First salary review after one year - what would be a reasonable ask?
I'm looking for some advice on a salary discussion.
I [M30] joined a German engineering company one year ago as a software engineer. At the time, I had only 6 months of full-time experience (plus ~ 2 years as a working student) and a CS bachelor's from a well-known German technical university. My starting salary was €63k plus the standard holiday bonus everyone gets.
During the interview, I was told I'd have mentorship, code reviews, and the chance to learn. Instead, I ended up as the only developer responsible for an entirely new application for one of our devices. I pretty much own everything, architecture, implementation, CI/CD, testing, requirements analysis and maintenance.
In general I don't have anyone reviewing my code or supervising my work. Recently, another team helped implement two features because they had capacity. I reviewed their code, and it was possible for three people to work in parallel without conflicts, which gave me some confidence that I'm doing things reasonably well. Apart from that, I feel like almost nobody sees the technical side of my work. My PO mostly handles tickets and planning. The requirements I receive are often vague, so I either write the concept myself (if it is something new or specific to our device) or reverse-engineer similar products that have the same feature to figure out what needs to be done. My manager mainly sees that sprints are completed but not how the work is actually done within the team.
When I signed my contract, my manager also signed a document stating that my salary would be reviewed after the first year. That year has now passed, but nobody has brought it up yet. According to Kununu, software developers at my company average around €71k (there are only 12 entries).
My questions are:
- Should I bring up the salary review myself now, or wait?
- Given my responsibilities, what salary would be reasonable to ask for?
- Am I overestimating the scope of my role, or is this beyond what would normally be expected from someone who joined with my level of experience?
I'm not planning to leave immediately because I'm finishing my M.Sc. over the next year.