Market changes our salaries

There was a job posting for what appeared to be a challenging quality engineering / testing role, and a clearly defined phone time to ask about the role. So I called to ask a few things.

• why was the position 1 year contract rather than continuous - because they wanted a longer trial period to see if the new-to-organization role would be valuable

• would the salary range of the position make it a pay cut if I considered - it indeed would, and I got the understanding that it would be about 25%.

The real reason I called is that it was from an organization that I got to consult with for a few weeks with my lovely current employer allowing me to work with probably half the invoicing per hour to create throughput metrics as my first assignment, and I have hoped to be allowed to focus on that particular organization ever since.

So I had to check. The google AI summary tells me today that "a principal quality engineer earns €6250 - €8750 per month". They were hoping for the lower end of that scale.

Today's phone call was a reminder that have, salary-wise, grown to a scale in which I rarely get to stay around full time for a longer timeframe, but I show up with similar topics in many organizations, driving changes that people hired for the lower end salary don't always get done. It reminded me that for an above expected salary, my last three positions have been tailor-made for me, rather than be ones where I would be able to apply for an open position. I have been lucky to be surrounded with multiple organizations already who have done that for me.

Moving from me to the phenomena this makes me investigate: we are living in a world where a lot of people acquiring attention of talent believe we can now buy that attention for a lot cheaper, and require more on all levels. For me this shows up as desperately seeking testers, but not finding the right kind of testers (who are also developers). It shows up as talent salary levels confusion, that I can't quite wrap my head around every day.

I realized that for this position they fill, they hire someone who proposes hiring me for a few days at a time to help. And I never get to focus on a single client if I want to stick with the higher end of salaries.

Where I work, we are all called consultant, but not all of us really do consulting. And some of us who do, hope we wouldn't need to. But I guess that is the market valuation of paying for a kind of work.

Demand increases when the price point goes down

A colleague at work had a broadband installed for their house this week, making the running joke of the week:

How many people does it take to install a broadband?

The empirically validated number appeared to be 5 distinct individuals showing up at site. For a end user price point of 99 €.

Evidently, if that is a great business, someone else paid most of the cost. It was also a great example of organizing work to be done by as many people as it felt possible, specializing in tasks towards the end result.

The running joke become the brain worm of the week for me, for the parallels that I struggle with in testing. Clients want to get testing done, for whatever their equivalent of 99 € is. If we need to send in separately project manager who allows for testing to happen, a test manager who organizes the frame, the tester who knows what to do in the frame, and the test automator who leaves something behind for repeating, not all these roles can get a professional level salary without someone invisible in the chain subventing the costs. And unlike with broadbands in Finland, we don't have one of those for testing in Finland.

On an individual level, the test lead colleagues who don't test themselves but hold space for testing, creating some of the best environments to test in with positive feedback and continous acknowlegment of the unique challenges of testing, they are worth a lot. On a structural level, clients are increasingly asking not to have to pay as much for management and taking control over the choices by choosing individuals excluding these.

There will always be some test leads, especially for end-to-end systems over multiple systems, teams and even organizations. Yet the reshaping trend, and declining numbers of this specialization are visible at large.

The demand drives the shapes of "testers". The demand comes often attached to low price points. Like this week, a tester deep into the agentic style of testing, with five years of test automation centric test experience, for 50 € / hour. Must live in Finland and speak fluent Finnish. While I would be qualified for the tasks, my price point is somewhat more than double to that, and as much as I would have been a great person for that project, I wasn't ready to cut my salary yet.

Now with AI in the picture, the shapes of our roles are changing even more. We'd rather pay 50 € / hour for someone who is seriously supported by the tool bringing in a new generation of testers that are AI native. The 80 € / hour AI native testers need to find words to describe their value-adding shape.

If the World Economic Forum Future of Work -report says 92 millions jobs are lost to AI by 2030, and 170 million new jobs are generated in the same timeframe, it says the position shapes are changing.

As an individual, I look at three dimensions in building myself up:

• Capability is what I can do, and I can always get better in all dimensions of capability. Some grow with new skills, some by honing existing skills to efficiency of execution. It took me 10 repeats of transforming organizations to continuous releases before I felt I had the foundation of repeating this properly in place.

• Position is what organization expects me to do, and more often than not, we may be more in some dimension than our position is. This is the conversation of "I can do more, shouldn't I be paid more" where you need a different position to be paid more. Organizations tend to set pay for position, not for person. In best cases the two match.

• Aspiration is what you would want to do given the choices. Like the fact that I would like to be a developer even when I am a director, and I get snappy when someone suggests that I need a "developer" to tell how to do a thing I am an expert on. If aspiration and position are misaligned, there is a chance the work of the position doesn't get done, so I have always found it imporant to own my responsibility to a position, while visualizing and working towards my aspiration.

It's now been 10 years since Geoffrey Hinton in 2016 said:

"It's just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do better than radiologists. ... We should stop training radiologists now." -- Geoffrey Hinton

10 years later, radiologist salaries are up by 40% and total amount of them is up by 15% (in USA). The demand went up. The shapes that gets compared are probably different in the tasks. This is an example of the Jevons paradox, where added efficiency increases demand.

We need to start doing better in talking about value and added efficiency in testing. However, counting "testers" might not work same as radiologists, because the trend last 10 years has shown that "testers" title gets merged with developers. We need to start getting counted as one relevant group.

Some also say that we have same amount of chefs but more kitchens, demand increasing but key productive resource not increasing. With AI through, it might be that task expansion brings in more chefs, and not all chefs need to be winning michelin stars with their cuisine.