The last time I made my case for a promotion, the director said "Sorry, no promotions right now, there's nothing I can do."
A couple months later, a coworker gets a job offer elsewhere and threatens to leave, and he's immediately promoted. He happens to be the least experienced engineer, and now he's leading the team.
This sends everybody scrambling for job offers, since that's what gets rewarded. Half the engineers have left already, and with any luck, I'll be next out the door.
The best way to get a Promo is to get another job.
My theory is that in the last couple of years, the market is booming however for most people, salaries haven’t kept up with it. At Microsoft my rate of raise was lower than inflation (so in essence I was getting paid less every year). Jumping ship was a huge jump. I interviewed at a bunch of places and got an idea what the market would pay for me. I negotiated slightly above and been happy.
I've been saying this for a long time. It's especially true in technology and engineering.
I think the reason why the best way to get a promotion and a raise is to get another job is because once you've been working for a company for a few years your salary and benefits are "pinned" or anchored by HR, and you're only going to be able to advance within their acceptable terms, rates, and limits. There's also a lot more negotiation overhead—you have to spend a lot of effort in making your case for a promotion. Whereas with a new job you start fresh and you can negotiate on fundamental terms.
My best way to get a raise used to be to quit my contract. Got 50% more for staying. Now I get 33% raises (without asking/negotiation) to prevent me from qutting :-P That said, I started very low, so 50% was not much.
I recently understood what was it that made me quit reading Dilbert: because he's an asshole now.
For me, Dilbert used to be like a character in a Kafka novel making funny remarks about all the nonsense. And he used to build things too. Nowadays the "humor" is mostly people insulting each other to their face.
Sucks, though. As you say, it used to be such a great strip.
Not normally, but when you read some of his strips after reading some of his articles you start noticing done of the undertones of what he believes in in them. Especially when Dilbert is interacting with women.
They don't, but since the writer posted stuff in his blog that shows he's not a leftist, we have to shit on all his strips now. They might contain wrongthink secret messages, you know?
Of course, no shitting on that guy who writes xkcd and made a strip telling us to vote Hillary. Because Hillary is cool and all of that. https://xkcd.com/1756/
I experienced a similar situation just a few months ago. I'm now being asked to step in and take over the project from the very person who got the promotion because said individual never truly had the leadership skills to begin with, rather, they only had the leverage of walking out the door.
It's a very difficult pill to swallow when my manager turns this situation around on me, stating (I'm paraphrasing), "If you truly want to be a senior, you have to know when to swallow your pride and do right by the team."
For some reason raises suck these days. Where I’m currently employed the raise for a level jump almost doesn’t justify the amount of work to get there. So either I’ll jump through all these hoops to get a very modest raise or stay at the same level until the better parts of stocks vest and go find another job.
I always tell people that the best raises are the ones you get when you land a new job.
I never understood this mindset. Why would an employer pay someone that they have to train more than someone they already have?
I understand companies only being able to afford recent college graduates, but I don't understand the reasoning behind the larger companies paying a replacement more than the person who left.
I guess they're betting on higher performance from new employees trying to prove themselves?
What I saw was that managers don't think the person would leave. Because he doesn't have the guts. Or they don't want to pay him more than a manager would earn an so on. The people that decide this are the kind of people that do not change jobs unless they have to. They think everybody else is like them or worse.
Then when the person leaves they need to hire somebody else and they pay as much as it is needed to hire that new person. So it happens because it is a two step process with two independent decisions from the management and I have yet to see a manager that realizes that the two decisions are connected. I've even seen managers doing the same mistake over and over and never learning anything from it.
I think there’s also something else at play. Most of my friends also don’t believe for a second that a corporation has their best interests at heart. It’s not just promotions — it’s work life balance, it’s top-down decision making and political empire building, re-orgs every 4-6 months. The growth at all costs style of building companies chews employees up and spits them out.
Absolutely. Even if you love where you work, the corporation is always going to look out for itself first and foremost. It’s a lesson that can be especially hard to learn if you’re an early employee that grows or at a startup that claims to be different, but as cynical as it may be, the sooner workers realize that they are expendable, the better.
I would also add that it’s not just corporations. A startup that goes from 9 to 300 people in your tenure doesn’t have your best interest at heart either. Before going to corporate America, I put my health, relationships, and personal life aside in place of the places I worked. For whatever reason, I thought I needed to do that and I thought it would pay off.
Narrator: it didn’t.
Now, that’s on me. My employers didn’t force that on me and my inability to say “no” is my fault, not theirs. But it taught me that I’m never not taking vacation ever again. I’m never making two connections to save the company $200 on a flight ever again (when others don’t and I’d still be in budget). I’m never staying late to do a job that isn’t mine because I’m afraid it won’t get done otherwise (it will. And if it doesn’t, it’s above my paygrade).
That doesn’t mean I don’t work my ass off or give 100% (if not more), but it took me until my early 30s to realize that the company wont reciprocate my loyalty.
That might be one way to do it. But that alone certainly is not enough. One will also have to have the political acumen to take credit and make sure the others' interests are taken care of as well. It's really a complicated game to play for sure.
Can agree with some point -- but by definition, you are explaining exactly why you are definitely not giving 100% and then claiming you are giving more than 100%... lol.
We have different definitions of 100%. Staying late, working (unpaid) overtime, doing your bosses jobs... This is well above and beyond your responsibilities. When you hire a plumber to unclog your drain, do you also expect them to give their 100% by also cleaning your toilet, fixing that squeaky door, and doing the dishes? No, you hired them to fix a clogged drain and fixing it is 100% of the job. The rest is thing you'd like done (for free, preferably!) but it's in no way part of the 100%.
I don’t do five people’s jobs anymore —- which is what I did at past companies. But I do my job —- and more —- and I voluntarily take on more projects all the time. The difference is, I no longer put my job ahead of my health. I no longer go 18 months without vacation (I took my honeymoon 17 months after I got married. And when I got married, it was 3 days after speaking in Vegas — I was on a red—eye two days before my wedding — and I spoke at another conference two day after my wedding) and I no longer allow myself to be on-call at all hours of the day/night. The nature of my work has changed too — but even if it hadn’t, I still would have stopped.
The stuff I used to do didn’t make me a “better” employee. It’s not some badge of honor.
You don’t know me or my work ethic; to imply that because I no longer kill myself for a business that won’t kill itself in return, I’m not still a hard worker —- kindly fuck off.
Giving 100% != giving all of yourself to your job and employer.
He never said you weren't a hard worker. He said you aren't giving 100%. And he's obviously right because you literally just wrote a comment articulating all the ways in which you no longer give 100% of yourself to your work.
Not judging, I think you're smart for doing so, just pointing out the logical fallacy
I get what you are saying - could do more, doesn't.
But but but - here's the thing - health, relationships and career. There is a boundary which you can push past for your company which destroys your capabilities very quickly. You are doing more now, but will be doing less in a couple of months. Often people underestimate how much less, and they think that they will get a holiday to get over what they are doing, and they also think that things can be patched up, I'll get better, we'll get over this.
News just in - they can't. you won't. divorce. All promptly followed by dismissal due to underperformance or just not being as positive as management expects.
Choosing not to give everything to a job doesn’t mean you aren’t doing enough. And giving everything to your job very rarely pays off. Even if it’s your own company, choosing to kill yourself for a business rarely ends with a better business — it just leads to a sick founder of the person is pushed to exhaustion.
I would say there is "doing your job" and "overdoing" if you work 8 hours productively that should be the deal with your employer. Sure, if there is some crisis maybe stay a bit longer to help the team.
But going out of your way to save the company money in transportation is a different kind of issue, and so is regularly overworking.
Not all hours are of equal value. If you have activities planned that you would like to do, such as excercise, cooking, childcare, education, hobbies, visiting family, etc, and you have to give that up because you had to work late, then the marginal cost of working extra is far more than just salary divided by total hours worked.
Each hour past the agreed upon (or expected) # of hours cuts into your actual life, and is worth a lot more (to the person working). Too bad many people don’t see this or don’t have any options.
>>a corporation has their best interests at heart.
A corporation isn't a living thing to think about you. Its basically one boss, or at best a few of them, who think about you. The good news is if they like you, they'll do something for you, or at least can be made to do something. The bad news is let alone hating you, if they as much as don't think much about you, there is nothing much you can do but to leave.
This. I know it's not the norm, but I actually had jobs treat me very well in the recent past, and frequently give me unrequested raises. Last one actually left me baffled since it was so unexpected. I know I've been lucky, but I almost never had to ask for raises before.
It really depends on the people and the size of the company.
C'mon, does the DMV have your best interests at heart? Who really does, other than your close friends & family? It doesn't mean they're bad people, they're just people. Corporations and other organizations often are bound together by a common self interest.
Besides, much evil in the world has been done by people with good intentions who actually believe they are operating in your best interests. I'll decide what's in my best interests, thank you very much.
The DMV doesn't (usually) lie to you or use things like "we're a family here at the DMV" to lean on you emotionally and get you to do things they'd like that don't benefit you at best or are detrimental to your health/finances at worst. Companies regularly do.
Do you really believe governmental employees and the people who manage them have your best interests at heart? (Of course, they'll endlessly claim they do.)
How about that guy that runs the FCC who ignores net neutrality sentiment? How about that county clerk a while back who refused to grant marriage licenses to gays? (Of course, she thought she was operating in the best interests of gays.) How about the police who confiscate your cash to fund their departments? Does the prosecutor who hides exculpatory evidence have the public's best interests at heart?
There's nothing special about government organizations that make them operate altruistically.
Ajit Pai is his own special kind of bad actor. Worked at the companies he now claims are good actors, lies about his motives. There's a case for arguing against net neutrality, like comcast does provide internet access for a lot of people and it works. But they do a lot of horrible shit (I HATE my bandwidth cap, and comcast is evil for lying, pushing legislation that only helps them and hurts individuals). But Mr Pai is way past that, basically lying about why he does things that are in no one's interest except big corps. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/08/ajit-...
