What Do You Want to Know Before Negotiating Salary?

Many of us are employed, and while we might have a salary review each year, we often don't get to negotiate much about the amount. We might periodically ask for a raise of some sort, but what should we ask for? Most of us have accepted employment at some point, responding to the offer of a job. Do we know what a fair salary is for our position, in our location, with our experience?

Human Resources and Personnel departments use surveys and information to set ranges of pay for different positions. They come to a salary negotiation with some idea of the market, which is a generalization of what an employee is worth. This could be quite different than what you specifically feel you should be paid. However, do you have any rationale for your demands?

Every year Brent Ozar runs a salary survey. He gets lots of responses and does a better job of this than most other places I've seen. Including me. I've done this a few times, but I'd rather just let Brent run this and view his data. This year he asks you to look at the list of questions and give feedback.

I think Brent has a good list of questions, but perhaps there is something you wish you'd have known before you last negotiated salary. Is there something that might help you decide if an offer (or raise) is fair? Perhaps you want to add a checklist of responsibilities (BI, DBA, dev, etc.).

Maybe you think it would be interesting to know if there is on call work, or even the number of hours your employer expects you to work? Given the pandemic I might ask if the company is allowing remote work or expecting people to come back to an office. Some people have suggested these in the comments, but read Brent's answers. He's looking for a indicators or features that affect salary, not necessarily how you feel about the environment. I added one about non-monetary compensation like training, but feel free to comment on other suggestions as well.

What's really important here is that you take the survey when it comes out. Even if you don't like the questions, getting this data compiled for our industry helps us all, so keep an eye out for the survey and fill it out to the best of your ability. Then get the results when they are published and use them to try and evaluate if you're being compensated fairly.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums

Get Gartner’s latest DevOps and Agile recommendations for I&O leaders. Redgate is named as a sample vendor for Continuous Compliance Automation in the 2021 Hype Cycle™ for Agile and DevOps.

This article discusses how to perform Text classification in Azure Machine using a popular word vector technique in Text Mining. This article is part of the Azure Machine learning...

Many servers remain vulnerable to high-severity flaws in Microsoft Exchange Server, VMware vCenter, Oracle WebLogic, and other popular products and services.

In this article we look at how to setup transparent data encryption for SQL Server data files stored in Azure storage, but keeping the TDE keys local.

Transparent Data Encryption is a SQL Server feature that is used to protect data stored in SQL Server databases. The process to enable TDE on any user database is...

SQL Server maintains a variety of stats about all sort of performance items. Index usage (or missing indexes) Query performance Corrupt pages Disk IO performance Way more than I...

CREATE DATABASE [Story] ON PRIMARY ( NAME = N'Story', FILENAME = N'C:DataStory.mdf', SIZE = 101MB), FILEGROUP [Line1] ( NAME = N'File1', FILENAME = N'C:Data_.It', SIZE = 102MB), ( NAME =...

I drove up the volcano Hekla in central Iceland – also known as the Gateway to Hell – and parked the Defender here: While my travel companions hiked up...

I was recently approached at work about a company that was seeing tons of timeouts in SQL Server. I was asked how to troubleshoot this. There are lots of... The...

TL;DR summary:  Don’t do it.  Stop reading here if you want, but just don’t do it. This post refers to shrinking your database files (mdf, or ndf files), not...

As we all know optimization plays an important role in the success of spark SQL. Therefore, a lot of work has been done in this direction. Before spark 3.0, cost-based optimization was a major hit in which different stages related to cost (based on time efficiency and estimated CPU and I/O usage) are compared and executes the strategy which minimizes the cost

It is quite common to see 200 tasks in one of your stages and more specifically at a stage which requires wide transformation. The reason for this is, wide transformations in Spark requires a shuffle. Operations like join, group by etc. are wide transform operations and they trigger a shuffle.

SCD Type 2 in SQL and Python

In this article, you will learn how to efficiently utilize Dynamic Partition Pruning in Databricks to run filtered queries on your Delta Fact and Dimension tables.

