Salary Expectations (UK IT)

[arty]

Hi, I am at the point of salary review at work and have recently been wondering whether I'm being under-paid. I'd really appreciate it if a couple of you more experienced with the current UK IT job market could take a look and let me know what sort of salary range you think I could expect. At the moment I'm a CTO (in all but name) at a small (<20) London-based company, doing a mixture of working from home and from an office in central London.

Apologies for the buzzword bingo but I didn't want this to be excessively long!

Developer stuff:
- 20 years experience in IT working as a developer, team leader, PM, BA, SA, EA both as permie and more recently consultancy for the last 10 years.
- Front-end coding experience in Typescript with React, modern accessible HTML, tons of CSS, various other frameworks.
- Back-end in Node.js, Ruby on Rails, C#.net, Rust, loads of others (Java, Python, C++, Erlang, Go, etc.).
- Pretty experienced in relational databases, mainly PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL Server, SQLite. Also quite a lot of experience in no-SQL stuff such as Mongo, Redis, Neo4J, others.
- Built and delivered several mobile apps, most recently using React Native, but also with Swift / Objective-C, and a couple for Android (Java).
- Very familiar with AWS and Heroku, slightly less so with Azure, GCP etc.
- I've been doing test automation (and TDD, BDD) for years, including mobile, desktop front-end, web and back-end.

Architect stuff:
- I've designed and built / delivered some fairly large systems on-premise, in AWS and other cloud platforms. Very used to working with MQs, event streams, etc.
- I'm basically an advocate of microservices and have successfully deployed them as a reference architecture in several companies.
- I do a lot with Kubernetes, including Istio for mesh networking, Helm for chart management, etc. Pretty experienced here.
- Very experienced with Docker, which I've been using since the early days, and its whole ecosystem.
- As a consultant I designed and delivered dev-ops pipelines based on container CI / CD from dev to production at some large multinationals (and a few smaller companies).
- I'm comfortable designing and building integrations with third party systems; too many to list here!
- I've designed, built, delivered, maintained various APIs, both public and internal, most recently using GraphQL and its associated ecosystem of technologies.
- Data warehouse experience; I've built behavioural analytics pipelines feeding into data lakes, with ETL / ELT processes to load them into massive database clusters, etc. etc.

Ops stuff:
- Very familiar with Linux from the sysadmin / dev side of things. Have set up hardened Linux bastions, resilient (HA) and auto-scaling cross-DC clusters, etc. etc. - you get the picture.
- Done loads of Windows development and some server admin, mainly with .net for front-end, back-end and all sorts of stuff in between.
- I've designed, delivered and managed various networking infrastructure, mainly in cloud providers recently, including peering, security concerns (app. gateways, various firewalls etc.).
- Comfortable designing for scalability.

Other bits:
- I've managed teams up to around 30 strong with various flavours of Agile / Scrum, including development, test, BA, UX, design etc. functions. This included hiring, career development, etc.
- I've run projects as a contractor and permie for companies of all sizes, in various parts of the world.
- I've worked in loads of different sectors, most recently travel, leisure and financial services.
- I have been employee no. 1 at a few startups in the past, usually in accelerator-like programmes to get companies going before they hire more long-term staff.
- Experience with information security practices, involved in ISO27001 certifications in the past, I'm pretty familiar with best practices, etc.
- Used to working with departmental budgets, delivering IT solutions for business needs across the range of marketing, ops, scaling, growth - you get the idea.
- I'm usually involved in shaping the technical strategy at companies, but also often the business direction they take (at least at the smaller ones).
- Used to working at executive / board level, including giving presentations, justifying decisions, all the usual malarky.

I think that's enough waffle for now! Doing job searches for any subset of the above always seems to result in a massive range of salaries, so I'd very much appreciate any thoughts whatsoever. Thanks for reading!

 

[arty]

I can’t really answer your question, but have you thought about looking at the Developer Advocate positions at AWS? If you like enabling people then it might be right up your street with your level of experience.

Haven’t thought about it, as I’m probably not looking to change right now, but I know a few people at AWS so might ask them - thanks.

What do you want to be...?

I like being hands-on (at least partly) on the architecture side, so CTO at a smallish company would suit me, I think

That said, I’ve done some non-hands-on stuff at C-level before, and enjoyed it. I just enjoy intellectually challenging work with some connection to ‘real’ customers, and working with intelligent people.

 

[arty]

Nah, that’s the CIO’s job.

Tbh.. it seems a bit silly to have these C-level positions in a 20 person company, I’m not sure it is necessarily standard aside from maybe some startups where the CTO is a cofounder along with the CEO.

