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Of the handful of times I’ve seen people sharing their salary history, they are always very high. For context, a six-figure (£100,000) salary in the UK puts you in the top 4% of earners in the country.
This is where my concern starts – we only ever see these high outliers, so the sample size is incredibly skewed. Nobody is rushing to publish their £25,000 salary history, which means the curmudgeon in me can’t help but feel that these pages can sometimes read more like a humble brag than genuine advocacy, even if the author’s intent was entirely pure.
For the reader, this can be deflating, rather than empowering. A developer earning a perfectly respectable £50k (which already puts them in the top 15% of UK earners) might look at Jane Smith earning £105k and think, “Jesus, I’m doing terribly.”
But salary is highly subjective. It depends on where you live, the company you work for, the unique responsibilities of your role, what your peers earn, how hard you negotiate, and how supportive your manager is.
When you strip all that context away and just publish a high number, what is the reader supposed to do with it? If our developer goes to their manager and asks for a 100% pay rise because they saw Jane Smith online earning £105k, they’re going to be laughed out of the room. Because, without context, the raw numbers are useless.
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As always, wise words from Kev Quirk.
I publish my salary on my site, and I have ever since I was encouraged to do so by Jeremy Keith (who, I was surprised to discover, earns about half what I do despite being approximately twice as talented: salaries are, as Kev says, highly subjective and not-so comparable).
One thing I do to try to mitigate that is to publish my entire salary history for my current (i.e. software engineering) career. This shows progression, and development, and the shape of different industries (in particular how the academic sector compares to “big tech”). There’s a noticeable “jump” in my salary history if you look for it!
But I don’t know how well that’s contextualised. Should I be saying more, like: what relevant qualifications I had by each point (it’s possible to argue that almost none of my qualifications are “relevant”, because almost all the career-useful stuff I’ve ever learned didn’t come from my degrees etc… but some of my employers – and one in particular – attached value to my academic achievements so maybe they opened some doors?). Or, as Callum Rollo does, perhaps I should be balancing it against other factors (my salary, even when it was briefly ~£111,000, doesn’t seem so significant if you know how much I owe to the bank on our mortgage!).
I suppose what I’m saying is that I agree with Kev: context is everything here, and the picture’s distorted if only some subset of people publish their salaries. But I’m going to keep on publishing mine, because I think that salary transparency is an good thing overall, and the labour market gains a sliver of their employers’ power when they’re willing to talk openly about what they’re paid: whether pseudonymously via the likes of GlassDoor or openly on their publicly-accessible websites… every little helps, even where it skews the picture a little.
But thanks, Kev, for the reminder that the situation’s more-nuanced than some would have you believe, and for challenging us all to frame our transparency with a little bit of context.
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