I saw on the Caribbean Developers’ Facebook group someone looking to run a salary survey:

I dig Matthew’s approach, because instead of doing the survey and trying to see if there’s interest, he’s looking to see if there’s any interest first and then leaning into the work.

From the looks of it, interest is low, maybe it will grow, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t.

In 2018, I had a similar idea, for the same Caribbean Devs group. I may have been inspired by the StackOverflow Developer Survey and my own curiosity as it relates to the job market.

Here’s my survey results from back then:

caribbean-developer-salary-survey-2017Download

Just about 40 submissions were made, which was instructive. I appreciated that if you do a salary survey in a small pool, it can be too revealing if you have access to each submission, even if the submissions are anonymized. If I were to do this again, I would bear that in mind, I might leave out a Company field, for example, in favor of Industry. I’d also not include a Job Title field and instead leave it at Category and perhaps Years in the industry. I might also include questions that get to the heart of project diversity, too.

So, this is mostly a cautionary tale about surveys like this. There are good points of guidance to get from economists and people in the social sciences to understand how to design things like this, beyond simply capturing the data.