In our turn Salary stories, women with long career experience open up about the most personal details of their jobs: compensation. It’s an honest look at how real people navigate the complicated world of negotiations, raises, promotions and job loss, in hopes that it will give young people more insight into how to advocate for themselves — and maybe get some risks along the way.
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Age: 26
Location: Austin, TX
Current Industry and Job Title: Senior UX Researcher, Tech
Current salary: $134,000/year, plus stock and annual bonus
Number of years of employment since school or university: 4
Starting salary: $33/hour
Biggest Salary Jump: My biggest jump was in 2020 when I went from a $33/hour contract position to another $51/hour contract position. I am now FTE and every year I have had at least a 10% raise due to promotions or job changes.
Biggest pay cut: I have not experienced a drop in salary.
Biggest Negotiating Regret: I wish I had negotiated more. Not necessarily for more salary, but for more perks like sign-on bonuses or better titles. I’ve only worked for huge companies, so I’ve always felt intimidated dealing with rigid systems.
Best Salary Tips: Share your salary with your colleagues — at least the ones you feel comfortable sharing. Recently, many of my colleagues and I on my previous team either got laid off or some other internal position, so we were all sharing our current salaries with each other. We were shocked at the disparity, even though many of us had the same title and level. We were able to get a much clearer picture of what to ask for in our next roles.
This was a key position in the field of consumer electronics technology. I mainly assisted the lead UX researcher in the team. I helped with user research interviews, coded user insights, and occasionally the UX prospect had me present findings to leadership to gain practice and exposure. We had a human factors workshop on site, so before COVID-19 the participants would have to come and use the different prototypes.
This position was in the advertising space. I spent a lot of time remotely interviewing users who post ads, as well as serving ads when searching for relevant content.
This position was on the technology side of a large retail company. Despite the title, I was still primarily performing UX research. There were no other researchers in the team, so for the first time it was primarily up to me to decide what to do at the end of the research to support the design initiatives. While ultimately formative, it was a stressful leap to make, and I’m grateful to have been in a supportive group.
During that time, I had moved out of the country for this role and was also doing my Masters, which may have added to the stress of the job.
My current employer is huge, so there are many different organizations. I moved from a small design team embedded within an organization to the actual central design organization of the company. Every UX researcher supports different lines of business, mine is more consumer facing. By joining this group of other UX researchers, I feel like the standards are higher and I get much more guidance and constructive feedback than working alone. In terms of responsibilities, I still mainly do interviews and remote research, but I also occasionally do in-person research. I have some autonomy in deciding which methods and research designs to use, but I delegate the overall direction of the project roadmap to management. Deciding which projects and products to prioritize always gets very political and involves design, business and product teams along with asking different questions from the top down, so I’m happy not to be in charge of sorting through everything and rather trying to find out what I can for now (from a safe distance).
I’m hoping to move into a ‘lead’ or ‘staff’ level role as a UX researcher in the next 18 months, which would be a step up from senior. I would hope to make a base of $150,000, with a total value of about $180,000. The next level is usually the highest level you can reach in non-tech companies as an individual contributor. From there, I’ll have to think about whether I want to move into management or whether I’m content to stay as an individual contributor (IC). To go the IC route, I may need to move to a tech company (versus a tech role in a non-tech company, where I am currently), as tech companies tend to allow better promotion of IC roles.
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