When they don’t want new jobs, just more money | Hacker News Reader

When they don’t want new jobs, just more money

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93 pointsjrs235166 comments

>Not only does this trolling for raise bait waste hiring managers’ time, but employees who are “won back” with a counter-offer are still more likely to leave the employer within the year, SHRM noted.

People often think that this phenomenon occurs because employers decide afterwards to fire the employee who has recently gotten that significant raise. From what I've seen anecdotally in /r/personalfinance, what really happens is that employees realize that they've been undervalued for an extended period of time. If a well-performing employee has been getting paltry 2% raises for months or years and their employer quickly matches an offer of double their salary, it leaves a bad taste in a lot of employees' mouths.

It makes me wonder if loyalty was ever really valued in past generations or if loyalty was really just some fanciful meme perpetrated by employers to keep costs down. I often hear that short periods of time spent at jobs is a negative signal to hiring managers but I seldom hear anyone actually point to it as the reason they weren't hired for a job.

> I often hear that short periods of time spent at jobs is a negative signal to hiring managers but I seldom hear anyone actually point to it as the reason they weren't hired for a job.

Would the candidate know it if that was the reason? Do hiring managers usually give truthful feedback or generic platitudes?

I'm genuinely wondering, it occurs to me now I've never been turned down after an interview, or fired.

No, it is extremely rare to share such feedback, because it opens the door to quibbling with your reasons.

I figured they wouldn't.

It's pretty dumb to give honest feedback.

Or at least not helpful if it is things someone can't change. "You should work on your software engineering skills at a big company known for doing that well" is actionable in a way "changing jobs so often makes us worried it's a problem with you not them" is not.

> it leaves a bad taste in a lot of employees' mouths.

So it should. I worked for a CTO who signed off on getting rid of a vendor with the rationale that the last-ditch radical license cut they offered, to keep the business, was adding insult to injury. "You've been screwing me for five years and now you want to make it better? You should have given me your best price from the start."

Why would employees be any different?

For me, the past is the past. If I'd been being underpaid and was now being overpaid, I'm going to focus on the latter not the former. It's not like I can go back and right the wrong (real or perceived) that was done to me, so I focus on now and forward.

> I often hear that short periods of time spent at jobs is a negative signal to hiring managers but I seldom hear anyone actually point to it as the reason they weren't hired for a job.

In tech, I don't think job-hopping is frowned upon much at all. The most successful engineers and tech executives I know rarely spend more than two years at a company before moving on.

I think it also depends on your definition of "job hopping." Sure, two years each at your last three jobs isn't frowned upon in tech, but six months each is.

I'm sure there are some industries that would raise eyebrows at two years, of course.

Anyone that I've met like that is either a consultant or a shitshow.

Two years is about the timeframe where your mistakes and technical debt start to bite back. If people are moving up hopping like that, they're great self promoters.

I move on that often because the companies already have tonnes of technical debt.

OTOH, I've seen companies STILL overspending on loyalty. For example, super major oil companies are still obsessed with nurturing generalist managers who keep lateraling across divisions over a 40 year career.

Talk with their "career development experts," and you'd swear that you're dealing with a cult!

Oil companies in particular have enormous fixed investments in particular bits of infrastructure with their own particular nuances, long-running relations with particular governments, etc. It actually makes sense to invest heavily in people who know where the bodies are buried.

Ha! Though, if that were the case, I don't see the benefits of the LATERAL advancements. You're just moving the morticians from one mortuary to another instead of leaving them in one place.

You maintain favorable access to that information, and your people get to see different scenery instead of being stuck in one particular, usually crappy, locale.

"Hey Bill, back when you worked that field off of Malaysia - was the minister's son more of a whisky guy or a hookers guy? He's the minister now & he's causing trouble."

In my case it was more like my employer was resentful and started curtailing all the aspects of the job that made me want to stay (suddenly becoming very strict about never working from home and being in at exactly the appointed hour when this had never previously been an issue, for instance).

How people perceive value is a weird thing. Large raises suddenly makes some employers re-evaluate what they're getting for their money's worth. In their eyes, they're paying more money (sometimes a LOT more money) for essentially no change in work. That's profit out of their pocket and that makes them resentful. They don't look at new hires that same way, no matter what they cost, because they're getting an increase in workload for that spent money.

I don't at all agree with the above mindset, but I can easily see how somebody can look at it that way.

This is definitely an interesting aspect of human psychology that some places seem to be able to work around, like Google, which from what I understand is able to compensate their employees well relative to the market without them needing to job hop.

Among other things, Google is huge and so it's less personal.

It wasn't a for-profit business but there was definitely some sense that I was some young upstart who didn't know his place. Whatever, it's water under the bridge now.

This is a big reason why I tend to think that it's almost always better (some qualifiers apply) to take a new job instead of trying to get a raise after your comp has been "anchored" by the company.

Of course. You're already got an offer in hand from a company that believes you're worth a certain amount of money; why go through the potential landmine of trying to convince your current company of the same?

Even when you don't have an offer in hand, it may very well be the case.

Well, the temptation is that you are happy with aspects of your job other than the pay. But I wouldn't do it again.

> I often hear that short periods of time spent at jobs is a negative signal to hiring managers but I seldom hear anyone actually point to it as the reason they weren't hired for a job.

I have yet to stay at a job for more than ~2 years over my career, and I still get 2-3 recruiters a week pounding at my door for relevant jobs that would probably be a salary match or beat over what I currently have. So at least for me it hasn't hurt me yet.

I often hear that short periods of time spent at jobs is a negative signal to hiring managers but I seldom hear anyone actually point to it as the reason they weren't hired for a job.

Last year, we declined to interview several candidates who had jumped from job to job (many 6-12 month stints over many years, and not doing independent consulting/contracting).