Maybe things are different in the US, and your examples make sense. I don't live in the US thankfully and so I don't have to worry about these issues too much. Overall, where I live, governmental services are considerably less hell bent on convincing me that acting against my best interest is good for me and they won't go out of their way to manipulate me into doing those things. Every company I've worked at, not so much.
This is totally it. Engineers, in particular understand that they have options, they are highly in demand, and they have strong negotiating positions when they interview.
It's not uncommon for an engineer to get a boost of 10-25% when changing companies, and other than prepping for the grueling interview process, there really isn't a downside to feeling out what's out there.
Especially when your compensation isn't keeping up with the median due to lackluster annual increases.
Does this work for your entire career or does it only work until you hit some kind of "salary cap" for your local market? I've had a few good raises in a short period of time, but I'm scared I can realistically only get one or two more in before I reach the top of the market.
I’ve hit that in my market - or a soft cap, at least, meaning if I want to earn more, I’m going to have to make 2-3x as much effort than I did before.
Through working my ass off, and pretty great luck, (working on lots of side projects didn’t hurt either), I recently did some looking just to feel the market out and I’m making like $20k more than I “should” be.
Part of this is because my company is based out of Bethesda, MD and I live in Denver, CO - cost of living differences. My company pays really well which allows them to compete with Silicon Valley and everywhere else for the best engineers.
No complaints here. I’m making double what I thought I would be making at this point in my career.
Anyway, yes, anecdotally, it caps out, but I also like to think that if I really hustled, I could keep raising it. But I’m pretty happy where I’m at and would rather spend my free time doing stuff other than coding and hustling right now.
Were your feelers all in Denver? Denver seems to have surprisingly low salaries, especially when accounting for the housing boom of the past 5-6 years.
Salary caps but stock does not. FAANG companies give massive RSU grants to senior people. There is no ceiling at companies that can afford to do that, which gives them a big advantage over startups.
There was a statistic in germany about doctors, diploma and other high income people. Around 40 to 45 the salary capped or even started to decline. (age discrimination is real)
I'd imagine the gains are somewhat asymptotic -- there's definitely a theoretical maximum somewhere out there, and every jump moves you closer to it. The bigger gains (percentage wise) probably come earlier?
My first company switch literally doubled my total comp. My second one was a double digit increase as well. I expect any future jumps to be smaller. (Though, who knows where the market will be then, as I'm likely years away from any move.)
Strongly agree that the 67% of workers are not quitting, they are leaving for a new job that pays more.
My observation is that the higher you are in the pay bracket, the easier you seem to be abel to get a new job as your skills/experience are also in high demand else where.
They may see themselves changing jobs for higher pay, but what happens if companies are holding tight on salaries?
I've been in the market for almost a year now and have had offers, but nothing higher than what I'm currently making. So I stay put.
Where is this magic expectation that job offers instantly come with a salary bump? That may have been true before, but at full employment the indicators have all gone weird.
Well you have replacement rate wages which a company would use to fill positions they can't do without so the wage has to increase. Then you have expansion based wages where the company wants to grow and seize marketshare. Your best bet is to have some kind of leverage. So multiple offers.
Unless you're a new grad multiple offers are a very rare thing.
Some companies can get from interview to offer in a week or two, some take months. Everyone is a black box in the meantime. Getting 2 to line up at the same time is extremely hard, if not impossible unless you stretch one of them out way too long or simply lie about the situation.
One of the reasons I choose contracting over employment (I've been contracting for 4.5 years and was employed prior) is that moving from contract to contract is expected and usually comes with an income increase. If I were to change jobs as frequently as I change contracts, this would look bad on my resume.
This makes the contract market much more liquid than the job market, which has the consequence of arriving at my current valuation quicker.
Consulting is like building a castle and giving it away to someone else to rule and enjoy the fruits. I refuse to do it now. With each new contract, you start from scratch, again. After a while, you'll realize - you are just hitting a reset switch on your career, with each new contract that you pick up.
I'd argue contracting has been the best thing for my career. I've learned sales, marketing, accounting, business & legal essentials along the way. I've made great connections from the diverse companies I've worked in and vendors I've worked with. I'm now working on scaling and selling to larger enterprises. I may not own the companies or products I work on, but I own my own company. You can stay stagnant as an employee or as a contractor. It's up to you to make your career.
And No, its not resetting the switch, because the 'career path' that most companies offer is a hoax - a perk here, a perk there. What matters at bottom is, the money. And as a contractor you arrive there quicker. My references get the next job, and my pay goes up as I raise my rate. There's no reset involved.
Is there any room for income growth in contracting outside of building an agency?
A couple of years ago, my career seemed to be dead in the water, so I thought about contracting. It's not clear to me what changed, but in the course of a year, I got two huge promotions and am now making double. I'm currently interviewing for a huge step up that might bump my salary another 25% more.
I imagine if I went the contracting route, short term, I could've made much more money per hour, since I am/was pretty productive. But I /really/ doubt I'd get to where I am now on an annual basis (especially considering benefits and vacation). I also seems to have a clear path toward being a VP, CTO doesn't seem unrealstic in a few years, if I want to continue down the career path (I don't, rather start my own business, but nice to have a solid backup).
I know there's a lot of money to be made running an agency, but I don't think that's a natural skillset for the vast majority of engineers. Also it seems like a really competitive space.
I'd love to hear more from some contractors about this.
Contracting is effectively going mercenary. It's straight up 'I've got the expertise, you've got money... let's get together for a while.' There's no career path for you as far as the client is concerned but the pay is better. The understanding going in is that you will likely not be together for more than about a year. In addition to the bump in pay, since you know it's not a long-term situation, you typically get to avoid much of the office politics and organizational dysfunction and focus on what you're there to do.
It's not an ideal terminal position: either you use it as a stepping stone to something better (i.e. starting your own agency, getting into consulting, starting some other kind of business etc.) or you use it as a way to test drive companies without committing (i.e. If you like the place, convert to an employee if it's offered. If not, move on ASAP)
There are people who do contracting for the same company indefinitely. That's usually a career mistake as you're not getting valuable new experiences which will prepare you for something better and your hourly rate will get stuck in the mud. After 2-3 years it will have often been better to have converted to an employee. (i.e. more relaxed relationship, benefits/paid time off, stock/bonus programs etc.) Many larger companies love it when contractors stay long term: for them it's all of the upside of having an employee with none of the downside. (it's also legally problematic but that doesn't stop most of them)
If you contract direct, you can make decent money. I have multiple clients at the same time and work 4-6 hours a day and make 40% more than when I was working 40hrs a week as an employee. I also have my own office close enough that I sometimes bike to work in the summer.
I’m a consultant but maybe a different kind. I go in and create a product or the core technology and then move on.
It’s kind of like being an “explorer” vs. a “settler”; big kudos to those who clear the land and creating a farm from nothing, I’d just rather be exploring.
On the other hand it's nice to have that disconnection from all the crap that goes on. No matter how bad it gets you know that in a couple of months you will be somewhere else.
Very relevant to me. I've been contracting for the past 8 years, and earned very well through it. But I absolutely feel the cyclical nature, i.e. the constant starting over is wearing me out.
It's kept me sharp, but I know don't want to be contracting as a senior engineer when I'm 45, and contracting is not the best path to leadership, or product ownership - which I would like to transition to at that age.
It’s simply the best way to get a pay raise if you’re a programmer in today’s job market. Want to make 30-50k more? Quit your job and find another.
You could ask your current manager for that kind of pay raise but if they do give you the increase, they’re going to expect you to work harder to “earn” it.
Of course, all this money being thrown around attracts frauds, and that’s why we have absurd technical interviews.
I've had 3 jobs in the past 6 years (5 in 10). So I spend about 2 years/gig on average. Reasons:
1. Learning. I find that I learn 80-90% of what I will learn at a company in the first 12-18 months. Staying at a job for too long is risky because I will miss out on new things happening in my area. In the long term this is the most important, because this is what will get me more money, and make me competitive/valuable. Example: it's hard for people in traditional data roles to do ML/DL without switching jobs.
2. I prefer dynamic equilibrium over static equilibrium. I very strongly prefer being able to go out and get a good job at any time over having a "cozy job". The only way to be good at getting a job is having practice at it.
3. Impact. I find that I deliver most of my impact on the job in the first 2 years, after that it levels off and I tend to do more maintenance stuff of all the things I've built (both systems and teams).
4. More money. This is almost a side-effect of 1-3. But also in itself: if I want to get more money in my current job, it's partially up to me, but it's also up to my manager and the company/culture. If I get unlucky with my manager/company, I'm not going to get it. Also, sometimes I hit a glass ceiling, and there's simply nowhere to go (eg. I'm already the Head/Director whatever, but the company isn't that successful and/or/but pay levels aren't that high). On the other hand, switching jobs is entirely up to me: if I am good at what I do and have a good track record to prove it, practice interviewing to be good at it, and play the numbers game (apply to lots of companies), I will succeed at finding a higher paying job.
Overall:
1. I have to be ruthless and watch out for my own interests. Nobody else will. The world doesn't owe me anything, I have to go out, work for it, make smart decisions and then pluck the rewards myself.
2. I don't think this is unfair towards companies. If a company/org is badly run, people leaving is valuable feedback. Assuming a company can hire good new people, those will deliver new impact, bring new knowledge, etc.
Having said that, there are companies where you can work and make more and more money (usually stock options play a big role here), and keep learn more and more (because the company is growing like crazy). These are the startups that are run well and are rocket ships (the FAANGs were like this).
1. My tenure lengths used to be longer (3.X years), and then became shorter recently, so this signal is not that strong. It looks like: uni - 3.X - 1.X - 3.X (my startup) - 3.X - 1.X (FAANG) - 1.X (current). There are 2 positions that I leave off my CV: during my startup I did some parallel work in Academia, and there was a failed aqui-hire at the end of my startup, where technically I was an employee at a big NASDAQ company for 3 months, but then the deal exploded. Both are 6-10 years in the past and were during my rollercoaster startup years, so I just compress it into the startup entry, it's not worth detailing (not to mention NDAs). In my experience, both as a hiring manager and when interviewing, things more than 5 years in the past don't matter anyway.
