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If you _really_ want more money the most effective method is to to "play hardball". This play can double or even triple your income from a entry point salary if you're worth it and you play it right.

The deal with hardball is that you have to leave your current company. You may not actually leave the company but you must be _prepared_ to, otherwise it wont work and you will back down too quickly.

As usual, look around the market for better pay and try to get a job interview and a position for pay that you like the sound of. Once this is done and dusted, hand in your resignation and state that the reason you are leaving the job is due to pay. State a figure that would keep you at the company but obviously keep this very private between yourself and your manager. You can be a little cheeky with this figure, depending on how much you want to remain there.

If they value your work sufficiently they will accept your figure and modify your salary to keep you there. If they don't you leave for the other job that pays better.

For best results you need to get the timing of the hardball perfect. You need your employers to either be desperate, guilty or a bit of both. Desperation is achieved by doing this at a critical moment. Say, the most senior member of staff on your project leaves, thus leaving you with the most knowledge of the system. Or in my case, regulation of the mortgage market was about 8 months away and I was the only member of staff with sufficient knowledge to implement their new system.

Guilt can be even better though depending on the type of manager you have. Essentially you want the manager to feel as though they owe you something. For example, if your pay review was supposed to happen six months after your start but it has been twelve or eighteen months then they will feel guilty about not doing it sooner. If they have cancelled a project you worked hard on or did you some other kind of disservice your guilt ratio increases and you can cash in.

I managed to push my salary from £12k to £36k in one fell swoop this way about 8 years ago. It's how I started contracting.

For context, the company had cancelled my own software development project (which despite being poor code (when i look back on it) was fit for purpose and worked). They replaced this with a system bought in (which they had to buy on a management agreement from joining a particular group) that was just a confusing mess of VBScript and SQL stored procedures. It didn't work, wasn't built for purpose (a common operation would lock up the database server for 2 minutes+) and I only _just_ managed to stitch it together in time for regulation day (actually it was a few days after, I had to manually do a lot of the quotes in the first few days of regulation.. ). And when I say stitched this process involved a bunch of programs I had also hacked together to cover the gaps.




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