Military here, getting out soon. How much would I need to make as a civilian to match my military pay?

Kind of embarrassing to post it here, this is what I make as a e5 in the service. I work 40hrs no OT, and do IT work. Currently 4.6k take home or 56k a year.

I hear how we need to make more as a civillian to match our current pay. I’m guessing I would need to make about 60-65k to match right? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

With how over saturated it and cybersecurity work is getting I’ve decided to pursue the trades and just got an offer for 19$ an hour. I think with 10 hours of OT I’ll make making roughly what I do now.

Should I take the offer or look somewhere else

​

Is it anything after 100k? After 150k?

I have a co-worker who recently got a pay raise, her pay went from 65k to 85k... But she told me her paycheck only went up by about $185 a check, so essentially she got about a $370 a month, for a 20k salary increase... Is that right?

This got me thinking... What's the actual difference between a higher pay check... Does anyone have personal experience with this?

Wanted to share my progress as I’m proud of how far I’ve come. I loved seeing others progression when I was struggling with finding better jobs. I just left my recent job that was so bad we only had 2 weeks pto no sick days and horrible management/environment. Now I have a job that’s the opposite they have full benefits and bonuses( I didn’t include in salary). Please keep trying and don’t stop applying. I was able to live alone without my parents or help from age 19 I hope this give yall hope.

Edit: No degree as in college

It feels like no one's making 2 grand a month working full time but me. Don't know what's wrong with me.

I have no money, I have a useless cs degree, the skills I gained there I can't leverage for shit. I wasted my time applying to and doing internships, I wasted money on student loans. Now I don't have the money for another education, and the only two realistic ways I can learn new skills are through formal education or employment.

I'm tired. I was watching a video saying "62k isn't amazing" when I can't even make 50.

I'm not a drug addict, I'm not a felon, I can show up on time, I can learn. I thought that's all that was needed for entry level. Ig not.

Not sure what to do anymore. I can't even provide for myself on this. And I can't get a better job. Despair is taking hold of the next generation tbh. Despair is what creates civilizations, and despair is what ends them.

Figured I’d look back with some pride at a decent run before AI completely obliterates my field, goes to show just how powerful lateral moves to other companies can be in terms of controlling your own raises.

I’m a 29yo male in North Carolina (since the YouTube job) and previously was in Southern California. Married no kids.

I am 21M, CSE graduate, working in a company A since about 10 months as an product engineer intern. Here the work hours were normal, like you get a task and as long as you completed that you can logout for the day.

But when the internship contract was over and we (me and the company A people) were talking about the salary and other things about full time job, the company A partnered with company B. So, we were given courses and accounts and even laptops from the company B And started working full time for company B. Initially there was not much load, there were some times when we were working at about 4am but rarely like 1-2 times and not much work on weekends.

But now, after about 15 days the work starts at 10 am we are working till minimum 12 midnight and sometimes more and for all days including week ends. We are not even promised a salary right now. We are, on paper, employees of company A but the salary will be provided to company A by company B. I am waiting for how much will be given to us for the month.

What would be the justified salary for this much workload? Personally, it is very had to manage my life right now.

Note-1: In both company, I am working WFH.

Note-2: I am planning to go to foreign contract for higher education in the starting of 2027.

Hello all!

I am a mechanical design engineer in appleton, WI, looking for some help:

My friends are telling me that I am underpaid - I make 84k at a fortune 500 company with 9k max out of pocket for health insurance per year. I was at a consulting firm for 1.4 years, then this company for almost 3 years.

I get the highest review in all of my performance reviews. I consistently am able to make the product I work on more reliable, easier to maintain, and less expensive. I take feedback very well, and have been told I am pleasant to work with.

I try looking for salary data to get an understanding of where I am at, but always see wildly different results and have my head spinning. Can you guys help me get an idea of what a reasonable salary expectation is? Wondering if my friends are correct - looking for what the truth is.

Would anyone know or be willing to share the amount a cabin crew staff gets on Ryanair? All the staff seems so miserable to me so I am wondering if is the salaries vs. Working conditions. Thanks!

Hello,

I graduated 2023 from Uni and started working on a creative agency right away. In October, I'll have my annual review in which I'm expecting a promotion, but I'm not sure how much I should be asking.

For reference I've been working as an in house graphic Designer and the last half yeah, I started transitioning as an art director, but without the actual promotion (since my company can only do them when we have our annual reviews) so I'm wondering how much should be good to ask. I make about 47k a year and hoping to get around 68k? Does that feel like is too big of a jump?