2. My shorter gigs were in different countries, and people understand you're only going to stay in a foreign place if everything is really awesome (city AND company is a good fit).
3. I have FAANG on there, which esp. outside the US moves you past issues like this.
I think it's worth pointing out, I'm not saying you should job-hop for the money. That's why I put money as #4. I'm just saying you should maximize your learning (good for you) your mental well-being (good for you and your team, nobody likes to work with burnt out ppl) and your impact (good for the company). If you can find a place where this is possible for 5-10 years, jackpot, don't leave!
Not OP, but - I graduated in '95 and started working right away. Back then, the market and demand for developers was insane, and I ended up switching jobs - for 10-20% more every time - four times in four years. Then, right around 2000, the market crashed and I started interviewing again, and suddenly I had a really tough time finding anything: they brought up my short tenure at all my past jobs very negatively. I did finally find something, and have slowed down my job-hopping a bit (averaging 5 years per job now), but the "four jobs in four years, back in the late 90's" thing came up just last year during an interview - for a job that I didn't end up getting. In short - be careful, they're watching.
Personally I feel like an employer who is overly concerned with something like that (especially when it was so long ago) is a huge red flag.
People evaluate others based on their own experiences and ideas of success. If they feel that staying at one job for a long time is the utmost important factor above all else, what does that tell me about the kind of person they are and the kind of company they’re running? It tells me it’s probably a run of the mill mediocrity-factory full of people mostly just punching the clock every day. I’ve ignored these signs in the past and learned the hard way.
IMO places that have strong engineering cultures that are run by smart and driven people understand that your technical skill is what matters and aren’t going to hold it against you if you’ve hopped jobs to maintain your career growth, because they’ve most likely done the same thing themselves. Ambition recognizes ambition, and ambitious people HATE to stagnate.
2 years in one place raising flags? Hahah. No. Good places where you want to work are more than glad to get strong engineers working for them, even just for a couple of years. In the age of the cloud 2 years is an eternity.
Be careful not to burn any bridges thought. Even in suboptimal situations take the high road and cultivate relationships with the people there that you want to work with again. In the long run this is going to pay dividends.
No one blinks at multiple 2-year stints, especially if they were spent at smallish companies (< 500 employees). Spending 2 years usually means you went through at least 2 performance review cycles, accomplished or delivered something and are looking for something new to work on. At smaller companies it's not always possible to change group, so it's logical that you might look to change your job instead.
My own work history so far has been similar - 3 jobs lasting between 1.5 and 2.5 years, and I'm now currently on my 4th. It's never been brought up as an issue in interviews.
In the past, giant stock grants could convince people to stay sans a raise/promotion, but with vesting periods increasing or being staggered and an understandable uncertainty in sustained stock growth (you could do really well or not, depending on when your shares are purchased), it’s totally understandable that someone would
leave for another company to get a pay raise or promotion.
Boomerang employment is super common too (you don’t get your promotion/level bump so you go to competitor X who hires you at s higher level and salary. You do your 2 years and then return to company Y at a higher level/better salary, in less time than it would take to earn a promotion using the system.).
I don’t know if this is sustainable — but I don’t fault anyone who does this or thinks about it. And because it’s so common, it’s not like it looks bad on a resume, because loyalty isn’t valued the same way anyway.
"The reason people are quitting today is because the labor market is so competitive that the only way they can get a significant increase in income is by quitting and going to another job."
Well, no, the opposite is true. Employees have to quit because companies stubbornly refuse to be competitive on salary.
The reason for that is mismanagement - managers and HR would be personally criticized for "being soft" if they offered raises, regardless of the benefits to the company of doing so.
I've seen this so much now that I feel like I must be missing a piece of the puzzle.
You work for a company for X amount of time, and you gain domain knowledge of the company, and general industry experience. Some other company looks at your CV, and without knowing you, and probably without caring about your specific company domain knowledge, decides you are worth say 20% more than you are earning.
You then go to your current company, and say 'my general skills are worth 20% more on the market, you know how well I work, and you know I have extra domain knowledge specific to this role, I would like more money' - and the company refuses.
They then spend time and money finding someone with similar skills to what you have, but without your domain knowledge, and probably at a similar amount you asked for since that's the market rate.
How is it not in the companies best interests to just keep you on and give you a raise? How do they justify all that wasted time and money every time? Do they just not measure it?
Suppose salaries are going up, and the average person at FooCorp could get 10% more by changing jobs. You are more underpaid than most; you establish that you could get 20% more by moving, and say to your manager at FooCorp that you'd like a 20% pay rise.
Suppose they say yes. What happens next: other people hear about it and go to their managers saying "I think I'm underpaid; give me a 20% pay rise". If the answer is yes, then FooCorp is paying 20% more in salaries for the same work as before. If the answer is no, then those people have a concrete motivation to go and interview elsewhere, and probably a bunch of them will then leave even if they get counteroffers at FooCorp once they've demonstrated that they could earn more elsewhere.
Suppose they say no. What happens next: most likely you leave for that better-paid job; others at FooCorp hear about this and understand that they aren't going to get paid more at FooCorp even with a job offer in hand. Some of them will decide to move, but maybe fewer than in the first scenario (because they haven't had the specific motivating experience of asking for more money and getting turned down, and because they don't feel like they have the lower-risk option of interviewing elsewhere, getting a counteroffer, and thus being paid more without having to move jobs). And the ones who don't move can go on being paid less.
It's not obvious to me that the first of those scenarios is better for FooCorp than the second, if all they care about is maximizing their profits.
In the first case, if you think the person deserves the extra money and give it to them, you keep your best people. If other staff ask for the same, you can either give it to them if you think they deserve it, or risk losing them to elsewhere. The end result is you always keep your best staff, and potentially lose your worst staff.
The second scenario, you always keep your worst staff and you potentially lose your best staff.
You're granting them way too much introspection. In reality its goes more like:
"Company policy is that raises are no more than 2.5% per year with a perfect yearly review. You got your 2.5%. You can't have a raise." Umm I'm about to leave and get 30% more from your competitor! I know you don't want that and I don't want it either. Surely... "Company policy is that raises are no more than 2.5% per year..."
Of course! But the question is why there would be a policy of no raises above 2.5%, and I think the reason is the sort of thing I describe.
In response to others who said "this is a good recipe for losing your best people": yeah, it might be. But if you don't believe your best people are dramatically better than the rest, or if you think that actually your best people aren't the same as the people who will go shopping around for higher pay elsewhere, maybe the calculation works out differently.
Also, for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying that this is good on balance. Only that it's not so hard to understand how a company might arrive at that sort of policy while trying to maximize its performance.
the answer is that company policies like only small raises are dumb ass, and are clearly bad for the company. We all know if someone knowledgeable leaves, it will take time for the new hire to ramp up, and replace an existing good person. For that reason we should try harder to keep them. But higher up the ladder, people look at stats like average pay - it's much harder to measure productivity than average pay, that's why pay is used in stupid ways, in negative incentive ways.
Managers need to evaluate the strength of the claim of the experienced person - are they really underpaid? Has the person done their homework?
I've had those conversations and they've worked out positively for me, but I've spent time building rappour with management, along with very carefully gathering data sources, cost of living shifts, and current income.
If I just rolled up and asked for money, I expect I'd be shot down, and laughed at after I left the room...
As a software manager who has both approved and turned down raises, pnathan pretty much nails it -- you need to bring data to the table. Are you underpaid? What's your target? Why now (what work have you completed that helps me sell this upwards?)
Expect it to be a conversation, but it's a healthy conversation to have with a good manager -- we can't help meet your expectations if you do not communicate them to us!
Companies rarely hesitate to pile on more work or responsibility often with zero conversion. If I can provide data and examples of work I’ve recently finished to support my request for a raise, the flip side of that is the company is already getting that value, and is happy to continue receiving that value without paying for it. It’s absurd that companies try to justify not giving out raises because the employee is not making their case. If a company gives me more work and responsibility, they have already made my case for me.
Plain and simple. It’s the asymmetry of power in the relationship that is causing all this. The power dynamic is in the employers favor and the employer exploits that. Historically. Currently. Systematically.
> It’s absurd that companies try to justify not giving out raises because the employee is not making their case.
There's a subtle difference between this argument and what I said. I said, "If you want to make your case, then you need to bring data." not "If you want a raise, then you need to make your case."
I think the typically way they address this is by promoting people. This is why you have subroles in a job. e.g. soft. eng. I, soft eng II ... You can have yearly and even mid term promotions as well. The promotion aspect of it saves face for everyone. So you go to your boss or you talk about promotion opportunities, you may even talk about the market. This is especially relevant when your company is hiring. Then you see how it goes. Eventually if you don't get the raise or promotion you leave.
But a really good reason to switch jobs is to increase the size of your network.
That logic is a good formula for losing your most employable employees. Those that can hop will. You’ll be left with the bottom of the barrel. Doesn’t seem reasonable to me.
and you know I have extra domain knowledge specific to this role
Funny story, at a previous employer people who had been there 10+ years, would always say, it takes 3 years to really hit your stride in this company. They meant the time taken to have made the contacts and established the reputation that you could really be effective, be trusted with important decisions, and so on. It was a vast company and operated on multi-year cycles was a large part of the reason.
But the average tenure of an engineer at this company was 2.5 years...
> How is it not in the companies best interests to just keep you on and give you a raise?
Better to be less profitable than bankrupt due to lack of cashflow. Mark Zuckerberg would have been a great hire for any company even at a salary of a billion dollars a year, but any startup that hired him for that salary would immediately go bankrupt.
This is assuming that they hire someone else to replace you, which is usually the case, so they're only saving a couple of months of salary, but now they have less staff developing the product, the staff they have are busy doing interviews, and they then have to pay a recruiter fee.
This is the real answer. Companies have been stubbornly refusing to grant raises in line with market rates.
It makes sense on the balance sheet. A large fraction of employees (33% if we take the article at face value) are unwilling to exercises their market options, and will stay at a company that underpays them.
