Comment by sidlls | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sidlls | Hacker News Reader

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> Instead, 2 years is a pretty common stretch before turnover in white collar jobs, especially for younger folk. Employees become better off from firm-hopping, and employers have no reason to offer long-ROI incentives such as paid masters' programs.

I'd have gladly stayed at my third job for much longer than the ~21 months I did had there been training, retirement, reasonable pay increases, and career development offered. The same for my forth job. Some number of jobs later and my current one is also my longest tenure to date. Not coincidentally I have had and continue to have a clear path of career development, non-trivial pay increases and bonuses that aren't tiny. I've given up on employer-provided proper retirement plans and education/training.

"Firm hopping" exists, in my opinion, precisely because companies tend to either not recognize the role they must play in supporting long term tenures or else simply don't value them enough to allocate resources to the support.

My longest jobs both lasted around 8 years. In both cases, I stayed because I liked my coworkers and the environment.

As a result, my salary history is well below average for my location and experience. Further, since I was paid less than my less experienced (and less capable) coworkers, my input was usually ignored and I was basically sidelined except when something went badly wrong and I spent much of my time cleaning up others' mistakes.

Keep an eye on those pay increases and the IEEE salary survey in your region.

At this point in my career I've reached a salary plateau for the technical track. Short of landing a high-profile project at one of the major tech firms the ~6%-7% raises I've had the last couple of years are about the max of what I might expect from a "hop." Instead I'm looking to both exit this industry completely and, while I build the cushion necessary to do so, switch to management (which has ample support, currently).

This happened to me as well, the only way I was able to get above that plateau was to go freelance and start my own thing. Charging a fair market value for my time. Best decision I ever made.

That's about what I've decided, but all the freelance work I've seen available has been web development---the kind of thing I'm trying to escape. Freelancing for a systems programmer has a "I can't get there from here" problem, particularly since I'm crap-tastic at networking.

I feel like there's a market for independent contract sales. I would love to pay 15% of a contract to someone who could source and close contracts for me.

Unfortunately, I think there's no way to escape the need to network. But, it's a learnable skill so you just have to put in the time and effort.

The people who can close sales end up starting companies and they hire programmers. They end up taking a lot more than 15%.

>I would love to pay 15% of a contract to someone who could source and close contracts for me.

Couldn't agree more. The product design space is crowded with low end parties on both sides, and I've fruitlessly offered a percentage a few times for people to source mature, ready-to-pay clients.

There are solutions like upwork, and solutions like hired, but there doesn't seem to be an intermediate solution. Would be interested in what keeps more people from pursuing deals like this. 10% of a 50k contract is nothing to shake a stick at.

That's what consulting companies do, although they'd take a bit more than 15%. More like 40%, but then they have a higher rate too.

I work through 10X Management, doing freelance programming. They find customers, define the work parameters and scope, close the deals, do all contract and billing, and provide customer support as necessary. Flat 15%, I see the contract with the customer. They get better rates than I do on my own.

10X Management seems to be heavily focused on web development as well.

Not really. The whole world is very focused on web development so it looks that way.

I have 2 other freelancers I work w/. We've created a freelance conglomerate of sorts. We all work on a contract to contract basis. We offer our entire network a 10% finders fee. If someone you recommend closes w/ us you get 10% of the contract. This has worked out great for us. This also extends to the company we registered to provide all the freelancers w/ insurance and other things you should have when running your own company. So all the freelancers get 1m+ insurance through the company they bill as.

The company makes $30/hr on every hour billed. This covers taxes, etc as we also handle payroll and taxes for the freelancers but you could easily forgo this part. The person who brings in the client gets a 10% finders fee. We use this money to subscribe to lead generation services which deliver us hot leads and such.. RFP's, etc.

Anyone who contacts these leads and lands a client can earn the 10% finders fee.

Devs then take the rest as an hourly.. usually this means they're making between 90-120/hr depending on the contract. We specialize in Ruby, Elixir, ReactJS/React Native work.

