What's your salary? We want to know

(Max Woolf) #1

tl;dr: Please fill in the salary survey.

After lengthy discussions in the Slack group, I decided to run Birmingham’s first technologists’ salary survey and I want to know your salary and how happy you are with it.

It’s well known that Birmingham is a cheaper city to live in than London and that salaries are lower as a result, but it’s long been suspected that the disparity between Birmingham and other tech hubs are unusually large. To do away with speculation, it’s time to collect some cold, hard data.

Please fill in the anonymous salary survey

The survey is carried out by me (Max Woolf max@woolf.io) in a personal capacity. My employer will have no more access to the data than anybody else. The survey has been designed with anonymity in mind and will ask for no personally identifiable information.

Please pass this on to others who it may be appropriate to. The more data we gather, the more useful it is.

The anonymous results will be released under a Creative Commons licence in CSV format along with an analytical blog post written by me.

(Jon) #2

For (contractor) folks who work sporadically, is it best to indicate a “earnings potential” per year, or an actual income? It seems that the latter is more truthful, and the former is more useful. :smile_cat:

(Alex Russell) #3

Based on chats in the Slack group, it would seem that the main intention of this survey is to compare salaried workers for Birmingham employers. So if you’re not employed by a Birmingham employer, or you’re not salaried, you will likely skew the (intended) results.

I think there has been talk of expanding it next time (year?) to include the greater variety of working situations, but @maxehmookau wanted to keep it quick and simple to fill out to maximise the number of responses in order to draw more general conclusions.

(Jon) #4

But I pay myself a salary, and I live in Birmingham, so… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

But, fair enough, thanks Alex - I will leave it be for now! Maybe next year.

(Andy Wootton) #5

These are all good points. What is the objective of the salary review? Is it to find out how much people can be expected to ‘take home’ or how much employers are willing to pay for work to be done, via various classes of legal entities: an employee, a contractor, a contract agency, a software house, a consultancy? They are very different questions.

I found they were willing to pay about twice as much much for me as a contractor than I received as an employee but that only equated to a small amount more money for me, for a lot more hours away from home and it didn’t go up.