Starting out in tech, it’s hard to know if your expectations for salary growth are reasonable or not. While everyone’s journey is different, I will provide my software salary history as a baseline of reasonable expectation. My software salary growth (in the tech world at least) has not been anything remarkable, but it also has not been slow either.
Some things to be considered:
- All these salaries were while living in a medium cost-of-living area. I would expect these to be higher if it was in an area such as New York or SIlicon Valley, and possibly lower in the midwest.
- I had to switch companies twice to achieve larger raises in my pay.
- My skill progression wasn’t linear. I had to be flexible on the programming language and cloud environment that was used for the job.
- My pay increases started getting significantly larger in 2019. This was around the time that I started putting extra effort into increasing the depth and breadth of my software skills.
If you are trying to get your foot on the first rung of the ladder, try checking out which programming languages you should learn first!
Please leave any questions or comments on this post and I will try to respond. Thank you!
