What would you class as a good salary?

redundantmortgage

The lack of transparency around salaries means employers can get away with paying employees as little as possible and also makes it easy to assume everyone else gets paid more.

During my career I've not known what 99% of my colleagues have been making and the salary for 99% of the job adverts I come across is 'competitive'. Even when recruitment agencies send me job specs with salaries you have to take with a pinch of salt. 

Gavin83

redundantmortgage said:

The lack of transparency around salaries means employers can get away with paying employees as little as possible and also makes it easy to assume everyone else gets paid more.

During my career I've not known what 99% of my colleagues have been making and the salary for 99% of the job adverts I come across is 'competitive'. Even when recruitment agencies send me job specs with salaries you have to take with a pinch of salt. 

It’s one way the public sector is way ahead of the private sector, in that salaries are far more transparent.

lincroft1710

Gavin83 said:

redundantmortgage said:

The lack of transparency around salaries means employers can get away with paying employees as little as possible and also makes it easy to assume everyone else gets paid more.

During my career I've not known what 99% of my colleagues have been making and the salary for 99% of the job adverts I come across is 'competitive'. Even when recruitment agencies send me job specs with salaries you have to take with a pinch of salt. 

It’s one way the public sector is way ahead of the private sector, in that salaries are far more transparent.

Must have changed again!


When I first started in CS, very simple easy to follow progression, then it changed about 25 yrs ago, just a wall of figures, you may be able to see where you were, but impossible to know where your colleagues were.

mark_cycling00

You can feel like you have a good salary but be unaware how little pension you'll get in retirement.

There are 4 types of people:
1. Save lots but don't do useful things with their savings
2. Save lots and do very clever things with their savings
3. Spend too much and get into trouble
4. Spend too much but (annoyingly) make purchases that pay-back multiple times over and have a lot of fun at the same time

It's best to be in group 4 but there aren't many people in that group. Group 2 is second-best, but sadly most people are in group 1 or 3.

Brie

Currently job searching in the southwest and the majority of jobs I'm seeing are £19-21k.  So not  much more than NMW.  Add whatever the minimum is currently for pensions which also means a bit is contributed by the employee as well.

So say someone's salary is £20k.  Take out tax and NI which brings you down to less than £16k.  

Cheapest studio flat renting locally is £625/month according to rightmove so £7500 a year.

Say monthly utilities of £100 and food for £200 so £3600. 

Car? £200 a month for payments, petrol, insurance?  £2400.

Which leaves a person with just over £2k a year to go wild with.  Chances are they will need it for silly things like clothes, maybe an occasional night out, going to visit family or friends.  And if they are lucky a holiday.  Forget having anything fancy, for having a family. 

Obviously one could economise with a flat share or not have a car if the flat was well within walking distance of everything.  But frankly I don't see how many people could survive on this in our area.  And yet they must do else no one would work for these wages.

But as others have said it's all relative.

I remember working for a company years back where we had quite high value customers.  A guy complained that he wasn't getting the level of service he would like as obviously we didn't pander to people who only earned £600k annually.  I think I snorted down the phone line at him.

redundantmortgage

It's certainly bunched up a lot more at the bottom end. All the jobs I did as a student paid more than the minimum wage, over £1 an hour more in many cases. These were the sort of jobs you'd get simply by leaving your name and number with an agency and telling them you'd take any job.

A graduate starting salary was considerably more, even my starting salary which was definitely at the low end was around 60% more than the minimum wage at the time as I recall. Since then the minimum wage has more than doubled and a graduate salary has more or less stayed the same to the point it's barely more than the minimum wage.

MattMattMattUK

redundantmortgage said:

It's certainly bunched up a lot more at the bottom end. All the jobs I did as a student paid more than the minimum wage, over £1 an hour more in many cases. These were the sort of jobs you'd get simply by leaving your name and number with an agency and telling them you'd take any job.

