Conclusion

SALARY IS NOT SOMETHING WE SHOULD IGNORE, even though many of us might not want to spend too much time dwelling on money matters or worrying that we don’t make enough. The commonly accepted rule that it is not appropriate to share information about your salary with colleagues has reasonable justification—too much information could cultivate an environment of envy or perceived injustice—but no information at all about how much one should earn results in plenty of confusion and unfairness as well. Both the employer and the employee gain from knowing more or less what the latter should make.

Aside from the purpose of determining an appropriate salary offer or ask, the information in this report is also intended to help those in the design space navigate through the important career choices: which tasks might you want to spend more (or less) time on; which tools might you want to learn; and at which types of companies might you want to apply for a job. On one hand, the correlation-causation distinction means that we cannot say, for example, that “learning” Slack (it’s pretty easy) will boost your salary by $6K.

On the other hand, the fact that we cannot assume causation in the observed correlations does not mean there is none. When, based on intuition, causation seems possible, and when the rewards appear to be large and costs relatively low, it seems reasonable to act on an observed correlation even if causation is not ensured. A prime example of this is with coding: it is intuitive that being able to code, at least a little, would help a UX designer working on web, mobile, or (software-enabled) hardware; and learning how to code a little is probably not a great cost compared to the potential reward—even hypothetically— of an estimated, eventual $16K salary increase.

In conclusion, we hope that you find this report interesting, but above all useful. Design is a quickly changing field, and we hope to keep up with it by continuing this research, which cannot be possible without your participation. We encourage you to try your own data in the model, and if you can spare 10 minutes, to take the survey yourself at oreilly.com/ design/2017-design-salary-survey.