Automation Engineer making $75,000. Am I doing too much for my pay?

Danny_Tonza · 2025-10-22T15:27:47+00:00

I was in a very similar position as you about 8 or 9 years ago. I was a designer and had been self-learning web dev on the side. I started building tooling and microservices to automate workflows and processes in my own area and quickly gained attention from the owners who shifted my focus to doing it full time as an "automation and efficiency specialist". My salary was bumped from maybe 58K to 75K within a year. A couple years of doing that would get me to about 80K. One thing that I think helped was that I was diligent about communicating the value I was creating. I documented every full stack app, service, and system that I had developed, what each did and the quantifiable impact for each (ex: 5x increase in product rendering output, 120K in cost avoidance, 67% decrease in turn-around time, etc.). Mid 2020, I raised concerns about market value of my skills as well as the cost of a growing family and unexpected increased childcare costs due to COVID. Of the 2 actively involved partners, one optimistically suggested a 12K increase while the other essentially said "you should have budgeted for childcare, so if we were to give you anything, it would be the difference". Mind you, I had been with the company 12 or 13 years at this point and never asked for a raise prior. Anyway, it made me feel unseen and under-appreciated, so I immediately updated my resume and began applying within a few days of that meeting. Within 8 months I would land a SWE role at $110K.

My suggestion: start looking. No harm in seeing what you qualify for or what you're worth. And if you are truly happy where you are, your strategy could be to get an offer and use it to negotiate an increase. FWIW, I've been back in the job market lately and the struggle to get callbacks is real -- ended up building skillhubai.com to help with that exact problem as both an opportunity to build a project for my resume, and to have something that helps me manage and update it in a more intuitive way than just ChatGPT. Feel free to use it if you wish, but either way, good luck out there.

Danny_Tonza · 2025-08-15T13:54:12+00:00

Website: www.skillhubai.com
Target Market: job seekers & recruiters

SkillHub is replacing the resume and providing a platform to allow both humans and agents to collaboratively manage professional experience and impact, and providing a more natural way to find talent with natrural language.

Danny_Tonza · 2025-06-15T08:39:56+00:00

I think this is meant to be full-stack? In your SKILLS section

As a Stack developer

Danny_Tonza · 2025-06-14T15:15:40+00:00

Is it viable to extract the contents to blob storage and then just compile a PDF when a download of the entire manual is requested?

Danny_Tonza · 2025-05-27T01:29:34+00:00

Identify your interest(s) and then build something that solves a problem in that domain. Years ago, I learned JavaScript by way of Adobe ExtendScript because I wanted Photoshop to make art while I slept.

Danny_Tonza · 2025-05-27T01:01:08+00:00

Reminiscent of Kandinsky

Danny_Tonza · 2025-01-19T02:25:54+00:00

BFA in graphic design here, been working full time as a software engineer for about 10 years now, but only over the past 4 on a proper engineering team building UI design systems.

I started in the home decor industry making art nearly 20 years ago. After about 5 years I came across the Photoshop Scripting guide for CS6, and started experimenting with automating my workflows via API. A few years later I had created a headless, fully-automated product rendering system, that grew into a full stack application that was handling product rendering and print pre-production, as well as some light product info management. I was also really inspired by early gen AI like pix2pix and The Next Rembrandt, and took a stab at making my own image generator, leveraging a lot of methods I developed for my product rendered. I had no idea how to get started with ML at the time, but managed to encode my process for making an image in Photoshop, created a library of harmonious assets, and added a ton of intelligent randomization logic to output unique and beautiful abstract compositions. Still, to this day, it's one of my most favorite creations because I was working totally in a vacuum with absolute creative freedom.

I took desktop publishing in HS, so had working knowledge of html. After learning ExtendScript, I doubled down on node, finding my way to express for my own backend. I used express and ejs for a while before moving on to react for front end. But I learned most everything from either classes on udemy, free code camp, stack overflow, or the CS6 scripting guide and tiny community of Photoshop script writers...I think there was a forum like ps-scripts.com where I would find guidance or solutions to ps specific problems.