We also discovered after several interviews that candidates who were jumping from one government contract to another regularly were often not being re-hired when contracts renewed/moved (because they were mediocre employees).

The best candidates we interviewed were typically staying at jobs 3-6 years. I assume this was long enough to do some real work, possibly over several projects, but not long enough to stagnate.

These were mid-career and senior developer positions in the DC area.

>We also discovered after several interviews that candidates who were jumping from one government contract to another regularly were often not being re-hired when contracts renewed/moved (because they were mediocre employees).

This depends on the organization. Some government shops have an annual recompete for pretty much all of their contracts and ALWAYS go with the cheapest option, even if it totally fucks everything up and costs more in the long run. I worked for a government organization where every year we got an opportunity to re-interview for the same jobs at lower rates (with the company that underbid our old employer and put us out of with without even having employees of their own), in spite of the fact that our first line supervisors were happy with our work. It took me a while to get out of that hellhole. I'm glad no one held it against me when I applied for a non-contracting job. I've been in my current position for 2.5 years and I don't plan on leaving any time soon.

Absolutely true, and if the resume indicated they were moving companies as contracts moved[1], that was fine. It was the short timeframe hopping from unrelated contracts that was a sure sign of incompetence.

1 - We saw some resumes that were grouped by contract or government agency rather than by actual employer for just this reason.

I absolutely look negatively on a candidate who has never had a 2-year stint on their resume and has never gotten a promotion with the same company. It's not an absolute bar, but it's a negative signal for sure.

I'm not worried about job-hopping because of ambition that can't be met at a given company, but I am worried about incompetence that takes a while to ferret out and causes job hopping in that 9-18 month window.

Many companies are not fair with respect to promotions. And it depends on the strength of your manager.

I've been working professionally as a software developer for 20 years and I'm doing the same thing now I did 20 years ago - programming. Of course not at the same company. So I've never "gotten a promotion". If I'm lucky, I can go another 20 years without being promoted. I like development and I would die a thousand deaths if I had to be a manager. I would probably leave any company that forced a promotion on me.

It perhaps depends on where you work, but here is one example of levels of promotion while still being a programmer and not a manager (at google):

Software Engineer 2

Software Engineer 3

Senior Engineer

Staff Engineer

Senior Staff Engineer

Principal Engineer

Distinguished Engineer

Google Fellow

Senior Google Fellow

Lots of places don't have formal categories. Canonical, the place I work now, just has "Software Engineer". Job titles are dumb. So, I have a different name beside my picture in the company directory? Great. Does that help me pay my mortgage? Does it make the people who work with me every day respect me any more or less? Nope.

In my first job, 70+% of the work force within the division had the same job title, and any number on that title had a pay range associated with it that could easily cover many years of mediocre raises with little basis on performance. During the 10 years I was there, my job title changed twice, with the second change reverting to the previous title (including an associated pay increase for both title changes), because the division did not have enough work that they could give to someone with that particular title.

In my second job, I was a Software Developer 3 for 5 years with relatively good annual raises, and I worked on two different contracts in that time. The only way my title would have been likely to change would have been due to being hired onto a contract that required different titles (Web Developer or Software Engineer, for example), or to move up to a Lead Developer, which would have been somewhere between a developer and a manager. With that employer, moving from Developer to Lead meant that a Lead quit on your contract (and you interviewed for it) or you were hired onto a different contract as a Lead.

With my current employer, the numbers were removed from the job titles several years ago. For the most part, raises are even worse than they were with my first employer, and job-hopping internally is the only way most people can see a significant raise, regardless of merit. Promotions come from people in higher positions leaving, which seems less likely (except through retirement) than I've seen elsewhere, but you have to apply/interview for the promotion against internal and external applicants. Most of the people in this location which make more money with the same title have been hired in the 4 years since I started, and I make roughly 50% more than my co-worker with the same title who has held his job for over 10 years. On the good side, there are still a couple of other job titles I'm qualified to hold before I become a manager (though again I'm tempted with that Lead Programmer title which blends the roles). On the bad side, there isn't a lot of chance of vertical movement, so it's a struggle between the comfort of the known environment and the internal job search to see if anything interesting is posted.

What's a promotion? Is it a progression in job titles rank like Americans seem to fancy (junior/senior, engineer I/II/III, etc.)?

Because their was no such thing in the 2 countries were I worked.

> has been getting paltry 2% raises for months

What a weird bubble we live in where a 2% raise of the course of months is dismissed as 'paltry'.

Bubble? I thought I was being conservative in choosing 2% as a number. Yearly inflation in the past averaged over 2%. I'll admit that the past two years has seen record low interest rates, but 2% raises are hardly a recent phenomenon.

The wording of the original comment could be reasonably interpreted asdescribing a rise of 2% month. That's a pretty good rise rate!

Since the pay at your next job is correlated with your past pay for a variety of reasons, I just assumed that the raise made it easier for the employees already thinking of leaving to get a higher paying job elsewhere.

> or if loyalty was really just some fanciful meme perpetrated by employers to keep costs down.

That one. Employers who invoke loyalty and passion won't hesitate to unloyally drop if they're costing too much for the money taken in. Which is appropriate. But then they expect individuals to bear the "cost" of working for less at their business, than for more at some other business.

It is to laugh.

I've dinged folks pre-interview for having too many job hops. It's not an issue for junior candidates, but if I see someone who has 12 jobs in 10 years, and I know the goals of the position I'm hiring for are 2-3 years, I won't bother. The person could be great for a lot of things, but the track record suggests they're not the person for long term goals and objective. Or during an interview, it would be hard to ask, "Can you show me a goal that you worked towards over many years."

Anecdotally - someone getting increasing responsibility over many roles at a company is a great sign. The people that know them the best are promoting them and keeping them happy. Someone hopping too frequently, or keeping the same job with no switch over long (10?) year horizons is a bad sign. The latter could be a case of specialization so I'd still interview, but one needs to be careful.

