Madison Das just started a new job in January, but she's pretty sure she's going to get promoted in a few months.
She's not being presumptuous — her new employer told her as much. Das, 21, lives in Jacksonville, Florida, and started working as an associate project manager with a start-up this year. While interviewing, she was struck by how the hiring managers asked about her career plans.
"They told me, 'We don't want you to stay in this role for more than six months,'" Das tells CNBC Make It. "My department director and my direct supervisor are both women, and they both told me, 'The intention is to bring people in to have them grow.'"
Das checked the company's LinkedIn profile and saw many of its entry-level employees were promoted within their first six to eight months. For Das, it was a sign the company was invested in keeping their employees around.
Das accepted the company's offer of associate project manager and now earns $65,000 in base salary. By the end of the year, Das expects to be promoted to the level of project manager with the earning potential of $100,000 a year.
TikTok launched her career change
Das studied biomedical sciences, chemistry and sociology in college and applied to medical school but was rejected>How she'd negotiate differently
Das says she initially found discussing pay in hiring interviews to be "so uncomfortable."
She did some>Salary transparency in tech
In February, Das posted her own TikTok going over the difference between her base salary and her total compensation — something she wishes see saw more of when she was researching what kind of pay to negotiate for.
She often saw people, mostly men, posting their pay in the mid-six figures. It included their benefits and stock options but often didn't name the base salary, which is what she needed to work off of.
Das heard from other tech newcomers that they felt discouraged and didn't know where to start negotiating. "The internet is one of the easiest ways to get information, but it's also one of the easiest ways to get confused," she says.
Das, who lives with the chronic illness cardiac-valvular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, hopes posting her own salary breakdown encourages others from underrepresented backgrounds to see space for them in tech. "I am a biracial Indian, disabled woman in my early 20s. Breaking into tech wasn't the easiest thing for me."
Das has also grown more comfortable discussing pay with co-workers. Her first week on the job, she asked someone about how stock options work. Her colleague ended up going through her starting salary, her progression at the company and how she negotiated her pay — which Das plans to take with her into her next salary conversation with managers. She feels the start-up encourages a culture of transparency, which makes it easier to talk about money.
Das admits that working toward a promotion and raise within the year "feels like crazy fast development," but given the feedback she's gotten from supervisors, she feels "very confident that I'll be able to accomplish that, whether it's within my current organization or moving to another."
Eventually, she wants to work her way up to becoming a tech executive and lead organizations toward "more success, more growth, and more inclusive behaviors long-term."
