What Salary.com IT job category am I, really?

(1) You are underpaid. You're not a guy in a call center, you actually have some coding skills. You should be making around $50K, not $30-40K. I would say a $45-65K range would be reasonable. (2) You will not get a market salary unless you switch jobs. Maybe you should think about it, or figure out how you can extract the maximum amount of learning and marketable career skills from your current job to put you in the best position to switch jobs. How much do developers make at your job? Are they underpaid too? If not, is there a path for you to become one within the next 1-2 years?

When I stated in my job 5 years ago, they offered me $N. I asked for N+6%, and they said no. Recently I've learned a lot about what my company pays people: my friend who was hired for the same job title 8 years ago was offered N-6% and talked them up to N; thus he consistently made more than me because he'd had 3 years of incremental raises, which is fine, he'd had more experience. Over the past 5 years, I'm up to N+10% (cost-of-living and performance-based raises). They're currently hiring someone else into this same job title, and my manager is a loud moron who doesn't shut his office door when he talks about these things, so I know they're offering him N+15% as a start, and he's trying to bargain them up to N+20%. I'm in the process of taking my skills elsewhere for N+40%, so I know that my company is a bunch of cheapskates, but what really appalls me is that they're offering the new guy more than I could ever have caught up to via annual raises. In short, you should absolutely ask for more money, and do that with no embarrassment, in the full confidence that your skills are worth more than they're paying you. I hope it's a good conversation, empowering to be willing to ask for something, and getting you good gains in the shot-term. Unfortunately, your salary is so far off that you can also be confident that your skills are worth more than they will ever be willing/able to pay you. By leaving (which is a longer-term proposition), you can get a bigger pay raise than your current employer will ever give you. If you want to know more about salaries at particular companies, glassdoor.com can be a good resource.

Technical Support Representative II is the guy the pass the phone to when the guy who says "did you turn it off and back on again" can't fix your internet. They do not code and deploy bugfixes. They provision your modem. How similar is http://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/7235052 to what you do?

Unless there is some balloon payment in the end like stock options or you are living in Bangalore you are underpaid. I dont think there is going to be any benefit to finding the right salary.com slot, nor do I think their data is really meaningful. If you are opening an IDE, any IDE, as part of your job its a $50k/year floor.

I made 30-40k as essentially an intern 10 years ago. You are underpaid.

Most of my time is spent dealing with issues with legacy code. I spend about 20% of my time on the phone with customers, 60% delving into code and sprocs looking for bugs, and about 20% creating, testing, and/or deploying bugfixes. Underpaid. Underpaid. My friend makes 15-20k more than this doing only the part of your job that DOESN'T involve any coding or testing that was outside of the pull quote i grabbed. I grabbed that part because that's why you should be paid more. O, And my friend works for a contracting/staffing company that middlemans between him and his actual employer sucking up some not insignificant percentage of his pay. 50k should be your take home pay after taxes. If not more. Don't feel bad, if you look through my ask history you'll see i went through the same thing... only more egregious. My favorite answer from my "how much of a raise should i be asking for?" was "Zero, the correct answer is find a new job". I tried to bring my salary in line with the market and got a bunch of wishy washy excuses and offers of no raise but covering more education or certifications. They're not suddenly going to wake up and go "holy shit we HAVE to pay this guy more". If you're irreplaceable they'll be figuring out how to replace you ASAP with someone else they can pay less. If you're not, then why would they bother?

As someone who works in IT in Pittsburgh, you're significantly underpaid. Of course, it's my experience with companies in Pittsburgh that IT is underpaid as a matter of course, and that the extent you are underpaid (20K with no trouble) is not unheard of in my experience. You're almost certainly not going to be able to negotiate a 25K raise, but you should be able to find a new job at that range - at which point, you can either leverage that offer for a raise or (and this is my recommndation) take the new position. You're being exploited, and unless you are willing to find a new job, that won't change - Welcome to IT.

Where are you located? Different places have different costs of living. On the basis of your job description alone it does sound like you're underpaid but if you live somewhere with a very low cost of living that could account for your salary.

I'm located in Pittsburgh. 500 square foot 2 bedroom is $650 a month. Not NYC. But not out in the woods either.