To your point about loyalty as an excuse to underpay - my experience is Sort Of. When large companies like AT&T and P&G first had to do big layoffs, it did hurt the management teams. They weren't used to it, and were very generous. After a couple rounds, they got over it and got cheaper. (Severance packages almost always get worse over time, not better) And I saw many phone company employees hang on for 2 or 3 more years to get the company retirement party. On the one hand the company got to underpay them for several years just for them to "earn" a $300 party for some colleagues. On the other hand, perhaps the company didn't really need them the last few years, but still held them on.

One of the things I like best about my industry is that compensation is standardized for people in the first 8-10 years of their careers. At large firms (and government), people get paid based on publicly known scales on a strictly seniority basis. This is bad for people who are good at self promotion (whether or not their is a real basis in that self-promotion), but great for women generally and men who do more than they talk about doing.

I've grown very skeptical about he idea that the "market" will fix discrimination in pay for women. There are a couple of lawsuits happening right now against law firms where female partners are alleging that they were paid a fraction of what men were paid despite bringing in far more business. I suspect that phenomenon is not unique to law firms--just highly visible there because contribution to the firm can be so easily quantified.

What's your industry? How does it motivate people, and how do companies compete for talent?

Legal. Studies show that individualized bonuses don't necessarily do much to improve motivation: https://hbr.org/2010/06/youre-getting-a-bonus-so-why-a. Firms generally compete on non-compensation factors: quality of training, quality of work, etc.

I'm not suggesting that pure lockstep will work for everyone. In the legal industry, much of the variation within levels is accounted for in the often black-box "up or out" promotion process. But I think more transparency is good, as is keeping people at the same level around the same compensation. E.g. at Fog Creek, salaries at each level are transparent and the "superstar" bonus is like 10%. I think that's a great model.

From the description, it sounds like Gov't jobs or industries that work closely (Defense contractors, etc). The advantage is rock solid stability. You know what you're getting when you get in, you do some "due paying" and you have excellent long term benefits.

This appeals to a great deal of people that want to use that stability to build their lives, like having kids and a house. The company can rest easy knowing their employees are long-term, thus they can groom and train talent while keeping expenses predictable.

This isn't the most efficient system, but it is designed to last decades or longer.

>thus they can groom and train talent while keeping expenses predictable

That's the pickle employers that provide training to their employees face that aren't in this setup. The company spends money on training their employees and then the employees, being a more valuable asset, also want more money. So now companies are damned if they train and damned if they don't.

For example, tech companies that spend a few hundred on a pluralsight subscription for their employees will face having to spend thousands more in the near future for demands for higher salaries.

Or the employee spends the $25 per month on their own subscription and ends up either leaving for another employer that will give them a more beneficial package or using that as leverage for promotion/salary increase.

Which is where I get hung up. If the company is paying for it and using it like a perk then the company is investing in the employee and losing/risking that investment. If the employee is using their own earned income for it then the employee is investing in themselves and should expect being compensated for their increase in value. So, should companies bother paying for things like pluralsight or leave it up to the employees to invest in themselves?

if a company is not willing or able to compensate employees in a manner that satisfies their employees, then they will suffer the consequences (losing their workers). what about that is a hang-up for you?

This is a double edged question for me...

I'd like to work for companies that will invest in me like that, and as long as I see a path for career growth and actually realizing the growth I am seeking, I'll stick around until I'm the CEO. If my employer isn't going to invest in me, I'll invest in myself and make my own career growth.

I pay for my own Pluralsight, Safari Online, Resharper and other training resources and tools that help me to grow. Do I see I should have to, well, the tools I believe the company should pay for, but honestly, they make my life easier, so if I can pay for tools to make my life easier, I will and do. The training resources I believe are a part of my career growth and most places I've worked aren't really looking for career employees any more, they're after someone to fill a gap to achieve their current objective. As soon as you help them achieve that objective, they're onto the next one and if your role is no longer useful, "no hard feelings, this is just business."

Today's market on the whole (although I've seen resumes that counter this in some cases, but mostly I stand by my observation) just doesn't appear to support people who come in at the bottom in a company, apprentice, get promoted and work their way up to the C Suite. It requires working at a place until you hit the proverbial glass ceiling and when you start to feel resistance to growth, finding a way to sidestep that and frequently that either means leaving or having the company over a barrel by becoming so ingrained in so many of the company's operations that they can't live without you and have to promote you in order to keep you.

So if the company makes the employee worth more should they not have to pay market for that employee? I wouldn't expect the company to benefit from sending an employee to cooking class but if they are learning stuff that benefits the company, and they are worth more as a result, yes you can expect them to have a higher market rate.

Look at another way; if you buy a developer a faster computer, do you expect them to not ask for a raise later? "Hey, but we got you a new computer! You should be grateful!"

Sounds like "What if we train our employees and then they leave?"

"Well, what if we DON'T train them and then they STAY?!"

This used to be less of a problem when companies demonstrated loyalty towards their employees. Employees also demonstrated loyalty in return.

It was "deemed" more efficient on Wall Street to scale up when needed and lay off everybody when not, though. Apparently that doesn't breed loyalty.

They're only damned if they don't want to pay what people are worth.

There's no "rock solid stability" in defense contracting. You're only paid as long as there's a contract in place for you to work on; as soon as something goes wrong there, you're on furlough.

