In December 2021, I started an internship with a company paying $X per hour. My initial contract was to create user documentation. A large part of this was interacting with the UI to annotate screenshots and create step-by-step guides. This process revealed many UI/UX flaws; I took the initiative and with the bosses permission began fixing the issues I found. At the time I had no experience with frontend engineering.

Now (10 months later) I have graduated and they've brought me on full time. My skills are pretty good compared to when I started - a task that normally took 1-2 days can be finished in less than an hour. My rate of pay has not changed despite my productivity being 10x what it was. Compared to the salaries for frontend roles shown here on Levels.fyi my pay is 50% market rate pay for an entry-level role in the same city.

QUESTIONS:

• How can I effectively benchmark my skills against the market to see what my market rate should be?
• And how would I convince the boss to pay that market rate?

EDIT:

It is worth noting that this company is an early stage startup while the comp packages shown on levels.fyi are generally for larger tech firms and late stage startups. My understanding is that early-stage companies offer equity packages to compensate for the reduced salary; in any case, I haven't received any stock.

Also worth mentioning; the other interns are unpaid. I'm grateful that I was both paid and given the flexibility to develop a new skill-set. From the comments it's clear that moving jobs is the best way to improve compensation conditions. Leading from that, I assume the best way to benchmark skills against the market is to interview for other firms.