A graduate starting salary was considerably more, even my starting salary which was definitely at the low end was around 60% more than the minimum wage at the time as I recall. Since then the minimum wage has more than doubled and a graduate salary has more or less stayed the same to the point it's barely more than the minimum wage.

Graduate salaries now are so dependent on the sector. I have three clients who regularly run grad recruitment campaigns, they do roadshows around universities (when allowed) and they will regularly recruit in the £50k+ range. Some sectors have barely moved, others have more than kept up. 

Gavin83

lincroft1710 said:

Gavin83 said:

redundantmortgage said:

The lack of transparency around salaries means employers can get away with paying employees as little as possible and also makes it easy to assume everyone else gets paid more.

During my career I've not known what 99% of my colleagues have been making and the salary for 99% of the job adverts I come across is 'competitive'. Even when recruitment agencies send me job specs with salaries you have to take with a pinch of salt. 

It’s one way the public sector is way ahead of the private sector, in that salaries are far more transparent.

Must have changed again!


When I first started in CS, very simple easy to follow progression, then it changed about 25 yrs ago, just a wall of figures, you may be able to see where you were, but impossible to know where your colleagues were.

I’ve worked for both the public and private sector, currently work for a council. The pay scales are obviously pretty readily available but they also publish structure charts for the departments, listing each individual and their grade. You won’t know where they are on that grade, although the grades don’t vary much anyway. It’s fairly transparent, certainly more than most private sector companies.

redundantmortgage said:

It's certainly bunched up a lot more at the bottom end. All the jobs I did as a student paid more than the minimum wage, over £1 an hour more in many cases. These were the sort of jobs you'd get simply by leaving your name and number with an agency and telling them you'd take any job.

A graduate starting salary was considerably more, even my starting salary which was definitely at the low end was around 60% more than the minimum wage at the time as I recall. Since then the minimum wage has more than doubled and a graduate salary has more or less stayed the same to the point it's barely more than the minimum wage.

Welcome to one of the disadvantages of minimum wage.

Emmia

lincroft1710 said:

Gavin83 said:

redundantmortgage said:

The lack of transparency around salaries means employers can get away with paying employees as little as possible and also makes it easy to assume everyone else gets paid more.

During my career I've not known what 99% of my colleagues have been making and the salary for 99% of the job adverts I come across is 'competitive'. Even when recruitment agencies send me job specs with salaries you have to take with a pinch of salt. 

It’s one way the public sector is way ahead of the private sector, in that salaries are far more transparent.

Must have changed again!


When I first started in CS, very simple easy to follow progression, then it changed about 25 yrs ago, just a wall of figures, you may be able to see where you were, but impossible to know where your colleagues were.

These days although there is a scale, you start at the bottom, and stay on that wage (i.e. the bottom of the scale) - you're only not there if you level transfer from a higher paying department to one where the wages are lower, or if a promotion and the 8-10% uplift you should get is more than the minimum point.

You don't move up the scale with experience (as you did in the past) so someone who has been in the job for 5 years, is on the same as someone who joined yesterday.

It is transparent though as the ranges for your department are probably on the intranet, and the job adverts specify the range.

Politicians complain that CS are always job hopping, but with a move or promotion the only real way of getting any increase, is it surprising? Public sector pay restraint/freeze is a cut in real wages. The pension is excellent, but it doesn't pay your mortgage/rent in the here and now.

Silvertabby

It's all relative.  Mr S and I retired from the RAF in our 40s, so too young to retire, but we both wanted less stressful jobs after our combined 52 years of service.

Unfortunately, several possible employers couldn't get their heads round the fact that we were looking at jobs that paid less than our previous roles.  Even though we explained that our incomes would actually be very similar, as we had paid off our mortgage with part of our pension lump sums, and were both in receipt of our Service pensions.

We eventually took jobs back in the public sector, as only they seemed to understand that we weren't just stop-gapping until we found jobs on similar salaries to our RAF pay.