As least with government jobs, when you get furloughed, you usually get back pay after the dumb government passes a new budget and fixes the problem. But with defense contractors, there's no such thing. The only advantage to being a contractor is more pay (while you're being paid). The downside is more risk. It's also much easier to lose your job; if the client doesn't like you, they can have you leave at any time, and if your employer can't find a place for you to work (a contract for you to bill your hours to), then you get furloughed, and if that goes on too long (they can't find another department that wants to bring you in to work under some contract), then you get laid off. The main advantage to this line of work is that the expectations are pretty low: as long as you're doing at least as well as the government workers (who are usually either not great, or are fresh out of college and only there for a little while until they get a better-paying job in private industry), then you're pretty safe. But I would not call this "rock solid", not like actual government jobs.

So isn't there a lot of money to be made by a firm hiring women? Or an all woman firm?

Quite possibly, but converting hidden talent into money isn't straightforward.

Discrimination against women isn't just discrimination against current hidden talent. It can start in early childhood when a girl is discouraged from men-dominated careers, or in school when the same thing happens, or later when participation in the industry is discouraging for social reasons.

A log of discrimination can go beyond simply perceived inequality, but manifest in actual inequality.

Not unless you're planning to underpay them. Besides, an all-woman firm isn't such a great idea. That "diverse teams perform better" stuff is for real, and it works both ways. Cutting out half the human population from your talent pool is a disadvantage to your company no matter which half you're planning to cut out.

So the solution is a race to the bottom? (Rhetorical question.. I realize now many solutions to big social problems are equally a race to the bottom.) How do you feel being paid the same as someone who doesn't produce as much because years_of_experience?

Seeing as rayiner said it's one of the things they like best I'm gonna go out on a limb and say 'feels pretty good about it'

> This is bad for people who are good at self promotion (whether or not their is a real basis in that self-promotion), but great for women generally and men who do more than they talk about doing.

On the other hand, it seems that improving one's skills and increasing one's value to one's employer goes unrewarded.

Often the case anyway. Especially when you have specialized skills and employers aren't able to accurately judge them.

>Often the case anyway.

Because of a failure of negotiation. For negotiation to work you need leverage, and being an asset to your company is the obvious way to generate it.

There's plenty of markets dominated by non-technical employers hiring programmers and they have no clue how to assess how good you are.

Hence they all use poor rules of thumb and treat people like cogs. 1x and 10x developers get more or less the same offers.

Not a failure of negotiation. The only way to win that negotiation is to exit the market (if you even can).

>Not a failure of negotiation. The only way to win that negotiation is to exit the market (if you even can).

For non-technical people, you have to paint to the other person the picture of what's going to happen if you quit, and for him/her to realize that they do not understand the scope of what you do.

It's not guaranteed to work, but that's just like every negotiation tactic out there.

To look at it another way - assume you want to hire somebody and you have no idea what they do. How do you trust the picture of disaster that they're painting if you fire them?

The answer is nearly always you have some (poor) rules of thumb and you're skeptical of the ones who say that they're 10x better than the rest.

You need leverage, but you need a lot of other things, too. Feeling comfortable negotiating, for one. Given that we're an industry that trends toward the introverted side, that may be hard to come by.

It's an acquired skill like any other. Sure, social butterflies are more likely to be better at it than the rest of us, but we can still learn it. We owe it to ourselves to overcome our own nature if we want to get what we want.

(emphasis mine)

> One of the things I like best about my industry is that compensation is standardized for people in the first 8-10 years of their careers. At large firms (and government), people get paid based on publicly known scales on a strictly seniority basis. This is bad for people who are good at self promotion (whether or not their is a real basis in that self-promotion), but great for women generally and men who do more than they talk about doing.

It sounds like it's great for people who want to do the bare minimum too. If excellence pays the same as mediocrity, why strive for more?

Because mediocrity gets managed out.

> Because mediocrity gets managed out.

So for the first 8-10 years, keeping your job is your bonus? Honestly that doesn't sound very pleasant.

Yes, Big Law (and quite a few other fields) work on an up or out system. Not everyone is expected to keep their job.

Not in government.

Why would high performers stay in this environment when they could leave to work somewhere where pay is tied to performance and not seniority? It seems the only people who would be happy with this setup _are_ the mediocre.

... Or people who are not good at self-promoting. Or people who are punished for self-promoting (Women).

I'll know meritocracy when I see it, and most of corporate America is anything but.

Anecdote to anecdote but "... Or people who are not good at self-promoting. Or people who are punished for self-promoting (Women)." is pure conjecture that doesn't align with the results I've seen in industry.

What's to stop a high performer from becoming an entrepreneur (thus interacting with the market more directly)? The Google engineers making >300k /annual are definitely an order of magnitude more skilled than the Java dev making 75k in my experience. Despite the rhetoric, high performance is linked to pay if the employee does basic due diligence in job shopping.

EDIT reply to child comment since I can't post to this thread anymore:

Do you make that much money because you were highly assertive or are you highly skilled? I'm sure it's the latter, Google wouldn't be paying you that much if you weren't worth it.

> And there's a million reasons for why a high-performing IC should not become an entrepreneur.

Indeed, but it is an option, as is raising your skill level to the point where you can work at Google.

> Speaking of Google... It's found that equally capable women are routinely under-rewarded, as they rarely nominate themselves for promotion. [1]

Not receiving a promotion they didn't ask for does not sound like a problem in any way. We're talking about adults not children, if you want something, ask for it.

http://www.glassceiling.com/being-assertive-can-be-costly-fo...

Fortunately for the average woman, you don't see any problems - I suppose that means that they don't exist.

And there's a million reasons for why a high-performing IC should not become an entrepreneur.

-A just-shy-of 300K Google engineer.

Speaking of Google... It's found that equally capable women are routinely under-rewarded, as they rarely nominate themselves for promotion. [1]

This is a problem - why women don't ask for promotion is not relevant to this conversation. What is relevant is that I just gave an example of a group that benefits from homogenized compensation... And said group is not composed of talent-less layabouts.

