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I have offered to do a talk at my old university’s 'employabilty fair' ten years after graduation, where am I now. With some advice on traps to avoid, how to make the transition from university to work life etc., with some anecdotes along the way type thing. Within the realms of software engineering.

The person who asked me to do the talk knows my current salary and thinks I should put this number on the first slide to grab their attention in a 'this is what you could aim for' type way. But I feel it's a bit crass. I don't mind sharing my salary with the students if they ask, but I think it's a bit odd to stick it on the first slide.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this that could help me make this decision?

Update

I discussed this with some recent grads in my company, and they agreed that I should not put the salary in the talk. The talk ended up going over very well; no one asked about my salary and I didn't see anyone suddenly become more engaged after I pointed to the salaries in the Glassdoor table. Perhaps a couple students might have listened more intently if I had framed it as "I earn X and this is how you can do to" but I'm glad I didn't; the focus of my talk was for the students that love software engineering.

cag51
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chrispepper1989
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9 Answers9

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I agree with you. I feel the request to put your salary on a slide (on the first slide, no less!) is rather unexpected, and quite frankly does not speak highly about the professionalism of your contact. I would decline this, for multiple reasons:

  • Your salary is nobody's business. Not sure what more there is to say about this.
  • Students are, for the largest part, intelligent adults. Many would take this exactly for what it's meant to be - rather crude marketing and hype generation. This would detract from the message you actually want to transport, and would undermine your following talk.
  • Focusing so much on how much you make is arguably not the best way to motivate young people for a specific career path anyway. If you talk about why you love your job (if you do) will encourage more people than a six-digits salary number. More importantly, it will probably encourage the people who will actually be happy doing your job, not the ones who would end up wealthy and miserable.

You can of course provide a salary range as proposed by other answers, but I would not emphasize this point much (and base it on third-party data, such as Glassdoor, not just your own experience).