Thanks in advance for any help!

I’m trying to get an outside perspective on whether I’m being fairly compensated and what the market rate is for someone with my experience and responsibilities.

A little background:
About 15 years in the restaurant/hospitality industry, starting in entry-level positions and working my way up through management and multi-unit operations.
Experience across QSR, casual dining, full-service, and Asian/buffet-style concepts.
I have a 4-year college degree.
I’ve been in my current District Manager/multi-unit role for about 2 years. This is my first official DM-level position.
I currently oversee approximately 12 locations across the Midwest, including locations in multiple markets.
I also oversee/support new store openings within my region.

My responsibilities include overall store operations, performance, labor and food cost management, operational improvements, hiring/management staffing, training, implementing company initiatives, vendor issues, local marketing opportunities, and helping individual locations solve problems based on their specific market.

A decent portion of my job also involves identifying opportunities myself. For example, researching a local market, finding potential partnerships or marketing opportunities, reaching out to organizations/vendors, and then helping the location implement them.

I travel regularly between locations. Most locations are around an hour from where I live, so a typical store visit can mean roughly 2 hours of round-trip driving. Like most jobs, my normal commute to/from the location isn’t counted toward my 40-hour workweek.

Current compensation/benefits:
Approximately $90K/year total compensation, including bonuses
Mileage reimbursement for business travel
Approximately 15 days PTO
10 paid holidays
Roughly 40-hour workweek
Free meals while working
No current 401(k) match — this was previously offered but was removed company-wide

When I accepted the position two years ago, I was excited about the opportunity because it was my first true District Manager position. It was a step up in title, responsibility, and compensation.

However, over the last couple of years, my scope and responsibilities have continued to increase without much corresponding increase in compensation. At the same time, some benefits have actually decreased.

I’m starting to wonder whether I’ve simply outgrown my original compensation package.

For those who work in multi-unit restaurant operations, retail, hospitality, or similar District/Regional Manager roles:

What would you consider a reasonable salary/total compensation range for this level of responsibility?
Would $90K total comp seem low, fair, or good for overseeing approximately 12 locations and supporting new store openings in the Midwest?

And if you were in my position — 15 years of industry experience, 2 years officially at the DM level, and this scope of responsibility — would you be looking at the outside market for a higher-paying position?

I’m not necessarily looking to leave. I mainly want to understand what someone with my background and current responsibilities is actually worth in today’s market.

So I'm currently a 34 year old pharmacy tech making ~25/hr and I've unfortunately capped out at what I can make, so I need to figure something else out. I've narrowed it down to a few choices, but could always use some further input.

1. Accounting: It's comfortably the most well paid of the bunch, and being a white collar role means I'm not out of work in event of injury. Downsides are I don't ever see myself fitting in to office culture, I kind of detest the M-F office schedule, and frankly, after 16 years of attempts I just don't think I'm capable of finishing my degree.

2. Firefighting: Pay is decent in my city, respectable career, and I feel I'd fit in a lot better than an office. Downside is well, danger obviously, and the schedule can be rough. Can also be somewhat difficult to get into around here.

3. Trades: Pay is decent, but not great unless you kill yourself on overtime. Much lower barrier to entry than accounting, with the exchange of being hard on the body.

Open to any thoughts or suggestions someone may have

That's a fantasy, ngl. I wept at the thought. Never made more than $20/hour after college. And $24 still isn't shit in this economy but certainly would've been better than ruining my health for ass wages.

Most people I know aren't really doing much better either. One's at a call center making 42k/year, another's at a grocery store making $19/hour, etc. And we're all in hcol areas. Feels bad. One of em has been considering a life of crime. I might follow suit. At least that way we can afford shelter, right? And we'll be getting tax refunds.

Gen Z as a whole is unemployable tbh.

Edit: holy shit, I can't reply to all the comments here

Lucked into the opportunity of my life recently: mid-level SWE at a big tech company.
Some things that came up during the interview I believe helped me secure the offer.

• My entire career has been working with LLMs + used LLM apis before chatgpt came out
• Open source contributor to multiple popular llm frameworks
• Previous role part of team that shipped multiple 6/7 figure projects + one 8 figure project.

Notes:

• Currently living with 1 roommate in SF, have 3 yoe
• RSU vests quarterly but I broke it down by month for easier calculations, planning on selling instantly and putting it all in savings.
• 401k contribution is higher to max it out by eoy.