[1] http://www.wnyc.org/story/google-test-case-gender-bias/

>What is relevant is that I just gave an example of a group that benefits from homogenized compensation.

They don't benefit from a homogenized compensation plan, it just means others don't benefit more than they do from a non-homogenized plan. It's like saying the solution to racial bias in judicial proceedings is just make sure everyone is always found guilty.

I find it strange that you assume that high performance is actually what is rewarded even in non-standardized payscale environments.

It most definitely is in tech. 10X engineers exist and if they aren't being paid handsomely, it's because they've put zero effort into finding the correct job.

I can't speak to government work since I'm in private industry.

That's being rewarded for 'finding the correct job' not performance.

> Why would high performers stay in this environment when they could leave to work somewhere where pay is tied to performance and not seniority?

Because most places that claim "pay is tied to performance" actually don't tie pay to objective measures of performance (or even know how to objectively measure delivered value), they tie pay to either:

(1) an objective measure of something, but something often not tied to your performance of the duties of the job,

(2) a subjective ranking of "performance" that can reflect a decisionmaker's biases and/or your effort and ability in deploying social manipulation unrelated to your nominal job function on the decisionmaker.

If you're not a commissioned salesperson [0], ties to an objective measure of performance are hard to find.

[0] And even there, there are some problems, as even getting the base right for a sales commission to really measure performance and not an imperfect proxy that becomes an incentive to acts which make the measure look good but are detrimental to the real goal of the job is harder than it looks.

Perks. Better offices, better gear, professional recognition, more respect, more autonomy.

I hire contractors and consultants all of the time who are very well compensated. As part of that, we recorded 350 engagements and had at least 3 peers rate the people we hire. In my experience, there's no correlation between pay and rating, with limited exceptions.

Because people aren't motivated by money! Why is this mistaken idea still in circulation? Surely we've all seen Drive by now:

https://www.thersa.org/discover/videos/rsa-animate/2010/04/r...

Human society revolves around getting, trading, saving, and spending money. I think that money is a primary motivator for many, many, many people. Including myself - why else would I show up to a job every day?

I show up because I need money. I perform at a high level in order to ask for more money. I use that money to do things that I want. Money is a great motivator - I care about trivial things because I am paid to care about them. I would never care if I weren't being paid.

Obviously money is my primary motivator for going to work, but offering me more of it won't necessarily make me work more or in itself convince me to go work for someone else. Two salary negotiations ago I turned down money in exchange for more vacation days for example. I've turned down jobs offering more money because they placed greater demands on my time. I've also taken jobs offering less money since they offered me more intellectual freedom and autonomy as to how I go about my work.

I only go to work for a pay check! I wouldn't be doing what I do if I was financially independent.

I stopped working more than 40 hours after 3 months of 65-75 hour weeks and realizing I wasn't getting squat for it. Other people were getting paid the same I was and they weren't doing the extra hours.

So I stopped. Why put in the extra effort if it isn't paying out? Don't get me wrong. I am not doing sub-par work. I just don't do extra unless I am paid for it.

Saying people aren't motivated by money is fallacy, IMO

I think this is true only to the point of perceiving that you are compensated correctly relative to the market, i.e. that you can't switch jobs tomorrow and get a 10% or greater pay raise. After that definitely the motivations put forth by Drive apply. At least, this has been my experience with myself and past/present coworkers. There are also some cases where one will take a pay cut for more meaningful work, but that requires a position of relative privilege to contemplate.

I think it would be more accurately phrased as "people aren't necessarily motivated more by more money". Money matters a lot, but there's a saturation point. Once you have enough money that you're not routinely confronted by the issue of "giving up" things you want, I think additional money is mostly tied to other things that have more to do with social status.

I'm in a country where everyone can easily find out everyone else's salary. I find it weird (because I'm American). Also, unions are more common, but different because management will also often have unions, so they are the ones that do the negotiating. This means the process and facts and figures are much more open.

And while I find it weird, this does also mean that pay scales are more appropriate and fair. You can have seniority plus merit based pay, for example, so long as you are honest about what qualifacations people need to meet to earn more pay, and also lessens the gap between women and men's pay.

Some of the gap between women and men will take societal change, and most likely take laws and such to force people's hand to do it.

> this does also mean that pay scales are more appropriate and fair

It means that the pay scales are more equal. Whether or not that's fair is unclear as determining fairness requires determining a significant component of performance and results.

Paying a mediocre developer and a superstar developer (or salesperson) the same amount is equal, but is not fair, IMO.

You are correct on the definition of fairness, and no system is perfect. But at the same time, it doesn't mean that the pay scales are unfair. I think it encourages folks to be upfront about how they determine payrates, raises, and bonuses. However, the things you describe are more things left up to the employer - and the even-out payscales are in place especially in factories and other such professions. Not necessarily fair, but at least some of those jobs are more difficult to differentiate concrete pay systems as well.

In my opinion, such systems mean one needs to be able to back up the claim that the superstar is superior. Salespersons are easier to measure in this sense, especially if they make commissions. Developers? Simply have standards and be upfront about how said standards affect pay, and apply those. Measurable experience, results, error rate, speed, or whatever measures you have.

I want my coworkers focused on creating business value and trusting that they'll be rewarded for that, not trying to figure out how to game the system to close the most tickets, write the most code, write the fewest bugs, get the most fake wiki edit points, or whatever "objective standards" I could come up with.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

The "via leadership judgement" system absolutely has its flaws (including people trying to game that), but IMO it's the worst system to use, except for all the other systems we've tried.

> The "via leadership judgement" system absolutely has its flaws (including people trying to game that), but IMO it's the worst system to use, except for all the other systems we've tried.

Right now, at least with highly in-demand skillsets, it is more like "another company's leadership's judgement".

It is possible to find balance in there. Not all systems fit all workplaces. The main point I was trying to make is that whatever is used should be fair.