Elsevier has been a customer of Databricks for about six years. There are now hundreds of users and tens of thousands of notebooks across their workspace. To some extent, Elsevier’s Databricks users have been a victim of their own success, as there are now too many notebooks to search through to find some earlier work.

Are you looking to modernize your on-premises databases to Azure SQL? Join Alexandra Ciortea, Raymond Truong, Wenjing Wang, and Anna Hoffman to understand how you can size your Azure...

Azure SQL Database is a popular choice for migrating your database from on-premises to cloud infrastructure. It enables you to move to a fully managed Platform as a Service...

Continuing on the topic of High Availability and Failover Groups from the previous posts on How-to determine the SQL MI Failover Group configuration & How-to determine the SQL MI Failover Group...

This article will show how to instrument queries executed on a dedicated SQL pool of Azure Synapse Analytics. Introduction Transactional databases, Analytical databases and Data warehouses serve data requests...

Through this partnership, CISA and Girls Who Code will establish collaborative opportunities to provide awareness, training, and pathways into cybersecurity careers for girls, women, and those who identify as...

Every year, I run a Data Professional Salary Surve...

Smart devices are everywhere - doorbells, refrigerators, thermostats, TVs, speakers, lights, switches, you name it. If you take a look, I bet you can find at least one device...

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” — Warren Buffett The most important change in computing over the past 15 years has been...

1 – Azure Hybrid Benefit Azure services related to servers and direct infrastructure reservation require software licenses, such as Windows Server and SQL Server. Microsoft offers what’s called Hybrid...

Join Grant Fritchey in discussion with Kevin Davis, DBA Manager at Tower Loan to discover how they are using SQL Monitor, and hear their playbook for successful distributed estate monitoring.

Just over 30 days until SQLSaturday Orlando and I?...

Part of my job is doing POCs with customers to help with Azure Data Services. Anything that helps me move quicker is helpful so I’m a tad bit obsessed with automating things.

Learn about some of the uses for PowerShell when m...

Introduction In my previous post, Fun With the PowerShell Switch Parameter, I introduced the use of switches with PowerShell functions. We learned how they work, and how to create...

Take a picture of a bike part and ask, "How do I fix this?"

Against the backdrop of escalating cybercrime and data breaches throughout 2020 and 2021, state legislators in over 29 US states have thrown the spotlight on data privacy this year,...

Graphing data is almost always more informative than displaying a table of summary statistics. In a recent article about "dynamite plots," I briefly mentioned that graphs such as box...

How are you deploying updates to your databases? Do you run a SQL script that you receive from developers? Maybe you have a SQL job that takes a script...

Both partitioning and bucketing are techniques in Hive to organize the data efficiently so subsequent executions on the data works with optimal performance.

Apache Parquet is a popular column storage file format used by Hadoop systems, such as Pig, Spark, and Hive. The file format is language independent and has a binary representation. Parquet is used to efficiently store large data sets and has the extension .parquet.

SSIS Merge Join and Merge transformations are two ...

In this episode of Data Exposed: MVP Edition, Javi...

Are you familiar with recovery time objective and recovery point objectives? These are really important factors when you’re planning your SQL Server backup strategy. First, we’ll take a look...

As a laptop vendor, Huawei is entering its fourth...

In DAX, optimizations and data types do not always play nice and can leave you dealing with surprises. In this short article, we see an example of how mixing...

String DAX data type: Every string in DAX is stored as a Unicode string, where each character is stored in 16 bits. https://dax.guide/dt/string/

DateTime DAX Data Type: Date and time are stored using a single DateTime data type, which internally uses a floating-point number. https://dax.guide/dt/datetime/

Lucky Pencil There you sit, an earnest database glob. Users are complaining that the database is slow again, but this time you’re ready for it. You’ve got a monitoring tool collecting...

In Process One question I get quite a bit is how much I look queries that do a lot of logical reads, and the answer is: not very often. The primary...

Headway I’ve seen a lot of crazy ways for people to run reports on live data, but one of the worst ideas is creating a reporting table based on the...