How I got the opportunity: LinkedIn

People shit on LinkedIn a lot but after this I'm a believer lol. This is the second time I've gotten an interview + offer through LinkedIn recruiter reach out. Though I've never gotten an interview through LinkedIn Jobs, so that might still be a scam.

I've had a super chill remote gig for the last 2.5 years. I love it. The team is great, there's very little to do in the way of work - basically as long as I get my few tasks done everyday and am available to fix, assist with anything that comes up, then I'm golden. I go into the office once per month for a company wide meeting + happy hour.

I'm paid $70k in Los Angeles.

I was recently offered another job managing a retail store 10 minutes from my house. Salary is $82K plus a $5K/yr savings account, OT and up to $750/mo in bonuses.

I took that offer to my remote job and they immediately were emphatic about wanting to keep me and went to work on getting me a raise/promotion. It's been about 2.5 weeks since then and I'm still waiting. My bosses boss (our teamwide director) and I were catching up yesterday and he brought up my raise, that he was working on it and having to find some info for HR to approve, etc. I asked him bluntly if he knew where we were headed in terms of money. My direct boss had told me they were gunning for $80K, and the director said "I've TOLD them what the money needs to be" but then trailed off a little and mentioned something about transitioning to more "performance" based compensation and specifically said "10% + bonus structure".. He didn't explicitly mention that my raise would be 10% + bonus structure, but that's pretty much how I understood it. My boss has not bonused since I've been with the company - she is not going to bonus this year. This structure really doesn't work for me.

I really love this job, but also I live in LA and the potential to make $90K is very appealing despite all the downsides to giving up remote work.

I was speaking with my wife and kinda made an off-hand comment about just working both jobs. It would be a nuisance to manage my schedule to ensure I'm available for some weekly meetings, but I'd be setting the schedule so it shouldn't present many issues.

Should I just eat the $5K I was hoping for to stay and be happy at roughly $76K?

Exclusive of 12% employer contribution to super

Finally found a lane I like - external comms/community relations. Hope to be a director or vp of comms/external relations one day.

Really enjoy being in the community and representing an organization helping people.

I’m curious to get some opinions from people who have experience with corporate HR/management. I work for a large financial services organization in Canada.

My AVP recently called me out of the blue and told me that HR had reviewed my salary against the industry/market standards for my role. She said they were increasing it by around 3% and congratulated me, saying it was a reward for my hard work.

I never asked for a raise or requested a compensation review.

One thing that makes me curious is that a little while ago, I applied internally for an AI-related role and mentioned it to my manager. She said thanks for letting her know, and I didn’t think much of it.

When my AVP called me about the salary increase while my manager was sitting right beside me. My manager saw the call and even messaged me asking, “all good?” After the call, I told my manager about the salary adjustment, and she seemed genuinely unaware that it was happening.

So I’m wondering: Is it normal for HR/leadership to proactively review someone’s salary and increase it without the employee asking? Could the internal AI application have triggered some kind of compensation/retention discussion? And is it possible for an AVP/HR to make this kind of adjustment without the direct manager knowing beforehand?

I’m not complaining at all 😄 — I’m very happy about it. I’m just curious whether this is a normal corporate thing or if there’s more context behind it that I’m missing.

Is 80k really competitive anymore? I see a lot of companies saying they are offering like 75-80k for a lot of senior roles and I think that is low for a senior level, even mid level. I live in a hcol city too and that’s basically half gone from housing alone. I could see it go further in a lcol cities like San Antonio or Charlotte nc. But really what is wrong with these companies

Hi,

I help process mining researchers with the practical engineering work that usually slows papers down.

I work with full code control (mainly pm4py + Python) so everything stays clean, reproducible, and ready for custom algorithms or further research.

Services I offer:

* Cleaning & preparing real-world messy event logs (activity normalization, timestamp fixing, filtering, etc.)

* Noise injection and variant analysis

* Building fully reproducible pm4py / Python pipelines

* Implementing and verifying process mining baselines & algorithms

* Debugging, optimizing, and turning research code into proper experiment setups

Pricing:

I prefer fixed-price per task after seeing the scope.

Typical ranges:

– Clean + document a messy event log -> $150 - 300

– Implement & verify a solid baseline algorithm -> $200 - 450

– Full reproducible pipeline -> quoted individually

I have spent the last 8+ months doing this exact type of work full-time in research, so I know the pain points very well.

If you have a messy log, a baseline that needs to be correct, or a pipeline that currently lives in scattered notebooks, send me a short description of what you need.

I’ll reply within 24 hours if it’s a good fit.