If everyone's pay is public, it might not be uncommon to ask "why does person A make more than me?" And There has to be things you can point out (I suppose you can keep quiet, but it probably doesn't foster a wonderful environment). And if they ask how they can increase their own pay or their own job performance to make their pay better, it really needs to be more than, "just suck it up": In addition, the employee has to realize they probably won't catch up to Person A because they weren't doing the necessary stuff from the beginning.

Paying one developer more simply because they're better at negotiating isn't fair either. As is, we really don't have good ways of determining one developer is clearly better than another.

But you know it when you see the outliers, right? You know who you'd want to go form a 3-person highly technical startup with. You know who else you'd never want to work with if your personal livelihood depending on them performing in a crunch.

I admit that I can't judge who is 10 or 20% better than another developer. I can tell who the 5-10x outliers are. Maybe under other circumstances or at other companies different people would shine, but I'm at this company and under these circumstances.

Is it true that most Americans work in "non public" salary environments? All government employees, most union employees & many big company employees in the USA work with public salaries.

yes and no. Some professions have a 'salary' - as in, they get paid the same amount regardless of how much they work.

The other sorts, yes. For example, I worked in a call center. Nearly everyone started at the same rate, raises were scheduled, and everyone got the same percentage, dependent on how long you worked there. Pay was capped. The way to earn money was to have some sort of promotion or transfer.

A lot of factories are set up in the same way. It gets a little fuzzier in retail sectors. In the states, this is often (but not always) result of having a union for the employees.

Despite my username, I agree that the market will not fix discrimination. (Which I used to not believe was a problem, until I saw it first hand).

Markets are made up of individuals, and if most of those individuals are irrational, irrational outcomes will result, whatever the incentives for rational action. The only real fix is free speech and free association: i.e., those who belong to discriminated-against groups swapping information on the best and worst places to work, and forming professional associations for mentorship, career planning and networking. (Forcing companies to make diversity hires can only be counter-productive).

I think more radical salary transparency across the board would help salary equality between the sexes more than anything else, honestly. I(a male) was being radically underpaid for the first few years of my career simply because I hadn't broken into the "club" necessary to learn what the market rate for my skillset actually was, despite what I thought was negotiating hard for each position I had taken. I can only imagine how much harder that discovery process must be for women in any tech-related field.

Is it actually discrimination if its women's own actions that cause them to get paid less? i.e. not coming back with competing offers. I think we are losing sight of what the word discrimination means.

>There are a couple of lawsuits happening right now against law firms where female partners are alleging that they were paid a fraction of what men were paid despite bringing in far more business.

Source? I see this popping up all the time but never actual examples.

As someone who is responsible for these kinds of decisions, this is actually the most uncomfortable part of my job, and that's not because I'm not good with people or have issues talking about money.

It's because there is no single socially acceptable way of handling this, and people differ wildly over what they expect of the company.

As someone who employs developer's, I'm often in a position where starting the conversation with one employee because it's on his quarterly schedule can trigger another employee to question his relative position and start a job hunt because he just had his evaluation talks and the results he was happy with then don't look so great now.

Similar things happened with a general fixed sum raise for the whole team, where once everyone's numbers changed people wanted to be treated differently compared to their colleagues...

Currently I'm following a "to-each-his-own" philosophy, where we try to reach a market Level for each employees, and then try to give whatever the employee actually needs for his prefered Lifestyle, be it remote-work with a package of paid airplane tickets, or a company loan, or more holiday days... but this is also not perfect since it's often down to the creativity of the employee and the Manager/hr, but also because these packages tend to have a "Grass is greener" side of things as employees get jealous of other employees perks while forgetting their own benefits...

I've yet to find a frustration free system of compensation negotiation that leads to the one thing that's most important for my companies, retaining talent and team spirit.

Honestly I'm working as a full stack developer, mainly node.js/angular here in Austin at a small/medium sized company. The business isn't really tech, but we have a ~10 or so dev/design team. Only paid 55k per year and I feel like I won't ever get to market rate just staying here. I love the company, the culture, and the people, but I just feel way undervalued. I know I'm going to have to look elsewhere, because I need the money, but at the same time I wish I didn't have to. This is my first "real" job out of college.

How many years experience do you have? If you're fresh out of college and making 55K that sounds reasonable unless you're in some insane location like Silicon Valley.

Austin's a pretty hot market, from what I understand. Sounds kind of low to me.

In Boston, that's barely half the going rate for a fresh grad from a top school.

"Undervalued" is relative. To Google your skills might be worth $150k because you'd add $1.5m to their revenue. To the business you're in you may 'only' add $500k, so you're paid accordingly. You aren't undervalued so much as under-utilised - the company you're at isn't maximising the value they could get from you in the way Google could (or maybe they are; there is an upper limit). Either find a way to make a bigger impact on your company's bottom line, or change company.

To draw a startup analogy, if you decide you want to take 25% of an established $100m market that's unlikely to happen because that's really hard to do, so people don't value your startup as having a potential $25m revenue. But if you can think of a realistic way to grow that $100m market to being a $125m market then people will readily accept you potentially have a $25m revenue business. Same result, very different impact.

Within your company you need to grow the market for your skills.

So the question then is, how do you add to their revenue? Seek projects that will save them money? Seek projects that will net them additional revenue? How do you make a find a way to make a bigger impact on your companies bottom line?

If you're a developer, the sad truth is that there's probably very little you can do. Even if you removed 100% of the company's infrastructure cost center, it's only a small fraction of your company's total costs.

Unless you are in Sales, Marketing, or Senior Management, there's very little you can ever do to significantly impact revenue.

Not that Senior Management wants you to think that; it's demoralizing when combined with bonuses being withheld due to missed revenue goals.