! I've seen 6 to 7 percent about twice in my entire career. 3% is the usual max, and 1-2% more common.

But job hops are an easy 10-15%, hence the problem ;)

(Up to some limit obviously, as a guy with 16 years experience is unlikely to get a 10% premium over a guy with 15 years of experience)

First job out of college Inhad something to prove and worked my ass off. What I did was extremely measurable and I was easily doing 2x the work compared to the department average. Every single day.

1.5% raise the first year, made a huge fuss the second year and asked for a large raise (because my numbers of were insane) and only managed a 4% raise (promotion included).

I've been at a new job for about a year and have worked hard as always, but the things I am doing are much, much harder to measure. It's much more difficult for me to actually prove how much value I am providing. However, it's looking like I will be getting a ~15% raise shortly.

If a company wants you to stick around, they'll be proactive and show it. At least that's what I've taken from this...and I don't want to be anywhere I'm not wanted.

I discovered early on that, at least in larger companies, advancement in a role is based on your strategic value to the company, and not even remotely related to your work ethic. If your manager is willing to go to bat for you, you stand a chance of getting a meaningful raise. And that depends on whether you can demonstrably make their job easier.

Working "hard" only serves to let you feel good about yourself.

Yes. Except, "strategic value to the manager"

What is strategic value to the manager that is not hard work and delivering result? I'm asking sincerely, since I do hear a lot about the lack of correlation between hard work and promotion. I want to understand.

In my experience delivering results that the manager can leverage to demonstrate his or her value is more important than either working hard or delivering results in the strict sense that, e.g. you write solid code to produce a feature.

Often the talent on a team is not nearly as important as the talent's relationship to the strategic direction of the company.

This too, I agree with, when my cynicism is not cranked to 11.

Backing your manager and/or attacking other princes in the org. Finding dirt on incumbents... playing along and don't making a fuzz when stupid rules are put into effect.

Ostracise, or at least selectively ignore certain coworkers when called for to keep the "team spirit" alive. And so on and so forth. For being a loyal page, there might be some great reward. Funny thing is, I'm not even sure the incumbents would count it against you if the tables are turned. They know and respect a mercenary when they see one and will be happy to take you under their wing. But not if you jump faction too early, then you are just a traitor. Nobody loves a traitor.

Reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_machine as well as the background in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage_in_ancient_Rome

Essentially by supporting that manager's political goals (to gain power within the organization), you receive rewards based not on skill or merit but as a result of your support.

In this system, people in a relationship are either 'patrons' or 'clients', and it is expected that patrons will help clients within their power and in return clients will support their patrons advancement, either through advancing their ends directly or undermining competitors.

All of these things are wasteful distractions, but then, that's politics.

Consider this case: For one of our software releases, we worked with another product group in the company to co-release a new product line. I was basically on loan from my team to work on that project, as the only developer from my product group, and working under another manager. During that time, my team's manager stepped down, and a new one was hired. The product was released, the salespeople made a lot of money on commissions selling the product. The "other manager" left the company. The dev team in the other product group all either left or were reassigned, and I was left as the sole escalation support for the product.

Problem: My team's new manager had no part in the decision of putting me on that project, couldn't override the time that I was required to spend supporting it, but also couldn't use me as flexibly as her other developers. So I was first at the chopping block when the company decided to have a round of layoffs. I was providing value to the company as a whole, but not helping my manager in her own job.

Hard work: Check.

Delivering results: Check.

Delivering value to my manager: Nope.

Result: Looking for a new job.

Not only are you dependent on your manager, your often only able to secure significant raises at the cost of other team member raises. The bucket is allocated to your team based on a company standard, with nothing connected to your performance, then that has to be divided, which they often claim is performance based...

The plateau is real. It's not unheard of for your first job hop, early in your career, to get you 10-50%. Next move might be 5-15%. Over time, as you approach the ceiling, your reward for job hopping will diminish. I've got close to 20 years under my belt, and my last few hops were less than +1%.

