[erlang-questions] Standard modern salary for an Erlang programmer?

[Michael Ossareh]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 8:47 PM, Kevin Scaldeferri
<kevin@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> On Mar 25, 2009, at 6:45 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
>
>>
>> On 25 Mar 2009, at 3:22 am, G.S. wrote:
>>> What's a standard, good average salary for the Erlang programmer
>>> with a few years of experience, based in USA?
>>> Java is 70-90k,
>>
>> Wow.  That's about double what I make as a university lecturer.
>
> No one has ever claimed that teaching at university was the road to
> riches.  FWIW, I was offered about double that recently for a Java
> position, but in an industry and for a company which made the money
> not worth it for me. (Oh, and, ugh, Java)
>
>
>
>>
>>
>>> and I read online that since us Erlangers, being a less known, and
>>> essential for writing software that scales, and will scale into the
>>> future, is much higher. I seem to find various blogs that state the
>>> salary in 2008 was anywhere from 99k to 180k.
>>
>
>
>  From what I can tell, salary depends much less on the programming
> language, and much more on the programmer and the company.  Some
> programmers will never be worth that much to any company.  Some
> companies will never be able to afford to pay that much to any
> programmer.

I've found the opposite to be true in my experience. I have certainly
earned 50% more than a *much* better programmer in my past simply
because I had the balls to ask for a lot more. This is an example of
the third variable in my OP. The company was a fairly large startup
that had raised too much VC and needed to spend it - I did my company
due diligence before starting the interview process and knew how much
I could ask for.

In another case I was pretty much running every single campaign from a
tech impl POV and reporting angle for a small SMS-marketing firm, and
I was one of the lowest paid. The company 100% depended on me for
every day operations and I was on the
slightly-better-than-intern-salary I'd joined on 12 months previous.

> Also, networking and contacts matter a lot.  You are
> likely worth more to people who know you already than to people who
> only have a couple hours of interactions on which to judge you.

This is so very true!

>
>
> -kevin
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