The rest leave for greener pastures, and are replaced with new hires that are paid as much as a promoted position would be paid. But this way, companies can hold on to those 33% that never see a raise that exceeds inflation.
Large companies don't factor in things like loss of domain expertise, retraining, or loss of productivity due to hiring in their spreadsheets. So they will continue to do this and the only way to negotiate a true raise will be to leave; or threaten to leave.
Domain knowledge? Heck, at most of the places I've worked they don't even do a cost benefit analysis on whether or not the dev costs will produce a positive ROI.
My sister works in the advertising industry, where it seems few people spend more than 2-3 years [edit] in a firm before moving on. The big advertising firms tend to be in public ownership and and have apparently systemised the creation of advertising and marketing content, such that it doesn’t matter who is in the job or how long they are there for. I was pretty surprised by that - managers are well paid and grind creativity out of younger employees. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised - maybe those are just well run businesses, but I’m helluva glad I don’t work for one!
The average tenure of someone, particularly a junior person, at an ad or media agency is around 1.5 years.
The reality is that there's always opportunities at other agencies where they'll pay you a bit more than you're currently making (which is still less than paying someone there already more) and give you an inflated title.
Due in part to the nature of the industry, tasks are made to not be dependent on a given individual, and people float around because agency teams are never at equilibrium. They either have too few clients for the team and need to let people go, or too many/too big clients and need to staff up.
Source: worked agency side for most of my career and managed a bunch of people. I'm brand side now at a company with a significant percentage of employees at or over the 10yr mark. There's a reason I left the agency world.
One way to try to get a raise at a current job that I've done in the past is get an interview and see if you can get offers for a higher paid job and then use that as leverage for a counter offer.
I know there are already many threads about taking counter offers, but its not always a bad thing... in my experience, the manager just
needed better justification for the higher ups. It was too large a company for him to just give me a bump.
I was working in e-commerce when my company for acquired by a larger one. Since I was 100% remote and had zero face time with anyone I was one of the people to get canned. Actually, most of our company got canned.
At first I was furious and a bit depressed and that's when I said enough is enough, I will never let anyone else in a position over me, I'm done being an employee, I will never be let go ever again.
A year later I was working insane hours as a freelancer, just learning the ropes with enough pay to get by on. Fast forward to year 3 and I am a consultant making more than I did at the ecommerce company. I am my own boss. I can fire my clients instead of the other way around. Pay is great, hours are insanely good - I work just a couple of hours per week with occasional bursts of power sessions exceeding 3-4 hours. I get to spend most of my time with my kid.
The downside is having to always have business lined up but I have been fortunate to never really have any downtime. I'm slowly building out my marketing channels and once everything is in place I can pick and choose really carefully who I work with. Oh, and if I want a raise I just increase my weekly retainer.
"Fast forward to year 3..."
May I ask: are you e-commerce consulting?
Your comment suggests that you repositioned yourself purposefully, rather than the outcome simply eventuated. If so, was this based on a discovery you made in the market or client demand while you were freelancing?
Did this result in you "niching down" from a broader "catch all" offering as a freelancer? Are you clients higher ticket/larger SME's compared to freelancing (which is often outsourced agency work)?
I started as a freelance designer, then quickly niched down to UX designer and then again to CRO consultant. I only work with companies that will see direct ROI impact from my work. While I still design UIs, the whole process starts with discovery and an audit. It's a data based approach with no guessing involved. The process involves understanding customer pain points, their language and behavior. Clients vary in size from 10 person teams to larger e-commerce operations with maybe 30-40 employees. I do all of the work myself and expect full cooperation from the client or we don't go forward. I've definitely made every mistake in the book but I've learned a lot along the way. I'm sure there are consultants 2 tiers ahead of me though with productized services or just products. My ultimate goal is to have a product (who's isn't, right).
To answer your first question, I do consult in e-commerce, but not limited to it (though that may be a good idea). Most of my leads come through dribbble or LinkedIn. The client typically expects grunt work but after my initial email and call, they are quickly educated on my process and most see clearly that the way they thought of approaching their problems is backwards.
"The client typically expects grunt work but after my initial email and call, they are quickly educated "
That's the part that makes me hesitate jumping into consulting. How do you advertise yourself in a way that you can avoid the wrong clients, which seems you'll always gonna get.
Some would point out that you likely have your risk distributed across multiple clients now, whereas having a single full-time employer is like having all of your eggs in one basket.
My website is really stale as I am typically busy doing the work. I've tried to improve it but it does not generate any leads yet. So far the bulk of my inquiries comes from dribbble or LinkedIn. I get repeat business from an agency that uses me exclusively in place of their own designer / cro person as they do a lot of a/b testing.
I was wondering how you were making that much as a contract research organisation.
If you want to see how one person does better on conversion rate optimisation look at draft.nu Given what you’ve said about your rates and funnel you probably don’t need to improve but Nick Disabato puts a lot of work into being a guy people think of when they’re doing big a/b tests so he can charge them giant piles of money. Thought leader stuff like books, mailing lists, for a while a podcast.
Thanks, I'm well aware of Nick and draft. The agency I have done work for charged their clients 10k per month for a/b testing. I don't know what Nick charges, would be interesting to know.
The only way to get a proper raise is changing companies.
Promotions tend to take years and are often more political than technical. I've seen often that a company prefers to hire someone techie from the outside rather than promoting internally. It is just the way it is.
When the already hired engineers see this kind of thing, it is not surprising that morale gets low and churn gets high.
It's so sad this is the case, but it is the case. In a job I've always gotten 1.5-3% raises, and 10% for promotions. Switching jobs I've gotten up to a 75% increase each time.
The wording is workers 'who see themself quitting'. The reality is 1 or 2 in 5 (my guess) will actually do it. People always say this but fewer are willing to fight the inertia
It's a survey no one can really fact check? Ladders makes commission when $100k+ workers change jobs, so it benefits them by pushing the idea that everyone's jumping ship to make more money.
So what happens when you stay at your current job because you've just stopped caring for any of the software work out there? It's easier just to stay with your current company than to have to incur the costs of changing to a new environment and having to learn a new way of doing things.
I'm not sure if at this point in my career, it really makes a difference in the big picture of my life to get a 20% raise.
A cynic would assume it's just companies that produce low value, have low value (compared to cost) employees but are VC money pumped.
This cycle will continue until there's an economic down turn and a large portion of those companies will go bankrupt.
The big problem I have is that it’s rare to find a combination of strong leadership with fast stressful work in the corporate world. Historically either my work is slow and easy or my leadership is extremely weak.
The only times I have seen strong leadership and fast work is in agency/consultancy work and military.
Having worked at a large corporation I can say that I found the reward system completely random. It’s really difficult, if your not part of the team to figure out how much work and value people are adding. It makes it ripe for gaming the system.
I used to be the same way, but companies are legitimately having such a hard time hiring they're frantic to keep their employees and, at least at mine, are offering significant raises to stay and keep competitors at bay.
> someone at HR is already looking into replacing you.
Well, not that I disagree that accepting a counter offer is a bad idea, I'm pretty sure that someone at HR is always looking into replacing you, all the time.
I don't think that hr is looking to replace people, because it's way too hard to hire. At my company every new hire looks like a magical lucky serendipitous event. Hiring is just that hard. HR grudlingly matches people's other offers. They are too exhausted to look for someone to replace their existing employees.
2 years seems to be the minimum, and it's almost how linked in computes it that matters. In west cost tech companies, 2 years raises no red flags. so if you can get your average to that, or at a minimum your current job is at least 2 years no one will car.
The last time I made my case for a promotion, the director said "Sorry, no promotions right now, there's nothing I can do."
A couple months later, a coworker gets a job offer elsewhere and threatens to leave, and he's immediately promoted. He happens to be the least experienced engineer, and now he's leading the team.
This sends everybody scrambling for job offers, since that's what gets rewarded. Half the engineers have left already, and with any luck, I'll be next out the door.
The best way to get a Promo is to get another job.
My theory is that in the last couple of years, the market is booming however for most people, salaries haven’t kept up with it. At Microsoft my rate of raise was lower than inflation (so in essence I was getting paid less every year). Jumping ship was a huge jump. I interviewed at a bunch of places and got an idea what the market would pay for me. I negotiated slightly above and been happy.
I've been saying this for a long time. It's especially true in technology and engineering.
I think the reason why the best way to get a promotion and a raise is to get another job is because once you've been working for a company for a few years your salary and benefits are "pinned" or anchored by HR, and you're only going to be able to advance within their acceptable terms, rates, and limits. There's also a lot more negotiation overhead—you have to spend a lot of effort in making your case for a promotion. Whereas with a new job you start fresh and you can negotiate on fundamental terms.
My best way to get a raise used to be to quit my contract. Got 50% more for staying. Now I get 33% raises (without asking/negotiation) to prevent me from qutting :-P That said, I started very low, so 50% was not much.
As Dilbert said: the company policy is to reward disloyalty.
http://dilbert.com/strip/1997-06-29
Dilbert was such a great strip before the writer went all in on politics
I recently understood what was it that made me quit reading Dilbert: because he's an asshole now.
For me, Dilbert used to be like a character in a Kafka novel making funny remarks about all the nonsense. And he used to build things too. Nowadays the "humor" is mostly people insulting each other to their face.
Sucks, though. As you say, it used to be such a great strip.
His strips don't seem to contain much politics, though?
Not normally, but when you read some of his strips after reading some of his articles you start noticing done of the undertones of what he believes in in them. Especially when Dilbert is interacting with women.
I don't necessarily share the commenter's criticism, but one of the characters was made "officially gay" in response to current political events.
http://dilbert.com/strip/2014-02-07
http://dilbert.com/strip/2014-02-08
That second one was very weird.
Maybe the problem is not with a comic, but with a reality it reflects.
Is kind of like when Republicans stopped listening to the Dixie Chicks in the '00s...
They`ve been criticized for over 18 years for being right-wing: https://www.alternet.org/story/4260/the_trouble_with_dilbert...
They don't, but since the writer posted stuff in his blog that shows he's not a leftist, we have to shit on all his strips now. They might contain wrongthink secret messages, you know?