Short of going into management or doing a complete career change, it seems you can get stuck later in life.

Yep. At my company, the Engineering Manager position starts at about 10% above the equivalent tech track position's upper limit in the band, has larger RSU grants and a bigger bonus pool.

For me, the route out that I'm trying is to try to build a consultancy or productized-consulting business. It's effectively going into management, but the person you're managing is yourself.

It's especially true when you look at contribution vs reward for a skilled senior / principal engineer. If you take away the "steady paycheck" aspect of salaried employment, you can get 2x to 3x the reward for some percentage increase in total effort.

IEEE salary survey requires a membership.. free membership gets you no access to that survey data just FYI. I just tried it and now can't find a way to delete my account off that website.

Try payscale.com instead. I've found it to be reasonably accurate.

I learned in the late 90s that the best fit for myself was to hop and hop often. I tended to stay with a company for about 12-18 months and would use each hop to increase my salary. Among my friends, the basic catch phrase was "want a 10k pay raise, get another job". This worked well on 2 fronts, your pay kept going up, and you tended to stay at the firm long enough to extract any real value to yourself in terms of interesting projects, learning a new industry etc. That just made you more attractive to the next company.

A cautionary note here: companies are not blind to this behavior. The job market for programmers is very hot right now and employers to some degree just have to suck it up and deal with job hopping employees, but if the market cools, a resume full of one year stints may become a liability.

Maybe, but if you have 10 years of 1-year stints... companies aren't foolish either. They know you only survived that tactic because you're extremely good (and gosh hopefully well recommended by your colleagues from 10 jobs).

They also know that they are now 'lucky' enough the market is cold, and you'll be trapped with them for the next 5+ years out of fear.

A lot of this can be mitigated by managers having genuine conversations with their employees. The ideal manager I would work with (I've seen some managers come close but never hit all the right notes) would first and foremost be genuinely interested in my career progress as an employee. Different employees have different ambitions and expectations and there is just no way for a manager to know all of this just by observing someone; they really need to actively communicate and find out, to have a genuine conversation about how much raise they can provide or why they can't, what future they see for the employee. Especially if the employee is performing below expectations... that conversation can be tough, but I think one of the qualities of being a good manager is to convey this information in a way which makes the employee try to remedy the situation rather than just disparage them.

One on ones are important to me, and have been among the most enjoyable interactions in my professional life. My favorite point on this was by Andy Grove, who suggested that there's a limit to the number of your direct reports because you owe each of them about half a day per week to properly manage and support them.

That would imply the hiring process didn't select a perfect match 100% of the time, which is a slap in the face of a large budget item, that's not going to happen.

The fiction must be maintained at all costs that the employee was the perfect fit at hiring time; neither overqualified aka too expensive or underqualified aka the manager screwed up.

Not at all.

People change, companies change, the business changes. The person you needed when you hired him might not be the exact person you'll need in a year, but a good manager will first see if that person can grow into a new role instead of firing him and hiring someone else.

I firmly believe part of this conversation needs to be clear, measurable goals. At most places I've worked it's "Your performance is good, but you're not getting a raise/bonus. In order to get a raise, you need to do subjectively better in some vaguely described area or in some other nebulous way that I cannot articulate. Good luck--you won't know if you've done it until next review time!"

A better conversation would be: "In order to get raise X% you need to do A, B, and C. In order to get raise Y% you also need to do D and E. We will checkpoint 4 times per year on progress, and you'll know well in advance if you've made it." Where A-E are things the employee has direct control over, i.e. not dependent on things like overall team success or company stock price.

Exactly. I've never worked somewhere that gave >5% raises, yet simply switching jobs has gotten me a >8% raise every time.

I've stayed beyond what pay would incentivize at almost every company I've worked at because I liked the culture/coworkers/etc., but workplaces are fragile ecosystems, and culture/coworkers/etc. can drastically change with surprising speed.

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