CodyBugstein
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xLeitix
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    Funnily enough I completely forgot I already had a side with a glass door table on it that has salary averages, the reason I'd forgotten it was because I included it for the job satisfaction column! – chrispepper1989 Mar 05 '19 at 12:13
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    About the third bullet point, I beg to differ. Salary is objective. It's a number that everyone can measure + easily judge how valuable that number is to themselves. On the other hand personal enjoyment is harder to measure + varies from person to person. Maybe I love being a postman, but that doesn't mean you will, and you won't know until you try my job. Aiming for a particular career path because someone else thoroughly enjoys it is a dangerous place to be. – Allure Mar 05 '19 at 12:34
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    @Allure Software engineering salary range is a joke...it really needs to come with a distribution curve to be of any use at all. Overall compensation varies wildly (do you get meals and a free shuttle bus, or do you only get the cheapest, worst health care plan?), "hourly rate" is not related at all to salary (just how many hours do they expect you to be there, anyway?), and then there's the good old "everyone hired at the same level receives the same compensation"...but not everyone gets hired at the same level, even when they have the same qualifications. – user3067860 Mar 05 '19 at 15:16
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    Not discussing salary is a trained response that benefits only one side, the business you work for. We should be changing that. It is like believing that money does not buy happiness. Money does buy happiness by giving people piece of mind and the ability to be able to pivot to things they enjoy. – NDEthos Mar 05 '19 at 15:25
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    As mentioned above, I don't have an issue discussing salary, and they are free to ask me, I just think its unusual to start the conversation I'm X and I earn Y. it could easily come across smug. While I agree that Salary ranges are confusing, the Median salary offered by glass door is closer to useful and it certainly gets across the point you will be able to pay the bills' – chrispepper1989 Mar 05 '19 at 16:03
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    @Allure That's why I said "talk about why you love your job" - if I were to talk about why I love being an academic I would explain what aspects of the job are great (and which aren't), and you would be able to judge for yourself if that sounds appealing to you as well. A typical salary for academics can easily be looked up, the benefit for the audience is rather small. You are right that what I specifically make is an objective number, but it's also completely useless to my audience since they will likely not end up at the same university with the same sort of contract. – xLeitix Mar 05 '19 at 16:18
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    I wouldn't say necessarily that it's no one's business. Many of us are public employees, and our salaries are (at least where I am in the US) a matter of public record. As a tax payer I should know what my money is going to. That said, there's a huge difference between it being available and shouting it off a rooftop (besides of course not being directly comparable to an industry salary, given the very different working hours/conditions) – user0721090601 Mar 05 '19 at 17:09
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    "Your salary is nobody's business" This is not the same as "you should not share it with people unasked" – Azor Ahai -him- Mar 05 '19 at 17:53
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    "Your salary is nobody's business." Not in academia. I've always known my boss's and co-workers salaries, even as a grad student. It's necessary for budgets in grant applications. You just ask them or the department admin. – user71659 Mar 06 '19 at 01:01
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    @NDEthos There are studies on the extent to which money buys happiness. If I recall correctly, it very much does until you reach a “middle class” income and then much less so. – Simd Mar 06 '19 at 08:06
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    Anyone who decides on software engineering as a profession because of the money is probably going to be a bad software engineer; you're only going to be any good at it if you are motivated by other things. It's like suggesting someone should become a professional footballer because it pays well. Also, salaries vary immensely; if you're prepared to endure a commute into central London you can earn a lot more than if you actually want a life. So demonstrate that software engineers are in demand and that good salaries are on offer, but don't make it your main selling point. – Michael Kay Mar 06 '19 at 09:09
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    @NDEthos People usually don't discuss salary with strangers because they don't want to invite comparison - they want to avoid both jealousy (if salary is high) and pity (if salary is low). Money is a sensitive topic. – Sulthan Mar 06 '19 at 21:49
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    Update, the talk went down very well, no one asked about my salary and I didn't see anyone suddenly become more engaged after I pointed to the salaries in the Glass door table. There were a few very engaged students who I think will do just fine, they definitely seemed more interested in my day to day and whether I actually enjoyed it :p it was good to see – chrispepper1989 Mar 07 '19 at 09:57
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    @chrispepper1989 you might add this concluding anecdote back into the original question? It seems useful context. – StayOnTarget Mar 07 '19 at 14:47
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    This is a really bad answer. – Viliami Mar 09 '19 at 10:48
  • @Sulthan I mostly try to avoid other people deciding how and why I should be spending my money. A lot of people love to do it "Oh, he makes X, he should be buying A and B and spending on C, instead of what he does now" is something a hear too often. And there is of course the other armchair economists going "If I was making X, I'd be much better of than him because I'd be doing A and B with my money" that's usually without ever knowing or caring what the person spends on or saves for. Plenty of people are apparently "more deserving" of the money that others are making. – VLAZ Mar 10 '19 at 13:24
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    @NDEthos In the OP's country, it is not "a trained response that only benefits the company", it is a core piece of cultural etiquette. We don't do salary resentment over here, and we achieve that by not asking how much people make, and not telling people how much you make. It's not relevant to anything anyway. – Lightness Races in Orbit Mar 11 '19 at 00:49
  • "If you talk about why you love your job (if you do) will encourage more people than a six-digits salary number" -> a six-digit salary might convince students that getting a degree in underwater basket weaving is not the best idea, no matter how much they like it. – JonathanReez Mar 11 '19 at 01:51
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    @chrispepper1989 It's good to hear that your talk went well! – xLeitix Mar 11 '19 at 12:38
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I would think you can share the salary "Range", but I, like you, would not put it on the first slide.

ie after 3 years experience you could expect xxx to yyy as a zzzzzz.

This answers a second question that the OP had in the original post, now edited:

Sometimes students like to hear about a "real" problem and "how" it was solved - that process is usually interesting and can give them a "focus" of why they have to study xxxx.

Solar Mike
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  • I like your suggestion, I don't really have anything like that yet and I was feeling the presentation was lacking heart! So thanks – chrispepper1989 Mar 05 '19 at 12:15
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    The Glass Door chart probably has medians. Median is anyway the right measure for salary as mean can be skewed easily by a couple of outliers. – Bob Brown Mar 05 '19 at 13:20
  • @BobBrown what glassdoor - you've lost me? I tend to find HR always give a salary range for x years of experience, y qualifications etc – Solar Mike Mar 05 '19 at 13:26
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    @SolarMike Glassdoor.com is a job search web site mentioned in a comment to another answer. Among many other things, they publish median salary information for many occupations. The real point of my comment is that median is the right measure when talking about salaries. – Bob Brown Mar 05 '19 at 13:32
  • @BobBrown then you need to get that median idea across to lots of HR people who still produce tables with ranges for relevant qualifications and years of experience... Just received one recently - nice table but no median values shown... – Solar Mike Mar 05 '19 at 13:34
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    @SolarMike I'm workin' on it! HR people in large organizations often administer salaries on a "Grade and Step" system. So, an associate professor of computer science might be "Grade 15." A newly-appoint associate prof would start at "Step 1" of grade 15 and advance until "topped out" at the highest step in the grade. However, for comparing salaries across institutions, I want to know the median salary across the whole group and at each institution. – Bob Brown Mar 05 '19 at 13:55
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As a statistician, I consider that an unrepresentative sample of one is unlikely to convey any useful information at all. You would mislead your audience if you presented them with such stuff.