I do agree that the connection to revenue is much clearer in other departments but that doesn't mean engineering can't impact the bottom line.

Areas where I think good engineering can help include, designing software that minimizes its support costs, attention to code quality to improve customer/users experience, improving up-time, shortening maintenance windows, metrics and telemetry that help marketing and product development understand how a product is being used.

Good product documentation (reference manuals, in-product help, etc) is difficult and often over-looked. This isn't coding but engineering input into documentation is important.

Engineers can also provide significant input into product features and directions.

Sure, we build the product. And without that product, the company is a non-starter. And if we screw it up, we can lose existing customers.

But the product by itself does not produce revenue. Only selling the product makes revenue.

So, at best, we can avoid costing the company money, but we can't make money. Even customer service can have a bigger impact on the bottom line than we do.

Increasing top line revenue is almost always a better path than cutting expenses. (The latter is finite, although sometimes easier to prove specific correlation between action and savings. Until you're working at a company with huge expenses, though, going for growth is better than cost-cutting.)

Curious about how the business is not tech but you have a dev/design team. I'm guessing it's a publicity agency but I'd be curious if it's another kind of business.

It's an e-commerce company that has a handful of brands careering to higher end consumer customers and businesses. So the core of the company isn't necessarily tech product wise, but the majority of our business is from the web.

My advice to you would be to stick out at least 2 years at your first job, so you aren't labeled as a job hopper off the bat by prospective employers.

After that, start applying everywhere to feel out what your more accurate market rate should be, unless your current company offers you a significant raise to stay.

Agreed. Your first job out of college doesn't need to pay handsomely, it's just a stepping stone to build experience and a resume. The employer is taking a bit of a risk with you too since you have zero work experience most likely. 2 years is a good amount of time to stick around before checking out the competition and not looking like a job-hopper.

Sorry but in my experience, your instincts are correct. Smart managers who will give you the serious market-correction bumps do exist but they rarely exist. Even then, you will need to have undoubted value in order to leverage a serious bump, as they will have people above them that will fight it.

In my experience, you will have to jump from job to job in order to get incremental salary increases, since yearly increases are not only shallow but percentage based(so lower salaries receive lower increases.)

I've seen many companies that attempt to thrive on lower earners, who are typically straight out of college. It's a successful cost-cutting measure that works until their products turn to shit.

Just for perspective, I was making $83k/year in Austin fresh out of college (and I graduated in December 2014). I was working at a bigger tech company though up in the North side.

I agree op is really underpaid. In 2011 I accepted my lowest offer out of college at $66k (though that was with good grades at a respected state school and good internships).

Shoot me a message at mail [at] chrisabrams.com - I can intro you companies - if ur doing Node ur worth more. I'm a Node developer too.

I make 55k in a similar city, though it's one much worse for developer jobs than Austin. My coworker also makes about 58k, and my lead developer makes about 80k despite being really good at what he does. He could easily find a 120k+ job tomorrow. We do mostly Node.js stuff. I have about 2 years full time experience, and probably the equivalent of 4 years full time experience since I've done web dev since I was a teenager.

Job market sucks for newer devs right now. You at least have a shit load of opportunity in Austin there. Barely anything where I live despite being a big ass city.

Just fyi, bigcommerce is in Austin and hiring. Someone wanted me to apply and said they're paying in the 120k range.

As a manager, when an employee comes to you with another offer, you (or the company) have already failed in some way.

This situation is not a root problem, it's a symptom.

I've found that when I match or beat the offer they leave anyways in 6-9 months. So now, I no longer fight to keep them. If they were a great employee I chalk it up as a loss and try to be smarter and more proactive next time.

But if you had matched the offer before they ever went out job searching, would they end up being around a lot longer? That's the big question.

Presumably that would be covered in "smarter and more proactive next time."

Many of these discussions seem to leave the elephant in the room of what is 'enough'.

If your company can only extract 50K per employee, and a home costs 500K in the region, then I don't think you have a legitimate business, and I don't think it should be surprising that people leave for pastures new.

I've spent far too long trying to improve companies' profitability to the point that they can actually afford to pay my mortgage - it's looking likely that I'll be lounging on 10 hours / week for the indefinite future.

Burn my youth so I can rent a fancy apartment? No thanks!

Just like complaining gets those customers more attention over regular non complaining customers, so to is bargaining and leverage influential in the job market game.

Everything is a push and a pull, if you aren't pushing you are being pulled, and vice versa.

With market values out there, if you aren't putting up other offers or leverage then the weight of the bargaining isn't on your side. It sucks that the game is like this, in a perfect world you'd have people that just wanted to work at one place without needing to play the game and employers that paid you actual market worth, but in reality that market value has to be checked to gain leverage.

Other market value checks on skills/employees/entrepreneurs are out there such as success, college, projects in addition to offers, but it needs to be a market value check externally to the organization/workplace to be valuable.

Like players in sports free agency, loyalty is gone from both employer and employee, you might have to move to a new team if you want to get paid sometimes and you need a few teams vying for you when it comes time to negotiate.

>I suggested we increase the standard pay for this position. My boss’s response was, “If [employees] want more money, they need to go and get another job offer.”

Is this a common workplace practice?

tl;dr-yes.

I heard this from recruiters when I was negotiating salary right out of college. "I want to give you more but we have a policy that unless you have another offer..."

What's to stop someone from just lying about another offer?

I think primarily the fear that their boss will call their bluff, and they'll be forced to either admit the scam or quit the job and have to scramble for a new one.

That's for leaving your old job, not for negotiating with your new job.

ethics, and usually they'd ask to see that offer and get the details!

Ethics is one thing, but forcing a candidate to produce a competitor's offer seems intrusive.

I had a (great) boss in my late 20s who was overjoyed to have me share my offer with him so he could go to bat with the corporate overlords (in another state) and get all the local devs a raise based on market conditions.

