UPDATE 2021: The results are in!
Links to the report sections:TABLE OF CONTENTS
Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6 | Pt. 7 | Pt. 8
DevRel Salary Survey
The goal of this survey is to provide industry data about the standard salary ranges for DevRel professionals, from Technical Community Managers to Developer Advocates, Developer Experience Professionals, DevRel Managers, and everything in between.
Why did we create a Salary Survey?
I'm an admin in the wonderful https://devrelcollective.fun/, a community of community builders, advocates, evangelists, and developer relations professionals. Together the group admins have been working to put together a survey of salaries in the industry, building on top of the foundation Alyss Noland laid with her survey over the years. As many of us already know, the titles and compensation for such roles is far from standardized. And as more professionals follow this path, we inevitably move forward. This can be a challenge for both employees and managers, as the signal-to-noise ratio can make it difficult to find out what's actually the norm. Much of the information available on line is anecdotal, outdated or both.
Our Goal
Our goal is twofold:
- Help individual contributors (non-managers) ensure that their salary is comparable for their geographic region and experience level
- Assist hiring managers as they calculate appropriate budgets for headcount
Privacy Concerns
All of the results will be anonymized. No one will have access to your raw data. This data will be viewed only by the admin team and we will only be using it to create visualizations that will show (among other things) average compensation for specific geographic areas. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the DevRel Collective admin team at team@devrelcollective.fun
How We Built It
The survey is in Airtable. We considered other options, and decided Airtable was just a great fit or our needs. After some asynchronous and synchronous discussions in Slack, we booked a work session to hammer out tasks in real time. This can be a bit challenging with a global contingency, but the nice thing about a group made up of helpers and community builders is that we all skew toward accommadation.
In the meeting we spent a lot of time pitching each other with use cases involving privacy concerns, and reverse engineering the experience of being nosy to ensure - as best we could - that it will not feasible for someone to look at the results and identify specific individuals. For this reason the data is anonymized, and many of the questions are optional. The collected results will be shared in a way that protects the privacy of the individuals.
Looking for the real story
We also spent a lot of time digging into the questions themselves to identify the real underlying questions. For example, some questions are very cut and dry: what country do you live in? and others are sentiment based: whats the cost of living in your area? The reason for that is CoL can be relative, and also some regions vary widely in pricing over a small geographic area. So the real question is not about the cost of a typical rent in your area meaning the dollar amount is beside the point.
For every question we added or deleted, we also considered what story its data could tell in combination with other fields. For example (totally fictional examples)
- we may learn that x% of respondents live in an area they consider expensive, but that most people are okay with that, except for people with <2 years experience. What would that say? Perhaps that the jobs are in expensive markets but that if you can trudge it out for the first few years, your prospects make it worthwhile.
- Or maybe we will find that there are 4 major airport hubs that cluster people who are being promoted quicker. If that were the case than maybe someone in a big city might consider moving to a different hub while gaining experience and then shoot for SF/NY after their first promotion. ^ Both of those examples are completely invented btw. :-D We will find out as the answer roll in . But I hope you can see from the hypothetical examples how helpful it can be for everyone. Making career decisions is a deeply personal set of choices, and the more informed, the better. It's our goal to help individual contributors (non-managers) ensure that their salary is comparable for their geographic region and experience level, as well as assist hiring managers as they calculate appropriate budgets for headcount.
Testing
We tested this on some community members, made appropriate tweaks and adjustments, then threw it live today
Demographics and drilldowns
2 points:
- As a woman of color, Im excited by this next one.
- Our demographic questions regarding ethnicity are very US-centric by the way - we know its not perfect but it was an easy list to pull. For this and other reasons, that section is optional, with "prefer not to answer" as an option.People shouldnt have to answer personal questions about themselves if they dont fit.
Something that emerged during our rambles was AAPI initiatives to disaggregate some data, specifically for Asian Americans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders. you can learn more about that https://equitablegrowth.org/how-data-disaggregation-matters-for-asian-americans-and-pacific-islanders/ and https://aapidata.com/ethnicitydata/
The lumping together of a wide array of ethnicities means that people from more numerous groups create data that can be misleading. This breakdown becomes very apparent when you look at some heritages next to others. So while agreeing that Asian visibility/representation is extremely important we also tried to dig into what other stories the data can tell while we're already in conversation with the people it is affecting every day. We pulled our list from the resources above to get started, and it may shift over time as we receive feedback and responses.
Age and experience
This is a set of questions we are extremely interested in. DevRel, which for a long time has been spoken of as almost a fad, is clearly here to stay. I remember that I used to hear "nobody lasts more than a year or two" because presumably the travel caused burnout. That story doesn't match up with the people I meet though. I routinely meet people who have been involved with field for upwards of a decade or even two decades. So, as the image catches up to the reality of this profession, we are really glad and eager to be in a position to gather up those insights to share.
Wow this got long!
We're looking forward to hearing your career's story.
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