Of course, no shitting on that guy who writes xkcd and made a strip telling us to vote Hillary. Because Hillary is cool and all of that. https://xkcd.com/1756/
So were these comments.
See how asinine that sounds?
Back in 1997. Funny how timeless some things are.
I got the advice from a friend.
Interview game >>> Engineering game.
Also from Scott Adams himself: Your day job must be to find a better day job.
This. A million times this.
I experienced a similar situation just a few months ago. I'm now being asked to step in and take over the project from the very person who got the promotion because said individual never truly had the leadership skills to begin with, rather, they only had the leverage of walking out the door.
It's a very difficult pill to swallow when my manager turns this situation around on me, stating (I'm paraphrasing), "If you truly want to be a senior, you have to know when to swallow your pride and do right by the team."
Our industry is just plain bananas.
For some reason raises suck these days. Where I’m currently employed the raise for a level jump almost doesn’t justify the amount of work to get there. So either I’ll jump through all these hoops to get a very modest raise or stay at the same level until the better parts of stocks vest and go find another job.
I always tell people that the best raises are the ones you get when you land a new job.
I never saw the benefit in working much harder to get a 5% raise when I could just go someplace else that would actually value me more.
I never understood this mindset. Why would an employer pay someone that they have to train more than someone they already have?
I understand companies only being able to afford recent college graduates, but I don't understand the reasoning behind the larger companies paying a replacement more than the person who left.
I guess they're betting on higher performance from new employees trying to prove themselves?
What I saw was that managers don't think the person would leave. Because he doesn't have the guts. Or they don't want to pay him more than a manager would earn an so on. The people that decide this are the kind of people that do not change jobs unless they have to. They think everybody else is like them or worse.
Then when the person leaves they need to hire somebody else and they pay as much as it is needed to hire that new person. So it happens because it is a two step process with two independent decisions from the management and I have yet to see a manager that realizes that the two decisions are connected. I've even seen managers doing the same mistake over and over and never learning anything from it.
I think there’s also something else at play. Most of my friends also don’t believe for a second that a corporation has their best interests at heart. It’s not just promotions — it’s work life balance, it’s top-down decision making and political empire building, re-orgs every 4-6 months. The growth at all costs style of building companies chews employees up and spits them out.
Absolutely. Even if you love where you work, the corporation is always going to look out for itself first and foremost. It’s a lesson that can be especially hard to learn if you’re an early employee that grows or at a startup that claims to be different, but as cynical as it may be, the sooner workers realize that they are expendable, the better.
I would also add that it’s not just corporations. A startup that goes from 9 to 300 people in your tenure doesn’t have your best interest at heart either. Before going to corporate America, I put my health, relationships, and personal life aside in place of the places I worked. For whatever reason, I thought I needed to do that and I thought it would pay off.
Narrator: it didn’t.
Now, that’s on me. My employers didn’t force that on me and my inability to say “no” is my fault, not theirs. But it taught me that I’m never not taking vacation ever again. I’m never making two connections to save the company $200 on a flight ever again (when others don’t and I’d still be in budget). I’m never staying late to do a job that isn’t mine because I’m afraid it won’t get done otherwise (it will. And if it doesn’t, it’s above my paygrade).
That doesn’t mean I don’t work my ass off or give 100% (if not more), but it took me until my early 30s to realize that the company wont reciprocate my loyalty.
IMHO to climb the corpo ladder you have to do your job and your bosses job but only get paid for your job. That aint for me.
That might be one way to do it. But that alone certainly is not enough. One will also have to have the political acumen to take credit and make sure the others' interests are taken care of as well. It's really a complicated game to play for sure.
Sometimes. And sometimes never saying no and pushing back just means you’ll always be asked to do more without promotion.
Honestly, climbing the corporate ladder is often about how good you are at politicking and working relationships as it is about anything else.
Can agree with some point -- but by definition, you are explaining exactly why you are definitely not giving 100% and then claiming you are giving more than 100%... lol.
We have different definitions of 100%. Staying late, working (unpaid) overtime, doing your bosses jobs... This is well above and beyond your responsibilities. When you hire a plumber to unclog your drain, do you also expect them to give their 100% by also cleaning your toilet, fixing that squeaky door, and doing the dishes? No, you hired them to fix a clogged drain and fixing it is 100% of the job. The rest is thing you'd like done (for free, preferably!) but it's in no way part of the 100%.
Yeah. No.
I don’t do five people’s jobs anymore —- which is what I did at past companies. But I do my job —- and more —- and I voluntarily take on more projects all the time. The difference is, I no longer put my job ahead of my health. I no longer go 18 months without vacation (I took my honeymoon 17 months after I got married. And when I got married, it was 3 days after speaking in Vegas — I was on a red—eye two days before my wedding — and I spoke at another conference two day after my wedding) and I no longer allow myself to be on-call at all hours of the day/night. The nature of my work has changed too — but even if it hadn’t, I still would have stopped.
The stuff I used to do didn’t make me a “better” employee. It’s not some badge of honor.
You don’t know me or my work ethic; to imply that because I no longer kill myself for a business that won’t kill itself in return, I’m not still a hard worker —- kindly fuck off.
Giving 100% != giving all of yourself to your job and employer.
He never said you weren't a hard worker. He said you aren't giving 100%. And he's obviously right because you literally just wrote a comment articulating all the ways in which you no longer give 100% of yourself to your work.
Not judging, I think you're smart for doing so, just pointing out the logical fallacy
I get what you are saying - could do more, doesn't.
But but but - here's the thing - health, relationships and career. There is a boundary which you can push past for your company which destroys your capabilities very quickly. You are doing more now, but will be doing less in a couple of months. Often people underestimate how much less, and they think that they will get a holiday to get over what they are doing, and they also think that things can be patched up, I'll get better, we'll get over this.
News just in - they can't. you won't. divorce. All promptly followed by dismissal due to underperformance or just not being as positive as management expects.
Choosing not to give everything to a job doesn’t mean you aren’t doing enough. And giving everything to your job very rarely pays off. Even if it’s your own company, choosing to kill yourself for a business rarely ends with a better business — it just leads to a sick founder of the person is pushed to exhaustion.
I would say there is "doing your job" and "overdoing" if you work 8 hours productively that should be the deal with your employer. Sure, if there is some crisis maybe stay a bit longer to help the team.
But going out of your way to save the company money in transportation is a different kind of issue, and so is regularly overworking.
You are confusing 200% with 100%
If a salaried worker doesn't get overtime, then every hour they work past 40 reduces their effective pay by 2.5%.
Not all hours are of equal value. If you have activities planned that you would like to do, such as excercise, cooking, childcare, education, hobbies, visiting family, etc, and you have to give that up because you had to work late, then the marginal cost of working extra is far more than just salary divided by total hours worked.
Each hour past the agreed upon (or expected) # of hours cuts into your actual life, and is worth a lot more (to the person working). Too bad many people don’t see this or don’t have any options.
Can you explain the logic behind this?
If you work overtime in a week and aren’t paid for it then you have taken a pay cut for that week.
You worked more hours but made the same amount of money. Therefore the amount you made per hour is lower than your usual amount.
Bingo. That's what a lot of people don't get with there high salaries. On paper they sound amazing.
But if you calculate hours worked and salaries. More often then not. There promotion for example made them earn less and less per hour.
But as someone wrote on hackernews: if your company is using the emotional path they don't have anything to offer on the rational level.
tl;DR: calculate your income per hour, not monthly salary!
> if your company is using the emotional path they don't have anything to offer on the rational level.
Stealing this for my “don’t work for a startup” site!
It is not from me either :)
* their
>>a corporation has their best interests at heart.
A corporation isn't a living thing to think about you. Its basically one boss, or at best a few of them, who think about you. The good news is if they like you, they'll do something for you, or at least can be made to do something. The bad news is let alone hating you, if they as much as don't think much about you, there is nothing much you can do but to leave.
This. I know it's not the norm, but I actually had jobs treat me very well in the recent past, and frequently give me unrequested raises. Last one actually left me baffled since it was so unexpected. I know I've been lucky, but I almost never had to ask for raises before.
It really depends on the people and the size of the company.
Lol wonder if we work at the same ole big dusty corpo
C'mon, does the DMV have your best interests at heart? Who really does, other than your close friends & family? It doesn't mean they're bad people, they're just people. Corporations and other organizations often are bound together by a common self interest.
Besides, much evil in the world has been done by people with good intentions who actually believe they are operating in your best interests. I'll decide what's in my best interests, thank you very much.
The DMV doesn't (usually) lie to you or use things like "we're a family here at the DMV" to lean on you emotionally and get you to do things they'd like that don't benefit you at best or are detrimental to your health/finances at worst. Companies regularly do.
Do you really believe governmental employees and the people who manage them have your best interests at heart? (Of course, they'll endlessly claim they do.)
How about that guy that runs the FCC who ignores net neutrality sentiment? How about that county clerk a while back who refused to grant marriage licenses to gays? (Of course, she thought she was operating in the best interests of gays.) How about the police who confiscate your cash to fund their departments? Does the prosecutor who hides exculpatory evidence have the public's best interests at heart?
There's nothing special about government organizations that make them operate altruistically.
Ajit Pai is his own special kind of bad actor. Worked at the companies he now claims are good actors, lies about his motives. There's a case for arguing against net neutrality, like comcast does provide internet access for a lot of people and it works. But they do a lot of horrible shit (I HATE my bandwidth cap, and comcast is evil for lying, pushing legislation that only helps them and hurts individuals). But Mr Pai is way past that, basically lying about why he does things that are in no one's interest except big corps. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/08/ajit-...
Maybe things are different in the US, and your examples make sense. I don't live in the US thankfully and so I don't have to worry about these issues too much. Overall, where I live, governmental services are considerably less hell bent on convincing me that acting against my best interest is good for me and they won't go out of their way to manipulate me into doing those things. Every company I've worked at, not so much.
Dude America itself lies about all that shit, arguably More than companies do
Public sector is just as (if not more) corrupt than private brah
Fixed: “67% of workers earning over $100k see themselves “changing jobs for better pay due to strong labor market” in the next 6 months.”