Those of us with experience of the world know that amazingly high salaries are sometimes available to amazingly under-qualified people. So there is no point in presenting that stuff either.

What I wish someone had told me when I was aged about 20 is what kind of life goes with particular professions. So, in your case: what is it like to be a software engineer? Can you spend your whole career doing that? or, do you need to be on the lookout for something better/ less stressful / more stressful but better paid etc? Where do you hope to be in 10 years time? What is the career path? Is there a career path? If I do moderately well as a software engineer, what sort of place will I be living in?

Your actual salary is irrelevant.

JeremyC
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Some universities (such as the one where I work) publish their pay scales. There's a level of abstraction between scale points and job titles but with a quick check of the salary bands in job adverts you could use the staff they're familiar with as a point of reference: "After a couple of years in industry I'm earning about as much as a lecturer". The audience can consider that useful information in itself, or they can go to the pay scales to see what range that works out to. In practice numbers on a salary don't necessarily mean all that much to undergrads anyway with taxes etc. to take into account, so a point of reference may be better anyway.

I use this approach myself as a postdoc with an industry job in the past.

Chris H
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    The college I work for is a state school, and so falls under "Sunshine laws" - our name, job title, and current annual salary are available on request. – ivanivan Mar 05 '19 at 15:25
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    The pay scales are standardized across the UK higher education sector, aren't they? (With a separate scale for London, because everybody knows that's the only place in the UK where the cost of living is higher than average.) – David Richerby Mar 06 '19 at 12:03
  • @DavidRicherby to some extent they are. The UK tag is new since I answered so I didn't assume a location. I hear your subtext; I'm only a bit luckier than you in that regard. – Chris H Mar 06 '19 at 12:07
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As far as I can see, none of the other answers mentions the UK aspect.

In the UK, you just don't go around asking people what their salary is. In this social context, if they're literally asking you to tell this class what you earn, that request is unreasonable. However, it would seem useful to include a typical salary for a position similar to yours. (Even if you don't think it's useful, the students don't have your experience and have a bunch of debt to pay off, so will most likely care a lot about this.)

That's a win-win: it avoids you having to reveal information that is considered very private in the UK, and it's actually more representative for the students. There are all kinds of reasons that your individual salary could be unusually high or low.

David Richerby
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At most I would publish a range from glassdoor or some other online career place. I personally wouldn't put it on the first slide either.

Depending on where you live, you might end up selling the salary short or giving them a nearly impossible target. In most regions of the US (not sure if this applies in the UK), salaries are adjusted for cost of living. I make only half as much as one of the kids I went to school with: I live in a moderate cost of living area (rural New Hampshire), and he lives in New York City. When I moved to my current locale, I got a 20% "raise" that ended up being only a minor raise in my take home because my bills and whatnot are higher.

If you are trying to sell the profession, I might compare it with another field, something like "software engineers make xx% more than mechanical engineers" with a reference.

Eskimoalva
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I see that the talk already occurred, so this answer may be of less value. Still I feel it is worthwhile to share;

As a former student I think sharing some kind of salary information would've been extremely appreciated. In University many people spoke of the "astronomical" amounts you could make and likewise the "terrible underpaying" that occurred in the industry.

The thing that almost never happened was hearing from a real working person about their real salary and explaining how they got there.

I think this could ground some students' expectations and raise others. And the ability to do this and offer a high quality analysis of how it happened, what career trajectory was needed, how you got that trajectory, how you aligned with your passions, what life principles you had that led to the outcome, etc. would make for a very interesting and more importantly useful talk that the general student population is starving for.

299792458
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Sidharth Ghoshal
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I would not recommend you share your salary.

Instead, why do not try the approach of sharing the milestones you have achieved since graduation? Do not hide the struggles so you can empathize with your audience but also highlight why you do not regret studying at your University.

I am pretty sure you did not learn everything at the school, but some elements were key for you to be the person you are today.

Will AE
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    Welcome to Academia.SE. I am not sure that this answers the question -- your first paragraph answers the question, but gives no justification. You then take a left turn into "general advice", which was unsolicited and is difficult to do when OP is a successful professional who knows all the details of this particular talk and we do not. – cag51 Mar 06 '19 at 00:51
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Your salary is nobody's business and I don't see any reason to discuss it. I don't know what your field is, but in any case you should be able to generate interest to the profession using technical accomplishments and advancements. If not, don't go there to talk; apparently you have nothing to say ...

Pirx
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