In this article learn how to use Performance Monitor to collect disk related counters to help troubleshoot SQL Server issues related to storage problems.

In my previous blog post, we saw how using INCLUDE to add a column to an index can make a difference compared to a key column. Let’s do a...

Wouldja Shouldja? I do love appropriately applied uniqueness. It can be helpful not just for keeping bad data out, but also help the optimizer reason about how many rows might...

Goal of this demo: Update a Power BI model schema by adding a column to the data model without opening a PBIX file and ensure the scheduled refresh still...

Video by: Reid Havens Part one of two of my videos...

Sometimes you want to highlight the lowest value i...

Not a coder? Don't understand Power Query M syntax...

I’m helping a client convert a few SSRS reports from SharePoint to Power BI Premium Per User (PPU). SSRS is of course near and dear to my heart because of all the work I’ve done around it circa 2004-2010 (yep, it’s been that long), books, MVP awards, etc. Since its humble beginnings, SSRS have had a solid architecture that excelled in extensibility.

I decided to stop writing book reviews here on my blog a long time ago: it’s a lot of work to read a book and write a proper, detailed...

This article describes how to customize the drillthrough experience in Excel PivotTables connected to Power BI datasets or Analysis Services databases. When you double-click on a cell in an...

Database objects often have references to external databases which makes continuous integration problematic. In this article Liz Baron and Sebastian Meine demonstrate a solution.… The post How to successfully deploy...

We are pleased to inform you that adutil has now reached the state of General Availability (GA). As you may be aware, adutil is a CLI-based utility developed to...

We are so excited to release our new SQL Server Co...

When it comes to manipulating and analyzing relational data, Structured Query Language (SQL) has been an international standard since 1986, a couple of years before I was born. And...

At its DevOps World 2021 virtual event, CloudBees introduces new integrated feature flag capabilities for DevOps, alongside a compliance service to improve governance.

The following puzzle is a well-known meme in socia...

There are many ways to load data into a SQL Server database. In this article, Greg Moore demonstrates how to get PowerShell to do more of the work.

One of the easiest ways to collect information abo...

(part 5 of my series of articles on security princ...

Users were asked to change passwords—but were not offered free credit monitoring.

It can be hard to tell a fake Microsoft security w...

Attacker used a legitimate — but likely deprecated — domain to sneak malicious emails past security filters, vendor says.

Malware contains similarities that suggest a possible link to malware that Russia's DarkHalo group used in its massive supply chain attack, researchers say.

Microsoft maintains it's not a security risk but is working toward a solution.

Not a week goes by without news of a new cyberattack. In this article, Robert Sheldon explains the cybersecurity threats in today’s world.… The post Cybersecurity threats appeared first on...

The NSA and CISA have released a document on how to harden your VPN.

That's not admitting defeat. It's preparing for success.

Public disclosure comes in wake of other grumbling...

In this article, we are going to learn about the different types of MySQL Window Functions and how to use them as per different use cases. MySQL is one...

I like rowversion columns, I like that they’re system-maintained and they provide a unique deterministic way to compare or order changes in a database. But they’re not timestamps (despite...

Sometimes you find yourself stuck in a rut and you...

I talk about using partition switching to load in fresh versions of staging tables with the least impact to current users.

In the first post of this series, we learned about a new type of system-versioned table that also works at the database level and introduces a mechanism that demonstrates...

SQL Server identity columns are easy to add to a t...

All four major browsers have duplicated HTTPS Ever...

Former Amazon employees get back pay after alleging they were illegally fired.

Introduction On September 25th, 2021, the SQL Fam...

Beta testers are already reporting worrying results with the new software.

Line breaking, also known as word wrapping, is breaking the displayed of a section of text into lines so that the text will fit into the available width of the editor. When writing queries this feature is not so useful as breaking the script line may make the query less readable, but when writing long comments this feature become one of the most useful feature.

The intent of this post is a quick reference guide based on the recommendation made in “Architecting Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere” April 2019 version. The target audience... The...