Hello folks! I'm in my mid-twenties and in the middle of making a career shift out here in the Boulder/Denver metro area. I found out I really hated the career my degree pointed to (luckily minimal student debt) so I decided to take some savings and turn my longtime hobby of web design into a new career. I took a web development bootcamp and learned a TON over the course of 6 months, built a portfolio and started applying. Unfortunately it was really hard to get my foot in the door despite a strong portfolio and killer people skills. After 50 applications I got one phone screening, which led to one technical interview, and one follow up interview. I aced all that according to feedback from the interviewers, but the team lead let me know they were going with someone who had industry experience and a CS degree. So, I did some research and ended up doing an apprenticeship program with a local agency. They basically take projects from other tech companies, have their senior team+apprentices work on the project, and then whoever commissioned the project gets first stab at recruiting the people who worked on it. If that doesn't work out past project partners are given your resume. About 90% of people who go through the program get hired by one partner company or another.
The sponsoring company for the project I've been working on has a senior engineer who's been keeping track of my work and he just let me know that they'd like to have me come and do an interview. He said they're confident in my coding skills, so the interview will be about culture fit, and salary expectations, after which he expects they'll make me an offer.
This is my first job in this industry- I'd be working as a full stack Rails engineer, and I'd be one of two people with front end responsibilities on a team of 15. I have a design background (love the work, didn't love the career) and I've been told the other front end person would really like to not do so much front end anymore. As I see it this puts me in a pretty strong position.
1. I've been working on their code for 4 months, there is no on ramp. I have the company's environment and flows down cold. Most if not all of the time it takes to go from floundering jr dev to productive jr dev is already out of the way because of the apprenticeship structure.
2. They have full confidence in my coding ability. There are no gambles in hiring me for a jr dev position.
3. I cost nothing to hire/recruit. There's little time or monetary cost to hiring me.
4. I can take over the workflows that they don't have a happily dedicated person for, and probably do it better than most people who do full stack because I actually have a design background.
5. I get along with the senior engineer who would be leading my team, and have met and gotten along with 3 other team members in the mid to senior level of the company.
I feel like this should actually put me in a really strong position to negotiate a good starting salary, but there are a few things I worry about:
1. I'm a Hispanic woman, and I'm slightly worried that the culture fit won't strongly sway in my favor. I would be the only woman on the technical side of the company, the youngest on the technical team, and the only latina in the company as far as I know. I don't know if that's because of that self selecting bias you read about in tech companies or just because there aren't many people like me living where I do and working in tech. Based on interactions I've had with people I'm guessing the latter, but I can't know that for sure.
2. All my true work experience is in this apprenticeship.
3. They know that they're the first people who will be making me a job offer.
Whatever they offer me will be a huge increase in salary from my previous work, so there's a part of me which is insecure about moving into this industry and feeling a teeny bit of imposter syndrome and looking back on my time searching for work with dread and fear which says 'TAKE WHATEVER THEY GIVE YOU AND GO FROM THERE!' But there's a bigger part of me which says I'm one hell of an asset and I would be a great addition to their team. I just don't know what to ask for, what to say when they ask about my previous salary, and how hard to negotiate.
Any advice would be appreciated, from what a reasonable expectation for a starting salary would be, to how to gracefully negotiate if that expectation isn't met. This is going to be the first time I'll be earning significantly more than it takes me to live, and I'd like to avoid starting this career with a starting salary behind other people and needing to scramble my way to reasonable raises etc going forward, especially as I didn't come to it straight out of college.
TLDR: What should a person with unrelated degree+work experience up until 6 months ago but excellent worth to the company expect as a starting salary for a full stack developer, and how should it be negotiated gracefully if the offer is lower than that expectation?