Yep, I agree. I'm really talking more about tech startups of that size, or slightly larger companies (50-150 employees perhaps) where it actually carries some meaning.

Thanks for the thoughts so far. I'll continue to poke around the job ads to see if I can find something comparable to what I'm doing.

 

[arty]

£120-180k. It's hard to judge whether you are underpaid however because you've listed your experience rather than what you actually do in your current job other than 'proxy CTO'. You might be underpaid for your skillset/experience but not underpaid for the role, if that makes sense.

Of course. I essentially do day-to-day product management and development, manage all of the IT systems, do all the technical strategy and roadmap planning, a bit of live support, vendor assessment, integrations, and overall company strategy stuff. I basically run the entire IT part of the company (not that that's many people!) and am essentially junior only to the founder.

I know I'm overqualified for the job I'm doing, and that's okay, but it's partly about considering what I could reasonably expect if I were to change. If that makes any sense. I'm a bit out of touch because I've been lucky enough to just move from one role to the next via referrals, enquiries, headhunting etc. for the last 12 years or so, and thus I'm not used to messing about on the open market!

 

[arty]

I'm currently on around £80k with equity and benefits.

I hear what you're saying about my experience being broad, absolutely. I'm sort of hoping that this would help when managing a set of diverse disciplines (development, test, ops, for example) as I've kind of done it all. Quite like what you're saying about the flexibility aspect, as I like being able to switch between different areas as they interest me.

Lots of food for thought! Many thanks for everyone's contributions to this thread - really helpful.

 

[arty]

Lots of legitimate points being made here, particularly with regards to the influence one can exert in a smaller company, the actual value of the equity (which I typically regard as being zero in order to make comparisons easier), and OspreyO's point about high salaries in small companies. I think that investor-funded startups offer high salaries purely to try to get the talent for them to take off, not because it's always sustainable, but that's just my experience.

Assuming you haven't exaggerated your skillsets, as others said unless you're getting a substantial equity in the business, £80k is on the lower side. I expect people like you to be getting a TC of £150-200k.

However, you've presented yourself as a do-it-all generalist. This might end up not playing to your advantage as the current market values specialisation far more than being a jack of all trades.

I'm being honest about my skills, and haven't listed a load of stuff just because I didn't want to add even more waffle to an already lengthy original post. Bear in mind that I'm not an expert in anything at all; I'm 'good' in a number of areas, and 'competent' in lots more, but I've always gone for a generalist approach. Perhaps I should specialise.

Even more to think about! Thanks all

 

[arty]

Thanks, but I don't use LinkedIn.

Edit - sorry, that came across a bit rude. I’m not looking to change job right now, thanks - just thinking about the future

 

[arty]

not trying to get you a new job, was only going to offer advice on the salary. LinkedIn was just a way for you to contact me more privately. I am a freelance consultant with 40 years in IT with similar experience to yours so can offer advice on what you are worth.

Ah, fair enough. I'd certainly value your advice, but I'm not sure of the best way to communicate given that they've got rid of the Trust system on here, and I'm loath to put contact details in a forum thread. Sorry!

I think it depends a bit on the organisation, in smaller orgs having a generalist who can cover a lot of bases (at a reasonably high level of seniority and competent) is probably really useful. Bigger orgs might have half a dozen people managing that stuff. It sounds like the sort of realms you are operating in, being a generalist isn't necessarily bad thing, but might limit your options if looking for a role in bigger orgs.

I do have similar considerations personally, in that within my field (Data Engineering / Warehousing / BI) I am struggling to really pin down what roles I should be targeting. I'm not a pure techy (no developer/architect background) but I have reasonable tech skills and can write functional code. For example, I wouldn't see myself sitting down for 3 days and designing a technical solution, I'd be more kicking the tyres on it, being a sounding board for tech leads and offering feedback, setting the priorities, resourcing/budgeting, making it presentable to business stakeholders etc. There are quite a lot of senior roles now that are expecting more of an architect or lead/principal engineer background. I position myself as more of a hybrid that is an interested in how the organisation will leverage the data as much as what the technical solution is but sometimes I feel this means I'm neither one thing nor the other when it comes to organisations weighing up where I fit in (I've had feedback from interviews/screening calls in the past that my background is too much in IT, and then on the flipside for other roles that I don't have the deep tech experience.

In general I've enjoyed working at smaller companies more, but sometimes the lack of resources and occasional fire-fighting can feel a bit limiting.

Funnily enough we're trying to recruit a semi-technical BI / data science specialist at the moment, but I won't turn this into a recruitment thread!