How I increased my pay by $50k in 1 year
I increased my pay by $50k this year (as a software engineer)!
There were two things I did that yielded this pay bump.
- The first is that I job hopped (not entirely by choice, as I was laid off in January). My previous job was paying slightly under industry average, so leaving and finding a new job was an almost guaranteed way to see a pay increase.
- The second is that I negotiated an increase in my offer from my current (new) job-despite not having any competing offers 👀
Here’s what happened:
When I was interviewing for my new role, I scheduled my interviews so that I had 5–6 onsite (final stage) interviews for different companies back-to-back. The first one I did was for my current company, and I did really well on the technical portions*. They got back to me with an offer that evening.
I was almost completely sure I wanted to work at this company, but I still told the recruiter and hiring manager that I had a few onsite interviews coming up with companies X, Y, and Z in just a couple of days and I wanted to see them through…unless they could match $X salary, in which case I would take their offer. That worked!