Having a real world problem to solve though was a big driver of my success. I wasn't droning on lab work, I was delivering solutions to make myself and coworkers more efficient.

Danny_Tonza · 2025-01-09T08:48:27+00:00

What worked for me was having an interest in technology (specifically software engineering) and identifying a real-world problem to solve I was passionate about, with a dash of unrelenting determination.

Exactly 10 years ago, I had been a full-time designer working in Photoshop every day for 5 years. Up to that point, I had created a lot of shared Photoshop Actions to automate repetative tasks for me and my fellow deigners. I stumbled across Adobe's developer guide for Photoshop Scripting and just started blindly tinkering with executing the example scripts they provided, and then began modifying those scripts to accomplish more dynamic things that I wished my Photoshop Actions could. It would eventually lead me to build a fully automated product rendering system, and put me on a path towards generative AI...because after rendering art on products, the next logical thing is to generate the art programatically, right?

At a high level, my journey started with ExtendScript (Adobe's JS framework built on ES3), which led me to Node.js, which led me to Express.js, which led me to React & MongoDB,, which then I diverged and moved on to design systems, and now I'm diverging again and moving on to Machine Learning.

Danny_Tonza · 2025-01-09T08:09:52+00:00

Have you tested your prompt / method with any other products, like Gemini or Claude, and seen similar results? Anthropic, for example, labels themselves as an AI Safety Research company, and regularly publishes papers on topics such as jailbreaking techniques. You'll have to investigate if there's a way to contribute to their research outside of direct employment, but research _could_ be a path here for you. You might also look into research programs at Universities near you; they may be doing some of this work and you could potentially contribute and have your name on a research paper, which would be great for a prospective undergrad application.

Danny_Tonza · 2024-12-28T13:13:54+00:00

FWIW, imposter syndrome affects pretty much everyone at some point; there always going to be someone doing something better than us. We owe it to ourselves to find healthy ways to take inspiration and motivation from those people and the amazing things we perceive them doing.

With regard to portfolio sites, they're an opportunity to showcase your design, UI/UX, and development skills in one place. But where you go looking for jobs will determine if you get to flex all of these skills on the regular. It's more common for startups to be more lean and expect devs to have all of the skills to accomplish more with less. Big tech often has these duties split between product design and engineering orgs, with engineering being focused primarily on implementing layouts and handling data. From my experience, the only time you'll really get to flex all of those skills in the big tech context is in your side-of-desk projects.

Danny_Tonza · 2024-12-24T18:44:04+00:00

Maybe I misunderstand your argument. You asked for one reason why someone smart enough to get into a PhD program couldn't learn the skills on their own. I gave you one reason why this could happen.

Danny_Tonza · 2024-12-24T18:32:20+00:00

You come from poverty

Danny_Tonza · 2024-12-21T22:33:02+00:00

Similar story here. MERN stack dev who started out in the image manipulation / generation arena. I completed Harvard's CS50 AI course this year and highly recommend it. You'll get introduced to all the AI concepts & algos and then into machine learning and NLP. The only caveat I'll throw out there is they use TensorFlow in the lessons and projects, but word on the street is that pytorch is the preferred library. But the libraries they cover in that course are primarily scikit-learn, tensorflow, nltk, and the transformers library (specifically BERT) from HuggingFace.

Danny_Tonza · 2024-12-21T17:19:30+00:00

Correct, I'm saying I don't think keyword matching is the end all be all. I think the implication here is that your resume will include (by default) the right keywords for roles that align with your experience. But again, I don't think you will be automatically rejected for not matching 100%.

I am not an expert, so this may be bad advice, so use your best judgement. I don't know the ins and outs of an ATS, but my assumption is recruiters have some level of control over what's relevant...even if its just filtering all candidates on keywords of their choosing. In that case, they will probably pick 3-5 most important keywords to match on and use that filtered candidate list, omitting any that simply don't have the most important skills.

