Salary and Promotion Calculator – A Time Saver for Testers

I consider it my moral responsibility to help the community. Time is the most important thing which anyone owns. I have developed this utility to save time for testers. Testers at the time of interviews and appraisals have to sit through unnecessarily long discussions. In many situations, the results are constant despite the actual performance or caliber of the person under review.

One of the big organisations talked about salary brackets with me and told interviews are meant for selecting a candidate and deciding, based on number of years, which bracket a person goes into. I want to help testers applying for a job or working in such organisations. I have developed a tool which if filled with pre-determined values like years of experience can give the resulting salary. It also has check-boxes for tools and certifications.

The tool is available here:

Online Salary and Promotion Calculator

http://www.testingperspective.com/tools/salarycalc.htm

Features

• Provide simple data and see whether the candidate is eligible for promotion and the hike.
• See useful suggestions on what explanation should be given.

Assumptions

• This tool does not take into consideration unimportant factors like real knowledge, what the person actually did in the years put as experience, passion, learning capacity, intelligence.
• It considers knowledge of pre-determined commercial tools which is very important and discards not so important thing like capacity to build an in-house tool or framework.
• It considers whether the candidate possesses pre-defined certifications and discards not so important stuff as assessing what was learn from those certifications, practical implementation of the concepts learnt and whether the objectives mentioned were met or not
• The beauty of the tool lies in its impartial nature. Whatever be the capability of the person, it is not overwhelmed. It does not take exceptions, so we should appreciate how consistent it is.

Who can use it

• Recruitment Team: At the time of interview, HR/Recruiter can use this tool to show how transparently they calculate designations and hikes. By the time, a tester understands it wasn’t a joke, provide his or her salary offer with the same calculator.
• Performance Reviewer: At the time of performance evaluation, see the above. This will accompany the formal performance review program in a great way. After all, it’s consistent tool.
• Testers: There’s a high probability that the the above people would not know about this tool. Please introduce them to this when you know that you are getting the same results. This will save you a lot of time, which you can spend on testing.

Future

I am planning to offer a paid service wherein I will process the data for complete organisation with the API used in this tool (I confess that it’s a very complex API and calculator, so I can not share the details). I promise to keep the data confidential ( Until, you keep the year and designation based criteria secret, no one can calculate it by oneself.)

This will save (most importantly) time for testers, so they spend their time on testing rather than in discussions. I hope I contribute to a Green World, because there be less testers smoking after those marathon interviews and meetings. ACs will be switched off in those conference rooms. It will be a better world.

Do I get a Noble Peace Prize for contributing to peaceful environment in companies by avoiding extended performance review meetings? Atleast a patent? Come on, be fair!

Further Reading

Rahul Verma

(Please look at Disclaimer page before looking on the web where I am employed. I have never faced such a situation with my current employer at the time of interview or during appraisals. This information is not meant for my current employer, as I do not want my performance reviewer to be tempted to use this in my next appraisal. )