You cleared R84k per month?!
Greetings poehols ā¦ err, peoples 
So last night I found out Iām getting a rent free house for all of June. That means I can land in the UK and go straight to a house and not have to worry about house hunting for a whole month!
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Inspect the house for mushrooms, carpets in the bathrooms, bathrooms directly off the kitchen, mice . . . . .
If none of that is there then yay (Im a bit sceptical after some of the houses I lived in whilst there
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Listening to you two discussing the developer salaries in Cape Town, it feels like Iām being underpaid. And Iām not.
Hahaha now just imagine how I feel as an office manager . . . seeing those salaries makes me cry
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itās all good, itās a bought house belonging to family ā¦ theyāre off on a family holiday in Spain so house sitting it is
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Yup, I was pretty much paid the same as a Senior Developer / Application Architect
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I was hideously overpaid, and this was largely because I hustled the last 6 years of my career to inflate my salary. Additionally there is a huge shortage of people in my specific area(s) of expertise which I also managed to exploit.
You just donāt find many people with degrees that have Microsoft Developer, Administrator and Solution Architect certifications combined with Linux specializations, Cloud (GCE, Azure and AWS) certifications and experience. Who can and have worked on multiple development frameworks, libraries and tools. Iām a decent enough developer in PHP (Laravel & Zend), Python (Django, Flask, Pandas and Jupyter), ASP, C, C++, C# and Perl.
To quote Liam Neeson " I have a particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career"
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Got the guys coming round for a good old Lan!
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NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH !!!
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy !!!
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Because of the success of āDetective Pikachuā, which hasnāt even been released yet. But hey, letās rush this
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To be honest, some of the senior guys weāve interviewed had asking prices of around R110k per monthā¦ They obviously wonāt clear R84k per month after tax, which means @PsychoFish wouldāve had a CTC of around R130k per month, which makes his move to UK even more eye-watering when I consider he wouldāve have moved for less money than he earned in Cape Town.
I seriously need to give myself a raise considering the salaries Iām now forced to pay senior devs, some who have less experience than me, with considerably less responsibility that I currently have.
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The problem with me though, as I pointed out, is that Iām a bit of a unicorn. The move to the UK was the best thing I could have ever done though. Iām actually being challenged for a change, but thats more of the industry Iām in rather than anything else.
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I need you to talk to my boss so you can explain to him why our devs, whoāve been working for him the last 10 years (me included) need to be paid substantially more than what weāre getting now.
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10 years is too at a single company. Your salary will never remain market related with the pityful annual increases. 3-5 years, and if you have not been promoted then move on. If you want loyalty get a dig.
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Thatās the play right now. Just trying to get interviews so i can move to bigger and better things.
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Wanna cross horns? I regard myself as a unicorn as wellā¦ I learn new languages and tech stacks in days and master them in a couple of weeks. I learn new business domains in a month or 2. I can spot a good developer without doing a technical test. I can sell technical services to just about any client with even the remotest of needs. I can write well structured, properly research and argumentatively sound documents and reports used in legal cases. I can create peace and positive motivation in a difficult, time sensitive project when all hope seems lost. I do all these things in various capacity each day of my life.
I know Iām severely underpaid and my business partner tells me so as well. I couldāve earned 1.5x what I do now from last month to compensate for Cape Townās āmountain taxā, but I prefer not to. Good cashflow and a sizeable profit reflect well on a companyās books and creates much more intrinsic value. Seeing as weāre looking at selling a bunch of shares to more stakeholders to expand our business quite soon, that would mean the pay-out I get from that is much more than a comfortable salary wouldāve been. I can, in essence, earn back 10x more than I wouldāve earned if I paid myself double the salary I did over the past 5 years.
So yes, Iām grinding my teeth and biting my tongue in paying new, less experienced employees considerably more than myself, but Iām reaping the benefits thereof soon enough.
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PM me your speciality and where you currently work. Weāre always on the lookout for good developers.
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