This is totally it. Engineers, in particular understand that they have options, they are highly in demand, and they have strong negotiating positions when they interview.
It's not uncommon for an engineer to get a boost of 10-25% when changing companies, and other than prepping for the grueling interview process, there really isn't a downside to feeling out what's out there.
Especially when your compensation isn't keeping up with the median due to lackluster annual increases.
Does this work for your entire career or does it only work until you hit some kind of "salary cap" for your local market? I've had a few good raises in a short period of time, but I'm scared I can realistically only get one or two more in before I reach the top of the market.
I’ve hit that in my market - or a soft cap, at least, meaning if I want to earn more, I’m going to have to make 2-3x as much effort than I did before.
Through working my ass off, and pretty great luck, (working on lots of side projects didn’t hurt either), I recently did some looking just to feel the market out and I’m making like $20k more than I “should” be.
Part of this is because my company is based out of Bethesda, MD and I live in Denver, CO - cost of living differences. My company pays really well which allows them to compete with Silicon Valley and everywhere else for the best engineers.
No complaints here. I’m making double what I thought I would be making at this point in my career.
Anyway, yes, anecdotally, it caps out, but I also like to think that if I really hustled, I could keep raising it. But I’m pretty happy where I’m at and would rather spend my free time doing stuff other than coding and hustling right now.
Were your feelers all in Denver? Denver seems to have surprisingly low salaries, especially when accounting for the housing boom of the past 5-6 years.
Denver seems to pay very low, considering the cost of living these days. I think they refer to it as the "Denver Discount"
What would be considered surprisingly low? A level 3 software engineer making $100K? Genuinely curious.
That seems absurdly low. For reference, I work for a major ISP and we pay our new college grads between $85-110K across our regions of operations.
110k nationwide is pretty good. In seattle we pay at least 120k for new college hires.
Salary caps but stock does not. FAANG companies give massive RSU grants to senior people. There is no ceiling at companies that can afford to do that, which gives them a big advantage over startups.
There was a statistic in germany about doctors, diploma and other high income people. Around 40 to 45 the salary capped or even started to decline. (age discrimination is real)
I'd imagine the gains are somewhat asymptotic -- there's definitely a theoretical maximum somewhere out there, and every jump moves you closer to it. The bigger gains (percentage wise) probably come earlier?
My first company switch literally doubled my total comp. My second one was a double digit increase as well. I expect any future jumps to be smaller. (Though, who knows where the market will be then, as I'm likely years away from any move.)
Strongly agree that the 67% of workers are not quitting, they are leaving for a new job that pays more.
My observation is that the higher you are in the pay bracket, the easier you seem to be abel to get a new job as your skills/experience are also in high demand else where.
They may see themselves changing jobs for higher pay, but what happens if companies are holding tight on salaries?
I've been in the market for almost a year now and have had offers, but nothing higher than what I'm currently making. So I stay put.
Where is this magic expectation that job offers instantly come with a salary bump? That may have been true before, but at full employment the indicators have all gone weird.
Well you have replacement rate wages which a company would use to fill positions they can't do without so the wage has to increase. Then you have expansion based wages where the company wants to grow and seize marketshare. Your best bet is to have some kind of leverage. So multiple offers.
Unless you're a new grad multiple offers are a very rare thing.
Some companies can get from interview to offer in a week or two, some take months. Everyone is a black box in the meantime. Getting 2 to line up at the same time is extremely hard, if not impossible unless you stretch one of them out way too long or simply lie about the situation.
One of the reasons I choose contracting over employment (I've been contracting for 4.5 years and was employed prior) is that moving from contract to contract is expected and usually comes with an income increase. If I were to change jobs as frequently as I change contracts, this would look bad on my resume.
This makes the contract market much more liquid than the job market, which has the consequence of arriving at my current valuation quicker.
Consulting is like building a castle and giving it away to someone else to rule and enjoy the fruits. I refuse to do it now. With each new contract, you start from scratch, again. After a while, you'll realize - you are just hitting a reset switch on your career, with each new contract that you pick up.
I'm glad I share my thoughts with this very smart man - https://youtu.be/Gk-9Fd2mEnI?t=908
I'd argue contracting has been the best thing for my career. I've learned sales, marketing, accounting, business & legal essentials along the way. I've made great connections from the diverse companies I've worked in and vendors I've worked with. I'm now working on scaling and selling to larger enterprises. I may not own the companies or products I work on, but I own my own company. You can stay stagnant as an employee or as a contractor. It's up to you to make your career.
That sounds just like 'any Engineering job'.
And No, its not resetting the switch, because the 'career path' that most companies offer is a hoax - a perk here, a perk there. What matters at bottom is, the money. And as a contractor you arrive there quicker. My references get the next job, and my pay goes up as I raise my rate. There's no reset involved.
Is there any room for income growth in contracting outside of building an agency?
A couple of years ago, my career seemed to be dead in the water, so I thought about contracting. It's not clear to me what changed, but in the course of a year, I got two huge promotions and am now making double. I'm currently interviewing for a huge step up that might bump my salary another 25% more.
I imagine if I went the contracting route, short term, I could've made much more money per hour, since I am/was pretty productive. But I /really/ doubt I'd get to where I am now on an annual basis (especially considering benefits and vacation). I also seems to have a clear path toward being a VP, CTO doesn't seem unrealstic in a few years, if I want to continue down the career path (I don't, rather start my own business, but nice to have a solid backup).
I know there's a lot of money to be made running an agency, but I don't think that's a natural skillset for the vast majority of engineers. Also it seems like a really competitive space.
I'd love to hear more from some contractors about this.
Contracting is effectively going mercenary. It's straight up 'I've got the expertise, you've got money... let's get together for a while.' There's no career path for you as far as the client is concerned but the pay is better. The understanding going in is that you will likely not be together for more than about a year. In addition to the bump in pay, since you know it's not a long-term situation, you typically get to avoid much of the office politics and organizational dysfunction and focus on what you're there to do.
It's not an ideal terminal position: either you use it as a stepping stone to something better (i.e. starting your own agency, getting into consulting, starting some other kind of business etc.) or you use it as a way to test drive companies without committing (i.e. If you like the place, convert to an employee if it's offered. If not, move on ASAP)
There are people who do contracting for the same company indefinitely. That's usually a career mistake as you're not getting valuable new experiences which will prepare you for something better and your hourly rate will get stuck in the mud. After 2-3 years it will have often been better to have converted to an employee. (i.e. more relaxed relationship, benefits/paid time off, stock/bonus programs etc.) Many larger companies love it when contractors stay long term: for them it's all of the upside of having an employee with none of the downside. (it's also legally problematic but that doesn't stop most of them)
If you contract direct, you can make decent money. I have multiple clients at the same time and work 4-6 hours a day and make 40% more than when I was working 40hrs a week as an employee. I also have my own office close enough that I sometimes bike to work in the summer.
I’m a consultant but maybe a different kind. I go in and create a product or the core technology and then move on.
It’s kind of like being an “explorer” vs. a “settler”; big kudos to those who clear the land and creating a farm from nothing, I’d just rather be exploring.
On the other hand it's nice to have that disconnection from all the crap that goes on. No matter how bad it gets you know that in a couple of months you will be somewhere else.
Thanks for the link.
Very relevant to me. I've been contracting for the past 8 years, and earned very well through it. But I absolutely feel the cyclical nature, i.e. the constant starting over is wearing me out.
It's kept me sharp, but I know don't want to be contracting as a senior engineer when I'm 45, and contracting is not the best path to leadership, or product ownership - which I would like to transition to at that age.
Upvote for the link.
It’s simply the best way to get a pay raise if you’re a programmer in today’s job market. Want to make 30-50k more? Quit your job and find another.
You could ask your current manager for that kind of pay raise but if they do give you the increase, they’re going to expect you to work harder to “earn” it.
Of course, all this money being thrown around attracts frauds, and that’s why we have absurd technical interviews.
> Quit your job and find another.
Not necessarily in that order, though...
I've had 3 jobs in the past 6 years (5 in 10). So I spend about 2 years/gig on average. Reasons:
1. Learning. I find that I learn 80-90% of what I will learn at a company in the first 12-18 months. Staying at a job for too long is risky because I will miss out on new things happening in my area. In the long term this is the most important, because this is what will get me more money, and make me competitive/valuable. Example: it's hard for people in traditional data roles to do ML/DL without switching jobs.
2. I prefer dynamic equilibrium over static equilibrium. I very strongly prefer being able to go out and get a good job at any time over having a "cozy job". The only way to be good at getting a job is having practice at it.
3. Impact. I find that I deliver most of my impact on the job in the first 2 years, after that it levels off and I tend to do more maintenance stuff of all the things I've built (both systems and teams).
4. More money. This is almost a side-effect of 1-3. But also in itself: if I want to get more money in my current job, it's partially up to me, but it's also up to my manager and the company/culture. If I get unlucky with my manager/company, I'm not going to get it. Also, sometimes I hit a glass ceiling, and there's simply nowhere to go (eg. I'm already the Head/Director whatever, but the company isn't that successful and/or/but pay levels aren't that high). On the other hand, switching jobs is entirely up to me: if I am good at what I do and have a good track record to prove it, practice interviewing to be good at it, and play the numbers game (apply to lots of companies), I will succeed at finding a higher paying job.
Overall:
1. I have to be ruthless and watch out for my own interests. Nobody else will. The world doesn't owe me anything, I have to go out, work for it, make smart decisions and then pluck the rewards myself.
2. I don't think this is unfair towards companies. If a company/org is badly run, people leaving is valuable feedback. Assuming a company can hire good new people, those will deliver new impact, bring new knowledge, etc.
Having said that, there are companies where you can work and make more and more money (usually stock options play a big role here), and keep learn more and more (because the company is growing like crazy). These are the startups that are run well and are rocket ships (the FAANGs were like this).
Does switching jobs so often raise any red flags when you interview?
