Take Code & Supply’s survey studying tech workers’ compensation and job satisfaction

I want to know how much you make and I want to tell others.

Well, not you individually, fellow tech worker. I want you to share your salary and your total compensation package — anonymously — and some more things related to your work-life balance, commute, job satisfaction, and more. With this, you, combined with the surveys team at Code & Supply led by Director of Surveys Yvette Menase, can help equip and empower others in our industry with critical information necessary for negotiating job offers and knowing how others are feeling about their compensation and their job satisfaction.

Code & Supply Co., commonly called C&S, is an eight-year-old, Pittsburgh-based small business managing a community of software professionals worldwide. We run events, host a vibrant chat community with thousands of users, and we aspire to build a suite of tools for improving the lives of our fellow tech workers. This started with our compensation survey in 2017, repeating and expanding nationwide in 2020, and now again in 2022.

The purpose of this survey and resulting analysis is to capture a snapshot of technology workers’ compensation and lifestyle. The questions asked in the 10-minute questionnaire focus primarily on compensation and benefits but also involve other data points in order to answer these primary questions:

• What is the average compensation of a tech worker?
• Given an amount of training and experience, how much can a tech worker expect to be compensated in their city?
• How are tech workers compensated beyond salary?
• Where do they live and work? Where are the tech booms?
• How much of their day do they spend traveling between work and home?
• What do these tech workers do at work?
• Where did they learn their skills?
• Are the gender pay gaps closing?

We want to collect data from throughout the United States — and even worldwide —  though our analysis will likely focus heavily on the Rust Belt, as that’s where many of our active members live. We’ll produce sections of our report for metropolitan areas that have enough respondents for meaningful and statistically significant analysis.

I believe in strength in numbers and the importance of pay transparency. This data will inform tech salary negotiations in job offers as well as role changes and regular performance reviews. We want people to feel adequately compensated for the work they do, but also to have some validation of that compensation.

Readers of our past results reported sometimes life-changing changes to their compensation after citing the results in job offer negotiations, in hiring practices, and in arguing for raises. A director of engineering secured a 17% higher starting salary for their entry-level employees, the first two of whom were young women. A veteran engineer realized how much they were underpaid at their long-time employer and left for a significantly higher salary having not actively looked for a job in many years. A mid-career engineer found that their salary was on par with others at their experience level and skill set, but that they were missing out on other aspects of compensation that they’d not previously known to even ask for.

The report isn’t just for workers, though. It’s for employers, too. We want employers to use the data to hire people at good wages and retain them through industry-leading benefits and regular compensation adjustments. We’re proud of our sponsors, currently devrelate.io, Truefit Solutions, Technical.ly, RustBuilt and WITPGH, and of our past sponsors Tech Elevator, Braintree Payments and StartNowPGH, for funding this effort. Great companies fund efforts such as this compensation survey in order to ensure they’re doing the best they can to treat their employees fairly. We still have some sponsorship slots open, too.

I hope that you’ll contribute your time and your data to the survey, and, if you’re able, that you’ll join C&S as an individual member or corporate sponsor in order to help fund efforts like our compensation survey, our conferences, meetups and more.