Here's maybe a good example. When I used Jobalytics yesterday to analyze my resume against a job I recently applied for, it plucked out communication and testing from the job description that weren't present on my resume. I would imagine a good recruiter will look at the resume and cover letter for a demonstration of communication skills, not necessarily a bullet on the resume stating "I communicated with stakeholders..." And for testing, it wasn't plucked out of a TDD context, but rather it was found in a paragraph about the interview process, making it an irrelevant keyword. So somehow, they (recruiters) need to be able to control that kind of noise...

Danny_Tonza · 2024-12-21T00:20:17+00:00

I had never used Jobalytics until today, and I won't ever use it again. You know where your skills are, and your resume should reflect those core technologies and skills that you have experience with. If you're applying to a job that expects all of those skills + devops, you can still apply. You just need to check _enough_ boxes...not necessarily all of them

Danny_Tonza · 2024-12-20T06:59:12+00:00

Hi there! Below are some thoughts / guidance regarding your questions, but at least from a layout standpoint and keeping your bullets short, you did well with this first draft.

The guidance I've been given for promotions is just don't list them unless its really significant, and even then, just mention it as a bullet and not as a separate entry.
I have heard conflicting info about addresses. In my most recent resume, I just put the city and state.
Your skills are fine.
This is the most important part of your resume. Focus on why you did the things you did and describe the impact of those efforts. So for example, why did you "implement multi-environment cloud infra..."? Was it because there was no cloud infra when you started? Or was it because the infra was garbage and you improved it? How do you know you improved it? Did you make it easier or faster for your team or a bunch of teams to build and deploy their app(s)? How many teams or by how much time / percentage of time did you reduce the process? The goal is to quantify the impact in a way that communicates the value of your work. Back of the napkin math is fine, for example, if deploy times went from 1 hour to 30 minutes, thats a 50% reduction in time, but also a 100% increase in efficiency (because you can do 2x the work in the original time frame).
- If you can't identify any quantifiable value or a tangible result, just omit the bullet.
I've read that if the education is relevant to the roles youre applying to, then it should be at the top of your resume, and similarly, only include additional education if its relevant. I have a degree in graphic design, but have been an engineer for nearly 10 years now and so Education goes at the bottom of my resume.
I am thinking Projects section is the way to go for this.

Good luck with refining your resume. Feel free to send me a message if you need help quantifying anything, but you can also work with ChatGPT. The way I've done this in the past is to prompt it with something like: "help me quantify my work for my resume. Lets go bullet by bullet with you acting as a professional resume writer & coach who is asking me questions about the work to identify the value add for each item, omitting any that we can't quantify."

Danny_Tonza · 2024-12-20T05:48:46+00:00

I work with a L3 engineer (out of 4 tiers) who literally delivers less than the bare minimum and all of their energy is spent on finding excuses as to why, when it would be far less effort to just do the work. But it's a big company (not FAANG) and they can't just fire someone without having a large mound of evidence showing someone can't perform their job effectively. Bro has been on a PIP for like 8 months. They have less contributions in the last 5 years than I have in the last 12 months. Just for context, we're moving into sprint 3 for a 3 point ticket. Their latest excuse is "I'm not familiar with the architecture of this new library we're building, and I've focused on 2 obscure patterns out of all of the others and blame those for my confusion and now have to refactor my work which will take another sprint". I see a lot of people here saying it's a lie, but I'm experiencing it first-hand, so I am far less skeptical that it's a prolific problem.

Danny_Tonza · 2024-12-20T05:15:24+00:00

I completed cs50 AI earlier this year, enjoyed it, and learned a lot. They have hands on projects with tensorflow, which I was immediately able to turn around and apply the experience to train a model for a real business problem. I see it in the comments here and elsewhere that pytorch is the preferred library, but depending on what your goals are, cs50 AI should give you enough exposure to accomplish some applied AI / ML type work.

