Intro
From time to time you have to calibrate the salaries of your staff against the market.
But where do you get the market salaries from?
You can spend money of course. But there are more ways.
I approach this by the following means:
1. Stack Overflow Jobs
Stack Overflow got a nice calculator that you can use to determine the 25 precentile, 50 percentile and 75 percentile of IT jobs.
That tool is super helpful to determine the pay.
You should roughly pay around the 50 percentile or up to the 75 percentile for high achievers.
Here:
https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary
2. Buffer
Buffer also open sourced its salary calculator. Note: For German salaries you'd have to deduct around 30% (the part that companies would pay).
https://buffer.com/salary
Buffer pays the 50th percentile for the role (in Stack Overflow the "seniority" level is only reflected by experience)
You can also check out all salaries at Buffer:
https://buffer.com/resources/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-including-our-transparent-formula-and-all-individual-salaries/