am i being being paid enough? – two minute tactics

i think we have all asked ourselves, are we getting paid enough?

i’m even willing to guess that a lot of you reading here, think that they should be paid more (even if it’s just a little more)

for every set of skills, there is a distribution of incomes you can get paid. you can be on the lower end. you can get a “normal” pay, or you can even shoot for the upper end

even if you end up negotiating the highest possible salary for your skills, you have a major issue at your hand now! what’s the issue?

i usually prefer staying in the mid range because of this issue.

why?

when you’re pursuing a career, you have a number of options. which levers to pull. what to focus on. what to work on. what to learn.

you can try to improve your skills, get better at what you’re doing. you can also invest time into making yourself more well known. talk about yourself, show people what you accomplished.

and finally, you can invest in edging out the most money for your position. negotiate, practice, build leverage, look up comparisons.

i think that time is ill invested. not only are you stopping yourself from getting better, and maximizing the learning you can get from your work, what remains, is that if you get paid the highest salary for your skillset, you can’t avoid being locked in!

what does that mean?

people don’t like getting paid less than they once used to earn.

once you’re on the top-end of your range, you will be locked into your high income

For every set of skills, there is a distribution of incomes you can get paid. You can be on the lower end, in the middle, or the upper end. You can get underpaid, you can be paid an okay amount, and you can be overpaid. The issue with always optimizing and shooting for the highest salary possible is that once you reach the top end of your range, your options become extremely limited.

the jobs you could switch to, are rare. the conditions are usually not ideal. and if you want to switch to learn something, you’ll be very limited.

take the engineer who’s earning 200k at google (in germany)

what are her options? she could join stripe, openai, facebook, netflix? sure! but that’s about it! when you already earn 200k your lifestyle will adjust to 200k and you’ll be forever locked into working for a global tech company. no way around it. no alternatives.

so i try to push for a good salary. something decent. but not the highest possible.

because i like the flexibility, i like having my doors open. i like being able to switch my job, and instantly be paid a decent amount more than right now!

make sure that you always leave something on the table because that will be your bargaining power in the future.