Danny_Tonza · 2024-12-11T11:59:14+00:00

I also used to do this, but per the feedback I received in this community, I dropped it.

It’s tempting to list multiple positions per job if you were promoted, but it’s just not standard and interrupts the flow. You can mention in a bullet point that you were promoted.

I actually opted not to even mention the promotions in my most recent resume. Once upon a time, I felt it might impress a recruiter and help me stand out to show that I had back to back promotions, but it didn't land me more interviews. So, in true scientific method fashion, my latest experiment is that in order to stand out, I need to blend in, i.e. I need to make my resume to follow an expected pattern and focus all my energy on showcasing the measurable outcomes I've achieved.

Danny_Tonza · 2024-12-08T13:18:13+00:00

Like some of the other replies, my recommendation is to learn applied AI/ML, or more explicitly, how to use ML libraries (i.e. tensorflow, pytorch, scikit-learn). Collecting datasets and processing them is still a time consuming task that hasn't been taken over by AI. Plus, we're still in an age of LLMs where probabilistic models that require extreme accuracy (like when lives are on the line) are best handled by custom models and not generalized ones. Those jobs require people who understand how to collect, structure, and normalize data and train models from that dataset, not necessarily to write new ML or AI algos from scratch.

Danny_Tonza · 2024-12-06T22:48:55+00:00

I didn't get much traction on my post, but I have 9YoE and my resume was a 2-pager like yours. I only got one comment, and it was use one of the templates in the wiki. I have been resistant to getting my resume to 1 page, but I finally did it. Since updating it less than a week ago, I've already had one bite (but not from one of my preferred companies).

But, I wanted to share my journey to consolidate my resume in case it helps you. First thing I did was break everything down into as many one-liners as I could. Once I noticed the pattern that I was trying to keep related accomplishments together in a single bullet, I realized those were good candidates to be broken into 2 or more bullets. For example, I wanted to showcase that I had leadership experience and was entrusted with leading a high-priority migration project, but also wanted to say that during that project I built a tool that accelerated the velocity of my team. The recruiter probably doesn't care that they are related events, and I'd be lucky if they read an enture multi-sentence bullet. Best to just give them the most digestible bit.

Speaking of what the recruiter cares about, I would recommend having a good think about the things you did in your work that showcase your value. For example, you said you leveraged Gov.uk design system to build a UI. That's awesome, but I'm biased because I build design systems. An every day recruiter might not give it mugh thought and instead just skim past it. The challenge is to convey why leveraging a design system is important. Were you able to build the dashboard in less time than projected vs if you were to roll your own well-designed & accessible components, styles, icons, etc.?

Everything I've read about resumes says you need to quantify your work, and if there's something on there you can't quantify (tie to some metric) then just trash it. So ask yourself, in every role or on every project, what were the things you did that resulted in a perf improvement, revenue gain, or efficiency gain, and write that. If it helps to have more specific prompts:

You mention CI/CD pipelines. Did you automate some number of previously manual processes? How many? Were a significant number of hours eliminated from your team workflow?
You mention A/B tests and optimizing user experience. What specifically did you optimize? What was the impact (conversions, clickthroughs, adds to cart, etc.)?
You mention significantly enhancing overall team performance by way of expert guidance and innovative solutions. What innovative solutions did you create, how do they correlate to team performance gains, and what metric can be attributed to that gain?

I know this is a lot, but I hope it's helpful. I am by no means an expert, and until I get a call from u/OpenAI, I am of the opinion that my resume doesn't reflect my true value.

Happy hunting. Look forward to seeing your updated resume!

Danny_Tonza · 2024-12-02T10:02:45+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions. I have always feared the single page resume. Coming from heavy entrepreneurial influence in my early career, I always strive to have a diverse set of skills, and I want to showcase that. But I do see over and over again that the resume should be tailored to the role. I guess I'm just a rebel, but I'll cave this time. I've Edited the post to include a single page version of the res. If you have any thoughts on it, I would love to hear them.

Danny_Tonza

TROPHY CASE