) betting they’re going to accept a smaller salary just for the privilege of working for you.
I won't even interview without a salary range being provided and then acknowledging my minimum. Otherwise it's a waste of everyones time. Any company that has an issue with this is going to be difficult to work for and treat you like you are lucky to be there.
Was bit bummed about this, I would love to work for canonical as they do great stuff and their embedded Linux offering is a great product. Just doesn't really make sense sadly.
Last year, I did 8 interviews (including 4 technical assessments and quizzes) to get an offer from AMD (in Germany) as a software engineer. For completeness, they reached out to me. I wasn't really looking at the time.
When I got the offer, salary+bonus was less than what I had at the time (a lot less now) living in a similar cost place, so I rejected the offer, obviously.
In the final call, the HR person implied more than once that I was a time-waster for going through the whole process just to get the offer and then say "no" to it, that I wasn't "committed" as I said...