Part I · Chapter 8

Your personal instrument panel

This book will age. Every book of numbers does.

So this chapter teaches you to check any career, in any country, yourself. After this, you do not need this book to be your only source. That is the point.

The routine

Four steps. About thirty minutes for a career you know nothing about.

Step 1. Count the jobs. Search one job title on two or three job sites for your country. Count roughly how many results appear. Then narrow to entry level and count again.

The second number matters more than the first. A field with many senior openings and almost no junior ones is a field you cannot enter, whatever its total looks like.

Step 2. Read twenty adverts properly. Not the pay. The requirements.

Write down what appears in most of them. That list is what employers actually screen for, and it is usually different from what courses teach.

Step 3. Find one grade 1 or grade 3 number. Use the hierarchy from Chapter 5. One good number beats ten salary-website numbers.

Step 4. Ask who is selling. Search the career name with the word “shortage”. Look at who publishes the results. If they sell training or staffing, adjust your belief downwards.

What to bookmark, and what each one really measures

Your national statistics office. Slow, boring, reliable. Measures employment and pay by occupation. One to two years behind.

Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook (United States). Ten-year projections by occupation, plus current pay. The projections are projections. The current figures are solid.

Eurostat for European Union labour data.

Indeed Hiring Lab. Measures job adverts, not jobs. Fast, and useful for direction. Remember that an advert is not an opening, and one opening can produce several adverts.

Stack Overflow Developer Survey. Measures what people who answer surveys say. Good on technology use. Weaker on pay.

Levels.fyi for large technology company pay, checked against offer letters. Covers a narrow slice of the market extremely well.

Your country’s immigration authority, directly, if a visa matters to you. Never trust a blog for a threshold. These change, and the official page is the only one that counts.

Finding your own country’s primary source

Most career writing assumes you live in the United States. This book does not. So here is where to start, wherever you are.

Every country with a working government runs a labour force survey. It is usually free and open to anyone. The websites that want to tell you about salaries almost never mention it.

Now the part that matters more than the list.

A primary source will answer a coarser question than the one you asked.

Two real examples. ILOSTAT publishes occupation data at the second level of the international classification. That means it can tell you about software and applications developers as a group. It cannot tell you about Epic analysts, because no statistical system in the world has a category for them.

India’s labour force survey now publishes monthly, which is fast for official data. What it publishes monthly is participation and unemployment. Occupation and earnings detail sits in the annual report, which arrives later.

So expect three things from a primary source. Broad categories, a delay of months or years, and total honesty about both. That is the trade. You are swapping precision for the certainty that nobody is selling you anything.

Use the official figure as your anchor and the fast sources as your direction. Suppose a job board says a role pays double the official figure for its occupation group. One of them is wrong, and it is usually not the government.

Finding your own country’s page is a twenty-minute job you do once. Do it before you finish this chapter, and write the address down somewhere permanent.

Reading job adverts as data

Adverts are the fastest signal available. Read them as a group, not one at a time.

Three things to track.

Volume over time. Search the same title every month and note the count. The direction matters more than the number.

Seniority mix. Count how many say junior, graduate or entry level. Compare against senior, staff or principal. This single ratio would have warned you about the entry-level squeeze a year before the articles did.

Requirement drift. Compare adverts from this year against last year, where you can find them. Requirements creep upward quietly. A role that asked for two years now asks for five. Nobody announces this.

Checking a salary claim in ten minutes

Someone tells you a career pays a certain amount. Here is how to test it.

1. Find the source. If there is none, stop. It is not a number, it is a feeling.
2. Grade it using Chapter 5. Most claims turn out to be grade 4.
3. Ask gross or net. Ask base or total. If the person does not know, they are repeating something.
4. Check the location and the level. A single figure covering a whole country and every level of seniority means very little.
5. Look for a second, independent source. Not another article citing the same one. Chapter 4 explains why that fails.
6. Convert honestly. For living costs, use purchasing power. For money you plan to send abroad, use the exchange rate.

If a claim survives all six, treat it as probably true.

A warning about your own searches

Search engines will show you what is optimised, not what is true.

Search any career with the word “salary” and the first page will be salary websites and training companies. That is grade 4 and grade 5 material, arranged by whoever spent most on being found.

Two habits fix this. Add the name of a statistics body to your search. And go directly to the sources you bookmarked rather than searching fresh each time.

Checking this book

Apply all of this to Part VI.

Every profile carries its sources, dates and grades. If a number looks wrong to you, follow it. If you find an error, Appendix B explains how to report it, and Appendix F records what changed in each version.

A book that teaches you to distrust weak sources has to accept the same treatment. Chapter 20 lists the specific findings that would prove this book wrong.