My Salary History
March 12, 2019 • ☕️ 3 min read
Note: this article is currently outdated. I intend to update sometime in the next six months.
The purpose of this article is for me to share what I've made in every job I've taken to provide a slight bit more transparency into what employers pay. Employees not sharing salaries is a stupid tradition. For a market to function fairly, there must be transparency - a way to tell if you're getting ripped off. In particular, women and POC 1 do frequently get 2 paid less than men for the same work. Without reference numbers, it's very difficult for an individual employee to tell if they're getting ripped off. Sites like Glassdoor can help with this problem but a) it makes me very uncomfortable that you have to provide personal data to a corporation to get information crucial to your livelihood and b) anonymized data is inherently less useful. You know nothing of their professional history - it's just a slightly lessened informational asymmertry.
Additonal recommended content on this subject can be found in these places:
And below can be found what I've made in each job along with a short description of it. I will be updating this each time I take a new job. Note that I have tried to convert to an hourly rate wherever possible. If you have questions, please feel free to reach out to me. Various ways to contact me can be found here.
| Company Name [Location] | Role | When | What I did | What I got paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spantree Technology Group [Chicago West Loop] | FT Summer Intern | Summer 2016; directly after HS graduation | I came in knowing a decent amount of programming but basically no software engineering. I built a basic but poorly designed Slackbot in Groovy for the company. | $15/hour + lunch + $12 in Ubers/day |
| Vanderbilt University Psychology Professor [Nashville, TN] | PT assorted technical tasks | Fall 2016 | I organized a bunch of old computers and technology, differentiating the useful from the not useful. I quit the job when the Professor in charged asked me to code without a previously promised raise. | $10/hour |
| Freelance website designed for Vandebrilt University Education Professor [Remote to Nashville, TN] | PT Summer Project | Summer 2017 | I designed a basic website using a CMS written in PHP to represent a Professor's curriculum design work. I was probably overpaid for this. | $3500; flat |
| Art of Problem Solving [Remote to San Diego, CA] | Freelance Grader and Assistant | December 2016 - Present | I grade mathematically inclined students' work and assist them in virtual classrooms. I mostly focus on Python classes and simpler prealgebra classes. | $15-$25/hour; depending on raises and precise task. |
| Art of Problem Solving [San Diego, CA] | FT Summer Intern | Summer 2018 | I worked with React, Node and HTML Canvas to help build out Beast Academy. Note that I received no housing distance despite San Diego being a fairly expensive place to live, particularly for a short lease. | $32/hour; $500 starting bonus |
| Amazon Web Services [Seattle, WA] | FT Summer Intern | Summer 2019 | Unknown as of right now! | $47.81/hour; $1925/month in housing assistance; travel assistance |
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Yes, I'm brown but that's not really an impediment anywhere but TSA checkpoints.
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The actual pay gap between women and men is not nearly as big as the 73 cents per dollar figure would imply. Stuff like the fact that paternal leave is rarely provided and/or taken or that men negotiate more than women are large sources of this disparity - neither will be solved by eliminating direct compensation discrimination.
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