Am I setting my salary requirement too low?

[twofish-quant]

Starting salaries are set company-wide, regardless of location. I'm pretty sure this is standard practice for large companies, which means salaries won't vary much by location for the same position.

I work for a multi-national, which means that you have wildly different salaries for different countries. An entry level position in India will pay a lot less than one in California. However, the tendency is to close offices in places with high salaries and then open offices in places with low salaries, which means that there are ten times as many entry level programming positions in Bangalore than in the US.

Within a company, there may be relatively small differences in salary, but the really big differences come in where companies choose their offices.

I should point out that this deeply worries me since I'm a US citizen, but one interesting thing about working for a multinational is that a lot of the people that you work with aren't US citizens and so have no particular concern for the United States. You aren't going to be able to appeal to US patriotism, if they person that makes the decision to move 1000 jobs from the US to India happens to be German.

 

[twofish-quant]

One thing is clear; it's difficult to get an accurate number.

Yup. One site that I highly recommend is www.glassdoor.com since that gives a pretty good number.

Also, big companies have people in HR that do nothing but try to figure out what market rates are. The main reason they ask you for a number isn't for your benefit but for their's since it helps them do market research.

That's also a weird difference between industry and academia. In academia, at least with public universities, professor salaries are public records that are in the budget, which you can get in the library.

 

[D H]

Also, big companies have people in HR that do nothing but try to figure out what market rates are.

They also subscribe to services whose sole purpose is to gauge salaries. So do medium and even small companies.

 

[BradP]

Thanks everyone; I guess it is time to stop shooting myself in the foot. I am glad I asked.