Never comes up. Couple reasons:
1. My tenure lengths used to be longer (3.X years), and then became shorter recently, so this signal is not that strong. It looks like: uni - 3.X - 1.X - 3.X (my startup) - 3.X - 1.X (FAANG) - 1.X (current). There are 2 positions that I leave off my CV: during my startup I did some parallel work in Academia, and there was a failed aqui-hire at the end of my startup, where technically I was an employee at a big NASDAQ company for 3 months, but then the deal exploded. Both are 6-10 years in the past and were during my rollercoaster startup years, so I just compress it into the startup entry, it's not worth detailing (not to mention NDAs). In my experience, both as a hiring manager and when interviewing, things more than 5 years in the past don't matter anyway.
2. My shorter gigs were in different countries, and people understand you're only going to stay in a foreign place if everything is really awesome (city AND company is a good fit).
3. I have FAANG on there, which esp. outside the US moves you past issues like this.
I think it's worth pointing out, I'm not saying you should job-hop for the money. That's why I put money as #4. I'm just saying you should maximize your learning (good for you) your mental well-being (good for you and your team, nobody likes to work with burnt out ppl) and your impact (good for the company). If you can find a place where this is possible for 5-10 years, jackpot, don't leave!
Not OP, but - I graduated in '95 and started working right away. Back then, the market and demand for developers was insane, and I ended up switching jobs - for 10-20% more every time - four times in four years. Then, right around 2000, the market crashed and I started interviewing again, and suddenly I had a really tough time finding anything: they brought up my short tenure at all my past jobs very negatively. I did finally find something, and have slowed down my job-hopping a bit (averaging 5 years per job now), but the "four jobs in four years, back in the late 90's" thing came up just last year during an interview - for a job that I didn't end up getting. In short - be careful, they're watching.
Personally I feel like an employer who is overly concerned with something like that (especially when it was so long ago) is a huge red flag.
People evaluate others based on their own experiences and ideas of success. If they feel that staying at one job for a long time is the utmost important factor above all else, what does that tell me about the kind of person they are and the kind of company they’re running? It tells me it’s probably a run of the mill mediocrity-factory full of people mostly just punching the clock every day. I’ve ignored these signs in the past and learned the hard way.
IMO places that have strong engineering cultures that are run by smart and driven people understand that your technical skill is what matters and aren’t going to hold it against you if you’ve hopped jobs to maintain your career growth, because they’ve most likely done the same thing themselves. Ambition recognizes ambition, and ambitious people HATE to stagnate.
2 years in one place raising flags? Hahah. No. Good places where you want to work are more than glad to get strong engineers working for them, even just for a couple of years. In the age of the cloud 2 years is an eternity.
Be careful not to burn any bridges thought. Even in suboptimal situations take the high road and cultivate relationships with the people there that you want to work with again. In the long run this is going to pay dividends.
No one blinks at multiple 2-year stints, especially if they were spent at smallish companies (< 500 employees). Spending 2 years usually means you went through at least 2 performance review cycles, accomplished or delivered something and are looking for something new to work on. At smaller companies it's not always possible to change group, so it's logical that you might look to change your job instead.
My own work history so far has been similar - 3 jobs lasting between 1.5 and 2.5 years, and I'm now currently on my 4th. It's never been brought up as an issue in interviews.
In the past, giant stock grants could convince people to stay sans a raise/promotion, but with vesting periods increasing or being staggered and an understandable uncertainty in sustained stock growth (you could do really well or not, depending on when your shares are purchased), it’s totally understandable that someone would leave for another company to get a pay raise or promotion.
Boomerang employment is super common too (you don’t get your promotion/level bump so you go to competitor X who hires you at s higher level and salary. You do your 2 years and then return to company Y at a higher level/better salary, in less time than it would take to earn a promotion using the system.).
I don’t know if this is sustainable — but I don’t fault anyone who does this or thinks about it. And because it’s so common, it’s not like it looks bad on a resume, because loyalty isn’t valued the same way anyway.
"The reason people are quitting today is because the labor market is so competitive that the only way they can get a significant increase in income is by quitting and going to another job."
Well, no, the opposite is true. Employees have to quit because companies stubbornly refuse to be competitive on salary.
The reason for that is mismanagement - managers and HR would be personally criticized for "being soft" if they offered raises, regardless of the benefits to the company of doing so.
I've seen this so much now that I feel like I must be missing a piece of the puzzle.
You work for a company for X amount of time, and you gain domain knowledge of the company, and general industry experience. Some other company looks at your CV, and without knowing you, and probably without caring about your specific company domain knowledge, decides you are worth say 20% more than you are earning. You then go to your current company, and say 'my general skills are worth 20% more on the market, you know how well I work, and you know I have extra domain knowledge specific to this role, I would like more money' - and the company refuses.
They then spend time and money finding someone with similar skills to what you have, but without your domain knowledge, and probably at a similar amount you asked for since that's the market rate.
How is it not in the companies best interests to just keep you on and give you a raise? How do they justify all that wasted time and money every time? Do they just not measure it?
Suppose salaries are going up, and the average person at FooCorp could get 10% more by changing jobs. You are more underpaid than most; you establish that you could get 20% more by moving, and say to your manager at FooCorp that you'd like a 20% pay rise.
Suppose they say yes. What happens next: other people hear about it and go to their managers saying "I think I'm underpaid; give me a 20% pay rise". If the answer is yes, then FooCorp is paying 20% more in salaries for the same work as before. If the answer is no, then those people have a concrete motivation to go and interview elsewhere, and probably a bunch of them will then leave even if they get counteroffers at FooCorp once they've demonstrated that they could earn more elsewhere.
Suppose they say no. What happens next: most likely you leave for that better-paid job; others at FooCorp hear about this and understand that they aren't going to get paid more at FooCorp even with a job offer in hand. Some of them will decide to move, but maybe fewer than in the first scenario (because they haven't had the specific motivating experience of asking for more money and getting turned down, and because they don't feel like they have the lower-risk option of interviewing elsewhere, getting a counteroffer, and thus being paid more without having to move jobs). And the ones who don't move can go on being paid less.
It's not obvious to me that the first of those scenarios is better for FooCorp than the second, if all they care about is maximizing their profits.
In the first case, if you think the person deserves the extra money and give it to them, you keep your best people. If other staff ask for the same, you can either give it to them if you think they deserve it, or risk losing them to elsewhere. The end result is you always keep your best staff, and potentially lose your worst staff.
The second scenario, you always keep your worst staff and you potentially lose your best staff.
Maybe from company perspective, there’s no such thing as “10x engineers”, but only “1.02x engineers” at most.
You're granting them way too much introspection. In reality its goes more like:
"Company policy is that raises are no more than 2.5% per year with a perfect yearly review. You got your 2.5%. You can't have a raise." Umm I'm about to leave and get 30% more from your competitor! I know you don't want that and I don't want it either. Surely... "Company policy is that raises are no more than 2.5% per year..."
Of course! But the question is why there would be a policy of no raises above 2.5%, and I think the reason is the sort of thing I describe.
In response to others who said "this is a good recipe for losing your best people": yeah, it might be. But if you don't believe your best people are dramatically better than the rest, or if you think that actually your best people aren't the same as the people who will go shopping around for higher pay elsewhere, maybe the calculation works out differently.
Also, for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying that this is good on balance. Only that it's not so hard to understand how a company might arrive at that sort of policy while trying to maximize its performance.
the answer is that company policies like only small raises are dumb ass, and are clearly bad for the company. We all know if someone knowledgeable leaves, it will take time for the new hire to ramp up, and replace an existing good person. For that reason we should try harder to keep them. But higher up the ladder, people look at stats like average pay - it's much harder to measure productivity than average pay, that's why pay is used in stupid ways, in negative incentive ways.
Managers need to evaluate the strength of the claim of the experienced person - are they really underpaid? Has the person done their homework?
I've had those conversations and they've worked out positively for me, but I've spent time building rappour with management, along with very carefully gathering data sources, cost of living shifts, and current income.
If I just rolled up and asked for money, I expect I'd be shot down, and laughed at after I left the room...
As a software manager who has both approved and turned down raises, pnathan pretty much nails it -- you need to bring data to the table. Are you underpaid? What's your target? Why now (what work have you completed that helps me sell this upwards?)
Expect it to be a conversation, but it's a healthy conversation to have with a good manager -- we can't help meet your expectations if you do not communicate them to us!
Companies rarely hesitate to pile on more work or responsibility often with zero conversion. If I can provide data and examples of work I’ve recently finished to support my request for a raise, the flip side of that is the company is already getting that value, and is happy to continue receiving that value without paying for it. It’s absurd that companies try to justify not giving out raises because the employee is not making their case. If a company gives me more work and responsibility, they have already made my case for me.
Plain and simple. It’s the asymmetry of power in the relationship that is causing all this. The power dynamic is in the employers favor and the employer exploits that. Historically. Currently. Systematically.
> It’s absurd that companies try to justify not giving out raises because the employee is not making their case.
There's a subtle difference between this argument and what I said. I said, "If you want to make your case, then you need to bring data." not "If you want a raise, then you need to make your case."
I think the typically way they address this is by promoting people. This is why you have subroles in a job. e.g. soft. eng. I, soft eng II ... You can have yearly and even mid term promotions as well. The promotion aspect of it saves face for everyone. So you go to your boss or you talk about promotion opportunities, you may even talk about the market. This is especially relevant when your company is hiring. Then you see how it goes. Eventually if you don't get the raise or promotion you leave.
But a really good reason to switch jobs is to increase the size of your network.
That logic is a good formula for losing your most employable employees. Those that can hop will. You’ll be left with the bottom of the barrel. Doesn’t seem reasonable to me.
and you know I have extra domain knowledge specific to this role
Funny story, at a previous employer people who had been there 10+ years, would always say, it takes 3 years to really hit your stride in this company. They meant the time taken to have made the contacts and established the reputation that you could really be effective, be trusted with important decisions, and so on. It was a vast company and operated on multi-year cycles was a large part of the reason.
But the average tenure of an engineer at this company was 2.5 years...
One missing puzzle piece perhaps: the importance of HR departments grows with a rising number of open positions.
