DRC Salary II: DevRel Salaries & Fair Compensation

Compensation

The purpose of the survey is to give the DevRel community information about earning potential, parity, and salary fairness. We started by examining how well the community knows that already by asking “Do you feel like you are fairly compensated for your job?”. 

Our rationale was that salaries are frequently not discussed among peers, making it difficult to know objectively how one’s compensation fares in comparison. However, most people do know to some degree of certainty how they perceive their own situation, and whether it feels appropriate on a gut level. 

Sentiment

Compensation and perceived fairness

We directly asked about compensation in the survey, so that’s an obvious plot to make:

At first glance, there’s a clear divide here between “Neutral and lower,” vs “above Neutral.” From Neutral downwards, there’s a clear trend with Salary – as you would expect. But above Neutral, the medians are all basically the same.

For further context and discussion, please refer to the section “Modeling job strategy.”

Salaries and cost of living

This trend is overall roughly what you’d expect (higher pay in higher cost areas), and the variation is pretty large

US and non-US responses

US-based responses

A question that came up in response to the Perceived Fairness plot was how do people in different locations feel about their compensation? Because we had a majority of responses from the United States, it’s possible to show how respondents in the US answered the question Do you feel like you are fairly compensated for your job?

We thought that it could be interesting to compare this to the non-US based responses. We can see in the responses that US-based respondents report being “Somewhat well-compensated” as their top answer (42.9%). Meanwhile, 25% of Non-US based respondents report they are “Mildly undercompensated”, with “Somewhat well-compensated” in second place  at 21.9%.

It’s important to remember that the cost of living in the United States involves localized factors such as the cost of privatized healthcare. Healthcare in the US is commonly accessed as an employee benefit and is therefore a typical part of the compensation package. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6 | Pt. 7 | Pt. 8

Conclusion and Takeaways

Appendix A: | Appendix B:

SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR DATA SCIENTIST, GREG SUTCLIFFE

Greg Sutcliffe has been working in community management for a decade, and is currently the Principal Data Scientist for the Ansible Community. He's interested in how appropriate use of data can inform the development and governance of communities, especially with regards to open source projects. He also likes cooking.