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Comment by pgt | Hacker News Reader

Cutting of catered lunches is a strong signal that the company is in a cash crunch. You can try to propose a weekly catered lunch at your company to "encourage communication" and watch it is a signal. In the past I instituted weekly catered lunches at a company, which were halved from weekly to bi-weekly the moment finance knew there was trouble.

Other indicators: delayed salary reviews, senior staff leaving (and not being replaced, because money) or minority shareholders trying to sell their stakes.

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Any rollback of free food perks is a bad sign. It's not always a sign of bad health, but if it's not it means the company is softly lowering the status of it's rank and file in order to put in another layer of management.

Does this often happen? Saving money on lunch might delay a company's failure for a week at best. My perspective is most startups will maintain all benefits until the bitter end explicitly to avoid giving their employees this kind of impression. Hints like this might cause critical employees to jump ship during a financial crunch time.

It's a surprisingly good leading indicator.

Interestingly, I've mostly seen this happen in the other direction - with successfully growing companies.

Weekly lunch for a whole company isn't a huge deal at a startup, and it's not going to shorten the runway much. But when you've suddenly got 10x or 100x the original employee count it starts to look less pleasant. By the time a company is spending several salaries worth of money on free lunches, it probably looks tempting to cut them. (And it's probably less destructive when everyone knows the finances are going strong.)

Early-stage startups have real trouble attracting talent. The more the business grows, the less desperate recruitment becomes. Cutting on perks is a decent signal of this: people have actually heard of the company, the stock options seem to really have value, etc, so there's no need to bribe workers with unlimited everything.

I work in a division of my company that was acquired by it 10 years ago (about a year or 2 before I started working here). When I started, there was "pizza Friday" every week. About a year later, it was every month (and headcount was much higher). A year later, we were building out into another part of the building that we took over when the previous tenant's lease came up. Fast forward. Now, 2/3 of the office it gone, offshored. There's a monthly bagel Wednesday. I've only stayed this long because my manager is pretty awesome.

But I feel like I've seen both sides: Growing out of childhood and falling into senescence. The next time I see this pattern, I'll leave a couple years earlier.

How often do salary reviews generally occur for someone working as a developer (or IT I suppose?)

Usually once or twice a year for a seasoned developer, more frequent for jrs. That's been my experience.

I've been at my current position for about ~1.5 years almost without one (I think they are starting to do them soon?). Last time I asked they had said they are implementing a formal process for them.

I've just been looking forward to it.

So you haven't gotten a raise in a year and a half?

(In my experience, if someone really deserves it then either a bonus or an out of cycle raise or promotion will be given, I've gotten both.)

I've never heard of a bonus being awarded (or a signing bonus of sorts when first starting being given)

Being my first FT position after finishing school I wasn't sure what to expect for reviews/raises/etc.

When people get raises and/or bonuses it's usually not announced publicly.

If your a jr software engineer you should be having regularly scheduled performance reviews. Everyone should be having at least yearly performance review and salary increase (unless you don't deserve a raise, I guess). You shouldn't be going a year and a half without a raise.

Push for a review, insist you need formal feedback on your performance as a jr. During the review bring up salary increase.

The job I worked when I was jr had a 3 month review and a 6 month review, and maybe a 12 month review. These reviews on came with small raises depending on performance. Plus everyone has a yearly review at the same time of year.

(But sometimes someone's performance is strong enough to warrant not waiting for the yearly review/salary increase)

I see - a few times in the past bonuses have been announced if "x occurs".

Yeah I'll bring it up - I'm not sure how "important" it is compared to other day-to-day meetings and such with managers, but hopefully they can find time for it.

Thanks for all the input thus far I appreciate it.

It's important. If your managers hair is too on fire to structure and schedule performance reviews then it's a bad company environment. You should not accept it as ok.

People seem to forget corporate policies are not law. "I would love to review your salary, but we are in a freeze right now" means nothing. You don't have to accept that formal process excuse.

Strangely enough I didn't quite view it as an excuse (although it could have been?)

> How often do salary reviews generally occur for someone working as a developer (or IT I suppose?)

It's served me well to have at least one interview per year with a different company in your field to see what they're offering. Doing this has really helped me understand what the market is willing to pay for my skills, and has more than once caused me to shift the direction of my career because the work they were doing was interesting enough that I switched jobs.

You don't necessarily have to accept the job, and I would caution against switching jobs every single year, but I've definitely found the experience helpful. It also forces you to keep your CV up to date, and it's also great interview practice. I've definitely taken lessons learned from my various interviews and applied them to interviewing candidates for our company.

> It's served me well to have at least one interview per year with a different company

That sounds like really good advice: finding out what's out there, getting interview experience and stopping that "fear of change" feeling you can end up with when you work for one company for a long time.

> and stopping that "fear of change" feeling you can end up with when you work for one company for a long time.

That's what I'm dealing with right now. I've been 9 years at the place that I started at, right out of college. Missed some signs of a downward slide that I should've recognized, and I feel like my current team is a "dead team walking", just waiting for the company to find a way to get rid of us.

So I've got pressure to move on, and my most solid options mean moving my family. If I'd been searching over the last couple of years, I'm sure I could've found something cool and suitable, but still in my current area.

I've seen: never; yearly; semi-annually;

In the "never" case, not that you never got a raise, but that there was no "review" component. Just a notice of your new salary.

When I was working for a big consultancy (many years ago) it was common to get a review after rolling off of a client engagement.

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