I was more than happy to share, but we also already had a relationship where I knew he wasn't out to screw me.

I have never shared one companies offer with another, nor would I. Of course if I company was not willing to negotiate I would immediately walk. I have just learned a lot about the people who work there.

You've hit the nail on the head. It's poker.

I'd guess lying for financial gain can be prosecuted as fraud.

Same as lying about your previous salary.

You can not be prosecuted for fraud for lying about your previous salary. That's ridiculous.

So if a company tells me they don't have the budget to hire me and they really do, I should try to get them prosecuted for fraud? The company might be purposefully undervaluing me for their own financial gain. Lying goes both ways.

What if your boss says "ok, sorry. We can't match that?". That has happened to me multiple times with real offers. Then you either say "ok, well, I like this company so I'll stay", which sounds disingenuous, or you have to quit and find a new job.

If you feel under valued, and talking to your boss doesn't get you a raise, why not just look for a new job? Doesn't cost you anything.

Unless you either don't find one and/or do not want to move to another city.

Not finding one is no worse than not looking. I didn't say to quit. Looking for a job while you have a job is incredibly empowering. It puts you in the driver's seat. You don't have to get a job as fast as possible just to get a paycheck.... you can take your time and find a job that suits you, and that pays you well. You'll be more confident in interviews, more assertive when negotiating salary... Also, companies often tend to value people who are currently working higher than those who don't. If you're working, you implicitly have a reference from your current employer - they obviously think you're worth a recurring paycheck.

I recently hired a new developer for my team. She stupidly asked for what I believe is well below market rate. I want to build a team for the long term, so I (and the CTO, my boss) had to stand up to HR to get her what we think the position is really worth.

In my experience, it's HR that stands in the way of employee satisfaction (whether that's salaries, or flexibility in various benefits, or whatever). You'd think they're there to be the champions of the worker in the corporation, but it seems to actually be just the opposite.

Correct. There's a misunderstanding by many. Many believe that HR is there for the employees, which is not the case. HR exists to serve and protect the company. Squealing to HR about problems isn't likely to help an employee, it's more likely to put them on the chopping block.

In the department "Human Resources", never forget that "Human" is just an adjective and "Resources" is the noun.

At my company, we call the department "People and Talent," but it's colloquially known as "PeepOps" here. Company is about 800 people and publicly traded.

> In my experience, it's HR that stands in the way of employee satisfaction (whether that's salaries, or flexibility in various benefits, or whatever). You'd think they're there to be the champions of the worker in the corporation, but it seems to actually be just the opposite.

I also thought the same thing, but a month or two into my first job quickly dispelled that illusion. HR is for the benefit of the company, not the employee.

Yeah happened to me. I had a low paying job for Seattle and decided to ask for a raise after I fixed a couple of seriously expensive bugs in our S3 management scheme. They told me that I would only get a raise if I had another offer. I said "There doesn't need to be another offer for me to get a raise" and they disagreed. I am now making 57% more at another company which is less fun but definitely more lucrative.

Article's title sure is misleading.

A better title would be "When skilled talent wants to be paid market rate, but can't get it without leaving".

It can be good and bad:

good: a company tries hard to pay well, and welcomes being proven wrong by an offer letter so that they can correct the pay scales for everyone.

bad: by default, management won't review salaries or give pay raises for anybody. Every single employee must go interview with other companies -- and waste both their times -- to get an offer letter and then a pay raise. This rewards disloyalty, as the employees who don't waste time interviewing elsewhere end up paid the least. It also encourages employees to be disingenuous (or dishonest): some engineers (myself included) refuse to be disingenuous: if another company made a much better offer I'd take it, and would refuse counter offers.

Of course, there's a third possibility: companies that do not welcome being proven wrong about salary, and don't want to have money conversations or pay raises at all.

I worked for decades for great employers but I don't recall asking for a raise except once where I'd prenegotiated it as a condition of signing on [at 6 months => go to market rate].

It just wasn't worth the hassle to me to negotiate when I could just go to another company that valued me more. There was nothing keeping the employers I left from proactively giving me a raise.

The thing I hate is how stingy companies are with salaries. Pay a hard working engineer who has immense institutional knowledge that'll take years to replace $15k more per year? No way! Pay a million dollars for a fancy automated video conference room that will barely ever get used? Sure!

Guess which one of these things contributes more to your company's success?

How much would you pay the perfect candidate? Someone who knows all the tools you're using, knows the problem space, knows your customers, someone who has even gotten their hands dirty in the code fixing bugs and implementing features? Plus, they're a known quantity because you've worked with them before. What would you pay this perfect candidate? A ton, right? Guess what? You already have this candidate. It's the person already at your company. Are they making "perfect candidate" money? If not, why not?

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Do people have much experience with services that provide salary data to companies to help them set salaries at fair market rates?

I feel like such a service might just be a way for a company to say "here is the data, they say market rate is lower than what you are asking." But I could be wrong.

I think this is kind of hard because of "soft" benefits (not sure if there's a better term).

Some companies let you work from home, some don't. Some have free snacks, some don't. Some have relaxed hours, some don't.

So matching pure paycheck value isn't really apples to oranges.

We use such a service to give us "market reference point" in our comp planning tool. I mostly ignore it, as I have a better sense of the market from actual hiring and have a philosophy that developer A and developer B are actually different and have different value to the company, yet will have the same MRP figure in the tool.

Some positions are only worth so much money. However, if you _know_ you're not paying a fair wage, then this is a bad practice and those employees who leave would do much better for themselves.

All companies do this, there is no such thing as a fair wage. (Speaking from experience at a company know to pay well, there are many paid below average that are highly rated).

yc is founder friendly. As such those yc companies should be employee friendly. Do that and do right by your employees and the sky is the limit.

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