What drives your salary in the ServiceNow industry? Is it the product of some cosmic coincidence? Or is there really a ServiceNow god watching over everything. You know, with a plan for it and stuff. I don’t know, man, but it keeps me up at night.

Seriously though. Red vs Blue reference aside, what characteristics influence your worth in the industry? Would you be worth more if you dove into ITBM instead of ITSM? Or maybe the more technical Discovery product? Is your salary more tied to what you know or what you do? Or who you are? Maybe it’s your ability to tell your story. Or maybe it’s a product of hard work over many years.

I often make the statement “you don’t know what you don’t measure.” Also relevant is “knowing is half the battle,” but that’s another story. So today I’m kicking off the ServiceNow Salary Influence Survey 2020 with the goal of uncovering some of these mysteries and better equipping the ServiceNow community to make career decisions, or just amuse ourselves.

So if you are interested in contributing to this conversation, please be sure to take the survey and share with others. The raw survey responses are anonymous, will only be viewed by me, and will be deleted once analysis is completed.

Thank You

I want to give a couple shout outs to some folks who were instrumental in providing feedback and improving the survey leading up to this launch.

Dhruv Gupta

First and foremost is Dhruv Gupta. Dhruv did a deep dive review of the survey and sent me back a spreadsheet with question recommendations and improvements for the organization, flow of the survey, question improvements, response enhancements, and a few additional questions I hadn’t covered. Not to mention identifying embarrassing duplicate questions. His contributions reshaped the entire survey for the better.

GlideFast Consulting Team

I’d also like to thank some members of the GlideFast Consulting team who provided review and critique of the questions and survey experience. I sought out their help on diversity and equal pay related questions and they stepped up to so much more. They recommended additional improvements to remote work questions, work effort questions, education questions, veterans status, and diversity questions. So special thank you to (in order that they appear in the Slack conversation, breadth first):

• John Helbrant
• Sherry Sullivan
• David Arbour
• Michelle Murtha
• Sam Sussman
• Sarah Toulson
• Diana Riveros

ServiceNow Community

I also had feedback from a number of individuals in the community at large on LinkedIn and through messages and phone calls. Many folks volunteered characteristics that they were interested in having studied and some shared techniques for obtaining the data. Also, many of you contributed to the polls that ultimately confirmed for me that this was needed. So thank you to the following (in no particular order):

• Paige Duffey
• Chris Sanford
• Sanjay Shintre
• Benjamin Broch

Those Opposed

I’m going to play it safe and assume these folks would prefer to not have their names associated with this project but I still want to acknowledge their contributions. A number of folks voiced concerns such as privacy and the survey data being used to drive wages down. Some of them took time out of their day to have legnthy conversations with me about their concerns and alternatives.

To those who oppose, your concerns informed things like the data policy, question structure, and the purpose of the survey. I know you likely still oppose, even with the changes, so thank you all the more for taking your time to share you concerns and work with me as I explored alternatives.