Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

We're in a labor market in which CS students are focused on drilling for the FAANG-style whiteboard tests. And many will tell you their strategy is to go to Google for 2 years of experience and resume-building, and then leaving rather than grind away and play the promotion game there. And everyone has known for 20 years that you have to job-hop to grow your salary in this industry. And most employees would be naive to think that their employer would take care of them long-term.

In this mercenary environment, loyalty doesn't go very far, so, for retention after mentoring, I assume one would have to pair mentoring/training with substantial growth in compensation. Besides all the non-monetary attractions.

View on HN

My last company would insist that they couldn’t give promotions or significant raises. Until you came in with an outside offer, then they’d roll out the red carpet and bend over backwards to keep you.

It breeds distrust, discontent, and disloyalty.

The best people don’t like this and leave. They company is left with people who can’t land outside offers. And the company ends up needing to pay market rate anyway to replace the good people who left.

Idiotic.

This works for the company because most people don't bother interviewing and coming up with a counter offer. In my previous company the best of the best would leave because company had this blanket policy that they would never do a counter offer. But in overall it was good for the company because they were able to retain most of engineers with raises as little as 1% and no stock refreshers.

I actually prefer that policy. At least they stuck to their guns.

We had an inexperienced junior dev come in with an “amazing offer.” This signaled to management that he must be amazing, so they offered a promotion to team lead to keep him. Half the team quit within a month, then he proceeded to run everything into the ground.

There was a certain amount of shadenfreude watching that play out.

We're in a labor market in which loyalty has and should have disappeared a long time ago. I used to have a nice stable job (7+ years), very happy with my 'arrangement' but then wall street rankings started a process involving layoffs.

I didn't get affected by the layoffs but after about 5 rounds where some of my friends/acquaintances got the boot, I saw the writing on the wall and actively started looking outside. Because it's way more comfortable to be laid off when you have an offer in hand. That's when I realized how underpaid I was. Since then, I made it a professional goal for myself to switch jobs every 2-3 years so that I don't leave money on the table, as the only loyalty I have is to myself and to my family.

Every company, after a while, will start paying you less if you don't climb the corporate ladder to go into management. They will pay you as less as possible considering the risk of you leaving, slowly transition you into working on the old stuff while the new hires will get the green projects. Ok, I'm generalizing but nobody can deny that newcomers are always treated better.

But mentoring transcends companies. I still have great professional relationships with past direct reports working in other places and more often than not they still ask for advice when it comes to their overall careers.

> And everyone has known for 20 years that you have to job-hop to grow your salary in this industry

And this is why companies continuously lobby to keep the current H1-B system in place.

What if you reverse this - loyalty goes very far, it's just that companies don't offer it. If you are fulfilled in your job, why would you want to leave for a grind?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com