11.10.2021

"It is more profitable to change jobs than to grow in the current place": how salaries are formed in the IT sector

Ivan Agarkov, Production Security Team Lead at Wargaming, wrote a big thread about salaries in the IT sphere. He spoke about the basic principles of the formation of the labor market, the importance of soft skills, the difference in salaries for women and men, and negotiations for an increase. We chose the main thing from Agarkov’s thread.

How are salaries formed in the IT sector?

  • According to Agarkov, the salary of an IT specialist does not depend on skills, experience and education. The main thing is the ability to sell yourself and your skills.
  • As an example, he cited the case of his former colleague, who was a “disgusting specialist”: “For a year of work, he did about nothing. But he could talk. [He] squeezed the maximum out of the company and left for +100% in a year. And yes, it’s just a normal story.”
  • Agarkov noted that when using the device in FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google), it is not for nothing that they advise hiring agents. They will help to negotiate and significantly raise the proposed salary.
  • Another tip for a salary increase is to change jobs as often as possible. According to Agarkov, it makes no sense for the company to promote the old employee much. He’s already doing his job. At the same time, HR managers have no problems hiring much more “expensive” candidates to close the right vacancy.
  • “Those who work longer receive less money than those who have come now,” Agarkov notes. This is unfair, but these are the realities of the market. Therefore, in a new place there is always a chance to get a solid increase to the current salary.
  • People who do not work in IT often wonder where programmers get such huge salaries. This is due to the fact that the IT industry is a global, not a local market.
  • If a good specialist knows English, he can always get a job in a Western company on the “remote”. According to Agarkov, there is now “a wild shortage of personnel and the wildest competition for employees abroad.”
  • Let’s say a Western company offers a developer $5,000 a month. The Russian firm will have to give him at least $5.5 thousand to agree to work in its office. At the same time, there are large players on the market like Yandex and Mail.ru Group, which in the pursuit of personnel can always offer even higher salaries.
  • Due to the prevailing market conditions, companies are ready to offer a lot of money, despite the fact that the hiring process itself is very expensive. Sometimes firms are ready to make huge concessions. Agarkov recalls how one day a new employee went on vacation immediately after hiring — he had already planned it.
  • Another important point is the difference in salaries between women and men. According to Agarkov, this is due to the fact that women in the CIS are often suppressed, asked to be like everyone else and keep a low profile. While men change several jobs in five years and get solid raises, women often stay in one place and are afraid to leave the company.
  • The user Varya does not fully agree with this thesis. She believes that this problem is much broader: “Even if [women] are not afraid and do not sit, they still get less for the most part (there are exceptions, and that’s cool). But it’s good that we started talking about it openly.”

How to ask for a raise correctly?

  • As Agarkov notes, the easiest way is to ask for a raise after you get managerial experience. However, there are other options.
  • The most important thing is to prepare convincing arguments for the manager, which he will then pass along the chain and be able to knock out an employee’s promotion. “It is important for a higher—level manager how exactly you can close the tasks of a division and how much you influence the success of this division,” Agarkov notes.
  • At the same time, the specialist cannot always formulate what benefits his work brings to the business. In this case, you can always ask your supervisor about it. But if he does not know the answer to this question, he may not be the best manager.
  • According to Agarkov, it is always better to talk about it directly. For example: “I want more money, what should I do to have more money? How does my job affect my salary?”

Conclusions

If we summarize all of the above, we can come to four conclusions:

At the same time, Agarkov notes that these rules are primarily applicable to specialists with at least 3-5 years of experience. At the initial stages of a career, an employee can easily increase his salary even by 200% without changing his place of work. However, it will be more and more difficult to grow every year.

Agarkov’s thread caused a violent reaction in the comments. Many agreed with the theses voiced about the importance of soft skills and knowledge of the English language.

Developer Nikolay Golub separately mentioned the term “boomerang”. The bottom line is that the specialist leaves for another company and receives +50% of the current salary, after which he returns to his old place and receives another + 30% from above. At the same time, he would hardly be able to get such an increase in his company without leaving it.

Dima Lashkov, technical director of TopFunnel, noted that there are “difficult-to-replace employees.” Such specialists can easily get a raise for themselves without changing their place of work. However, Agarkov does not fully agree with this opinion: “Bargaining can be perceived as blackmail, and we do not have irreplaceable ones.”

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