No-Fail Tips to Negotiating Your Salary as a Software Developer

How does one go about increasing their lifetime income? One of the most common methods is to change one’s job and negotiate your salary to get a massive raise. This is not the best option. So, how should you approach this situation?

There are plenty of other ways to really go about negotiating your salary in order to get a raise as a software developer. Here’s how.

It is all about gaining visibility

The smartest thing when it comes to negotiating your salary as a developer is to focus on gaining visibility.

We don’t just mean coming to work on time daily and leaving last.

What we mean by gaining visibility is to really pick up the right amount of work and projects while making sure you shine through your performance.

You need to pick up the most essential tasks that are going to add value to organizational goals in the long run. You can easily pick up fewer projects and responsibilities, but be smart to pick out the ones that will have a massive impact on the overall goals of the organization.

This is going to get you the visibility you need in the long run so that you can start negotiating your salary the way you like it!

Here are the three significant ways to gain more visibility in your organization:

• Reducing costs
• Reducing cycle times
• Driving revenue

Focus on projects that are going to cover at least one of the abovementioned things, so that you can gain more visibility by adding value to the organization.

So, how can you actually go about doing that? Here are a few ways you can add value to gain visibility and start negotiating your salary for a raise:

• Writing more code to reduce costs
• Fix more bugs to reduce cost as well as cycle time
• Manage more number of bigger projects to add more revenue and reduce costs
• Train and mentor your junior software developers in your team to reduce cycle time and costs
• Take up more responsibility, for instance, be a scrum master and hold weekly status calls to reduce non-essential expenditures to the organization

Most of these ways are adding both value as well as revenue to the organization, thereby adding value to the work you do. This will end up getting you the visibility you deserve, so you get leverage when it comes to salary negotiations. It is one of the best negotiation tips a software developer could ever get!

This small list should give you a brief idea of what you can do to gain more visibility. Leverage these tips to start negotiating your salary with your organization.

4 Amazing tips on negotiating your salary as a software developer

1. Calculate your worth

When it comes to negotiating your salary as a software developer, you should also focus on calculating your worth in the organization!

Start by focusing on your situation. Introspect honestly. Have you recently started working as a developer? If so, it might be too soon for you to negotiate your salary.

Do you think you are worth it? Do you have excellent work results to prove your worth? If so, please go ahead and ask for a raise.

So basically, the very first salary negotiation tips include asking for a raise only if you think you are ready!

2. Fix a meeting with your supervisor formally

Once you have figured out whether you are really worth it, fix a meeting to discuss your salary expectations with an HR representative and your supervisor.

You can’t just try to get their attention by sending them a random email about your request for negotiating your salary for a raise. It will not prove worthy, and will honestly seem very out of the blue.

After all, you are a dedicated developer, who is willing to achieve the best results. You need to approach your manager in a rather professionally appealing way. This is why it is so important to formally fix a meeting with your supervisor and talk to them face to face.

You can do this in person or do it virtually. It will give your supervisor a chance to sit down together with you in an appropriate way and listen to your requests, supported by adequate reasons. This way, your management can have a better outlook on things and can give you a more informed decision.

3. Keep the control in your hands

Once you meet with your supervisor to discuss your salary raise, try to steer the entire conversation in one direction. Keep control of the conversation in your hands. It should not come as a surprise that your supervisor gives you the “center stage” to convince them why you deserve that raise.

Prepare a pitch depicting the work you’ve done so far, and how that work has benefited the company. Keep this pitch short, but impactful. This will put the ball in your court when it comes to negotiating your salary.

You can start with this salary negotiation example:

“Thank you so much for meeting with me. I have requested your presence to discuss my role and performance. I am asking for a salary raise since I believe my performance over the past few months has surpassed expectations for the concerned role. It has also helped the organization meet its goals.”

From here, you can divulge the conversation into different examples of all the contributions you’ve made so far to negotiate your salary better. Ensure you are highlighting them clearly in the context of your team as well as your company. The aim here is to make sure you are coming off as an indispensable part of the organization. If not, you might lose your leverage.

Another wonderful way to garner your manager’s attention when negotiating your salary is to talk about another job offer in case you have one. You can talk about the raise (if any) that the other organization is offering you.

Whatever you do, just validate what you talk about with the right numbers!

4. Request affirmatively

After ending your clear and confident pitch when negotiating your salary to get a raise, pose an affirmative request towards the end.

The request, just like your pitch, should be crisp and brief. You can request a straightforward “x%” of raise in your salary.

That being said, also add a few points on how that extra “x%” raise can further motivate you to bring more value to the organization in the coming years. Convince them in order to get that well-deserved raise.

So, will you get that raise?

When negotiating your salary for a raise, your manager may or may not approve that raise, no matter how strong your performance is or how capable you are at your job.

If your supervisor does approve the raise, make sure you are genuinely thanking them. While thanking them, please mention how elated you are and how you look forward to being committed to the future endeavors of the organization, and how you aim to excel even more.

However, in case the management does not approve of the salary negotiation decision, be fully prepared to walk away. We are assuming here that you do have a separate job offer lined up. However, even when you don’t have a job offer lined up, feel free to get feedback from them on what you can be doing better at work. Ask them the kind of improvements you can make so you can get that raise next time.

The decision of negotiating your salary can either be accepted or denied. No matter what happens, you are simply aiming to step up as a champion of all the contributions you’re bound to make to advance your career!