Another missing piece: HR people don’t get big raises for moving jobs and they don’t see why anyone else should either
And the older middle managers get salty because they had to work for 20 years to make $120k so why should you get it “so young”?
I don't think this is true
Is this actually true?
> How is it not in the companies best interests to just keep you on and give you a raise?
Better to be less profitable than bankrupt due to lack of cashflow. Mark Zuckerberg would have been a great hire for any company even at a salary of a billion dollars a year, but any startup that hired him for that salary would immediately go bankrupt.
This is assuming that they hire someone else to replace you, which is usually the case, so they're only saving a couple of months of salary, but now they have less staff developing the product, the staff they have are busy doing interviews, and they then have to pay a recruiter fee.
This is the real answer. Companies have been stubbornly refusing to grant raises in line with market rates.
It makes sense on the balance sheet. A large fraction of employees (33% if we take the article at face value) are unwilling to exercises their market options, and will stay at a company that underpays them.
The rest leave for greener pastures, and are replaced with new hires that are paid as much as a promoted position would be paid. But this way, companies can hold on to those 33% that never see a raise that exceeds inflation.
Large companies don't factor in things like loss of domain expertise, retraining, or loss of productivity due to hiring in their spreadsheets. So they will continue to do this and the only way to negotiate a true raise will be to leave; or threaten to leave.
They hope you'll just be passive.
Domain knowledge? Heck, at most of the places I've worked they don't even do a cost benefit analysis on whether or not the dev costs will produce a positive ROI.
My sister works in the advertising industry, where it seems few people spend more than 2-3 years [edit] in a firm before moving on. The big advertising firms tend to be in public ownership and and have apparently systemised the creation of advertising and marketing content, such that it doesn’t matter who is in the job or how long they are there for. I was pretty surprised by that - managers are well paid and grind creativity out of younger employees. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised - maybe those are just well run businesses, but I’m helluva glad I don’t work for one!
The average tenure of someone, particularly a junior person, at an ad or media agency is around 1.5 years.
The reality is that there's always opportunities at other agencies where they'll pay you a bit more than you're currently making (which is still less than paying someone there already more) and give you an inflated title.
Due in part to the nature of the industry, tasks are made to not be dependent on a given individual, and people float around because agency teams are never at equilibrium. They either have too few clients for the team and need to let people go, or too many/too big clients and need to staff up.
Source: worked agency side for most of my career and managed a bunch of people. I'm brand side now at a company with a significant percentage of employees at or over the 10yr mark. There's a reason I left the agency world.
"Quitting" -> quitting to move to another job. But this isn't clear until three paragraphs into the article.
Right.. kinda clickbaity?
One way to try to get a raise at a current job that I've done in the past is get an interview and see if you can get offers for a higher paid job and then use that as leverage for a counter offer.
I know there are already many threads about taking counter offers, but its not always a bad thing... in my experience, the manager just needed better justification for the higher ups. It was too large a company for him to just give me a bump.
I was working in e-commerce when my company for acquired by a larger one. Since I was 100% remote and had zero face time with anyone I was one of the people to get canned. Actually, most of our company got canned.
At first I was furious and a bit depressed and that's when I said enough is enough, I will never let anyone else in a position over me, I'm done being an employee, I will never be let go ever again.
A year later I was working insane hours as a freelancer, just learning the ropes with enough pay to get by on. Fast forward to year 3 and I am a consultant making more than I did at the ecommerce company. I am my own boss. I can fire my clients instead of the other way around. Pay is great, hours are insanely good - I work just a couple of hours per week with occasional bursts of power sessions exceeding 3-4 hours. I get to spend most of my time with my kid.
The downside is having to always have business lined up but I have been fortunate to never really have any downtime. I'm slowly building out my marketing channels and once everything is in place I can pick and choose really carefully who I work with. Oh, and if I want a raise I just increase my weekly retainer.
"Fast forward to year 3..." May I ask: are you e-commerce consulting? Your comment suggests that you repositioned yourself purposefully, rather than the outcome simply eventuated. If so, was this based on a discovery you made in the market or client demand while you were freelancing? Did this result in you "niching down" from a broader "catch all" offering as a freelancer? Are you clients higher ticket/larger SME's compared to freelancing (which is often outsourced agency work)?
I started as a freelance designer, then quickly niched down to UX designer and then again to CRO consultant. I only work with companies that will see direct ROI impact from my work. While I still design UIs, the whole process starts with discovery and an audit. It's a data based approach with no guessing involved. The process involves understanding customer pain points, their language and behavior. Clients vary in size from 10 person teams to larger e-commerce operations with maybe 30-40 employees. I do all of the work myself and expect full cooperation from the client or we don't go forward. I've definitely made every mistake in the book but I've learned a lot along the way. I'm sure there are consultants 2 tiers ahead of me though with productized services or just products. My ultimate goal is to have a product (who's isn't, right).
To answer your first question, I do consult in e-commerce, but not limited to it (though that may be a good idea). Most of my leads come through dribbble or LinkedIn. The client typically expects grunt work but after my initial email and call, they are quickly educated on my process and most see clearly that the way they thought of approaching their problems is backwards.
"The client typically expects grunt work but after my initial email and call, they are quickly educated "
That's the part that makes me hesitate jumping into consulting. How do you advertise yourself in a way that you can avoid the wrong clients, which seems you'll always gonna get.
Some would point out that you likely have your risk distributed across multiple clients now, whereas having a single full-time employer is like having all of your eggs in one basket.
What kind of consulting do you do? Can you still afford to be remote?
CRO. I am 100% remote working from a non English speaking country. My clients are global.
Do you have a website or do you rely solely on word of mouth/referrals?
My website is really stale as I am typically busy doing the work. I've tried to improve it but it does not generate any leads yet. So far the bulk of my inquiries comes from dribbble or LinkedIn. I get repeat business from an agency that uses me exclusively in place of their own designer / cro person as they do a lot of a/b testing.
I was wondering how you were making that much as a contract research organisation.
If you want to see how one person does better on conversion rate optimisation look at draft.nu Given what you’ve said about your rates and funnel you probably don’t need to improve but Nick Disabato puts a lot of work into being a guy people think of when they’re doing big a/b tests so he can charge them giant piles of money. Thought leader stuff like books, mailing lists, for a while a podcast.
Thanks, I'm well aware of Nick and draft. The agency I have done work for charged their clients 10k per month for a/b testing. I don't know what Nick charges, would be interesting to know.
I work just a couple of hours per week
Do you mean per day?
It was a fast figure I threw out. My actual hours worked per week is about 4-6. Per week.
The only way to get a proper raise is changing companies.
Promotions tend to take years and are often more political than technical. I've seen often that a company prefers to hire someone techie from the outside rather than promoting internally. It is just the way it is.
When the already hired engineers see this kind of thing, it is not surprising that morale gets low and churn gets high.
Most companies in my part of the world opt to hire a new employee on higher salary than given raise to existing person. Can't fathom the logic.
It's so sad this is the case, but it is the case. In a job I've always gotten 1.5-3% raises, and 10% for promotions. Switching jobs I've gotten up to a 75% increase each time.
So the implication is that 2/3 of workers at this pay level will turn over 2x/year? Why publish these “survey” results when that is obviously false?
The wording is workers 'who see themself quitting'. The reality is 1 or 2 in 5 (my guess) will actually do it. People always say this but fewer are willing to fight the inertia
It's a survey no one can really fact check? Ladders makes commission when $100k+ workers change jobs, so it benefits them by pushing the idea that everyone's jumping ship to make more money.
So what happens when you stay at your current job because you've just stopped caring for any of the software work out there? It's easier just to stay with your current company than to have to incur the costs of changing to a new environment and having to learn a new way of doing things.
I'm not sure if at this point in my career, it really makes a difference in the big picture of my life to get a 20% raise.
A cynic would assume it's just companies that produce low value, have low value (compared to cost) employees but are VC money pumped. This cycle will continue until there's an economic down turn and a large portion of those companies will go bankrupt.
Nailed it ;)
The big problem I have is that it’s rare to find a combination of strong leadership with fast stressful work in the corporate world. Historically either my work is slow and easy or my leadership is extremely weak.
The only times I have seen strong leadership and fast work is in agency/consultancy work and military.
I throw in strong peers as my third axis. One point in my career I've had strong leadership, strong peers, and challenging fast work.
It was amazing. Then we re-org'd, and I'm still looking for that combination somewhere.
Having worked at a large corporation I can say that I found the reward system completely random. It’s really difficult, if your not part of the team to figure out how much work and value people are adding. It makes it ripe for gaming the system.
Don't accept the counter offer.
I used to be the same way, but companies are legitimately having such a hard time hiring they're frantic to keep their employees and, at least at mine, are offering significant raises to stay and keep competitors at bay.
care to explain why?
I'm not the OP, but can offer two reasons:
1. You'll be labeled as disloyal. Which is euphemism for: someone at HR is already looking into replacing you.
2. Whatever problems prompted you to want to go away are still there.
Similarly, never offer a counter-offer as a manager. Because:
1. You don't want to send the message to others that it's a valid way to get a raise.
2. Whatever problems prompted them to want to go away are still there.
There reportedly are exceptions when things work out on both sides of the fence. But in almost 20 years, I've yet to see one first hand.
> someone at HR is already looking into replacing you.
Well, not that I disagree that accepting a counter offer is a bad idea, I'm pretty sure that someone at HR is always looking into replacing you, all the time.
I don't think that hr is looking to replace people, because it's way too hard to hire. At my company every new hire looks like a magical lucky serendipitous event. Hiring is just that hard. HR grudlingly matches people's other offers. They are too exhausted to look for someone to replace their existing employees.
I feel like I've reached a point where I've moved jobs a little too often (avg 1.5 yrs last 3 jobs)
2 years seems to be the minimum, and it's almost how linked in computes it that matters. In west cost tech companies, 2 years raises no red flags. so if you can get your average to that, or at a minimum your current job is at least 2 years no one will car.
Survey of users on a job search site shows high proportion of immediate job searchers... selection bias much?