I found out my company is willing to pay people with the same experience I have more money. Just not me.
Your existing one will bump your salary by like 5-10%. A new one won't have that baseline, making it easy to go above that. My salary increased by like 45% in the last year. I've seen posts of people claiming they've doubled their salary with this one simple trick.
At least here in Montreal software engineers are almost as high in demand as doctors.
As attrition rates are surging throughout society. People are quitting faster. More and more people are on temp contracts. I find it kinda nuts that the sign that it is time to leave a company for a raise is hitting a productive stride. It is common knowledge that the best way to get a raise is to switch employers.
Yet absolutely nothing is being done with this information by employers. It isn't secret. So they seemingly have determined that preventing attrition isn't worth it.
Upper management doesn't have the visibility or the introspection to know one single individual contributor is truly worth 30% more to their business.
I coach my reports to sell themselves. Tell the directors how they individually are adding value to the company. They are completely allowed to speak with higher ups, and usually they're more than willing to take 15 minutes and listen to ICs on virtually any topic they wish to speak about. Then, the directors will remember you when it comes time to making pay decisions. Most engineers are modest, but nobody gets penalized for communicating and highlighting the great work they do.
Some companies are smaller than yours, or have better visibility, or give managers more budgetary latitude. Speaking as if this is The One Way It Always Works is unhelpful.
I know it feels like nitpicking, but I never felt that any of the developers were actually hard to replace: it takes some money, time spent on recruiting, interviewing, then training, but in the end, the new people catch up in a matter of months and the resources needed to invest in a replacement can be relatively easily estimated.
I usually don't see that with very good business and product people. When they left the company, the team became demotivated, the lack of company and product vision caused frustration, the company couldn't find a replacement at all, caused turnover. In my experience, good business people leaving is the early sign of the company going south.
The causation can go in both directions, though: 1. product and business people are the first to see if a product/business model isn't working out, so they leave. 2 they leave, then they can't be replaced, replacement is only half as good, people quit because of lack of vision, things go even worse, more people quit, company has to shut down.
In your example if the product manager sees the plan is not working out so they leave. Is it their business model? If so they are running away from a mess they created. If the model comes from above than senior leadership is lacking.
Not being able to replace would point to a problem with either HR or senior leadership .
[Citation needed]
I'm sure there are senior leaders who are amazing, and would be extremely difficult to replace. My experience of "senior leadership", however, has been, almost universally, that they're in that position because they were born into money, their organizational skills are crap, and they think "vision" means "sticking with the status quo (with maybe one oddball quirk) and "leadership" means "yelling at people until they do what you want."
That kind of "senior leadership" isn't hard to replace at all.
In fact there might be a slightly counterintuitive relation here: assuming good intent on all sides, transition from a leader with good organizational skills would be less disruptive.
What's needed, IMO, is a cultural shift away from the idea that we need a singular, extremely powerful CEO/president/chairman, and toward more group-oriented decision-making processes and devolution of both responsibility and power.
We abandoned absolute monarchies for a lot of very good reasons, and one of them is that having one guy who can just walk into any room in the kingdom/company and exercise the power of (in this case, financial, but that often becomes very literal) life and death over anyone else in there is a bad thing.
You can save a lot of budget by not giving competitive raises.
If company X isn't looking for external experience (because they figure they already have that experience in their senior management, other team members, etc), then they'll be happy to let the person leave for company Y and hire some new entry level / fresh grad / minimally qualified person for the position and start over.
Taxes are high in Canada but are the highest in the QC. By a lot. You get good stuff, like free or subsidized daycare, but you lose a lot of $$$ out of that paycheck.
COL in Montreal is low, but it's a cold place. Like, why go to Canada when I could go to Austin or the NC Research Triangle? Low COL means lower salaries. "Easier to be a human but harder to be a consumer" is what I've heard about COL and taxes in QC.
The CAD is weaker than the USD by around 20-30%, which makes it less cool for US-based devs. You can work around that by upping that CAD number, but remember the taxes are much higher and you'll be paying comparatively more, %-wise, at 210k CAD than you would at 150k USD.
Most jobs expect some degree of French, ranging from "learning but can get by" to "full-fluency in English and French". The city as a whole is kind of like that.
So yeah, of course there are jobs. They pay mediocre rates, need a second language, and mean you'll get taxed a lot. And if you're not in Canada, moving north presents logistical issues on top of months of snow.
For Montreal, the French thing is largely true, meaning you would generally have to at least pretend to be learning French. I find that the requirement gets ignored regularly however when yours is the only decent CV in the pile.
Or perhaps they’ll just find a way around it by using other forms of compensation that skirt transparency laws in spirit.
There is risk to switching companies, but a signing bonus helps compensate for that risk.
You need software engineers to make software, we are the necessary commodity of the future economy, nee grads arent getting in person experience, bootcamps arent doing as great at teaching during the pandemic, the visa program was also reduced. Are we sreing a supply side squeeze and a demand side rush on devs?
Some companies will simply pay people whatever it takes to convince them to join the company, which results in compensation that’s all over the place.
Some companies have surprisingly uniform compensation, some to the extreme that all developers are paid the same compensation in lock-step. This is usually an attempt to make things fair, but it creates a lot of animosity when people feel they deserve more than their coworkers.
And some times, it really does make sense to hire less experienced people into high-paying roles of their career trajectory looks promising. Hiring isn’t just about selecting for the height of experience on a bar chart. It’s also about looking at the slope. Less experienced employees who are growing very fast are best hired at high salaries, otherwise they’re just going to leave in a year when they grow even more. Conversely, if they fail to grow into the role they might need to be let go to make room for someone more appropriate for the position.
One of the tricky things about teams sharing compensation is that there is almost never a specific ordering of salaries that everyone on the team would agree is appropriate. It’s one of those situations where 80% of people on a team might see themselves as being in the top 20%.
As always, it helps to collect competing offers elsewhere. It helps even more to be prepared to take those offers if they pay more and higher salary is your highest priority.
How many places fire people because they thought they might be a star performer but turn out to be only average? I thought Netflix was newsworthy for being "ruthless" in that way, that it was rare and that few companies have followed their example.
Couple rotations through the ranking process and if you're not jumping you're on the way out. Smart devs will read the room and find a new gig before then.
Netflix also offers amazing, most-cash, compensation, and demands results up front. Throw 300k cash at me and I'll play those games for a while, too.
If you have virtually unlimited budget then keeping an over-leveled person in an overpaid position can slide if they’re still adding some value. However, it’s still better to demote them (difficult) or remove them to prevent animosity from brewing in their peers.
If you only have the budget to hire a few people, then having an overpaid and underperforming person taking up a valuable slot in your limited budget is a pressing issue. You need to get them off the team to free that budget up for someone who can earn it appropriately.
Plenty of engineers effectively have 1 year of experience 12 times.
Do you mean they've been doing the same things year after year? I.e. without growing their skills in breadth or depth?
Experience alone doesn’t mean much.