Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

After observing this I don't really mind hiring people to work for 2-3 years and then have them move on to another role, and most people I hire I do so with the expectation that I'll get a good two years of work and not much more.

A very small percentage of people continue to improve over the long term, and those people I am happy to continue increasing their pay, but I don't really go out of my way to retain employees and I don't think it's particularly worth it to do so.

This blog post mentions a kind of impact based compensation structure, and while I can respect the idea behind it, I am skeptical that they've managed to find a deterministic and impartial way of measuring "impact". I don't presume to have such a system so I pay based on what I observe in the market and let the market decide what the value is of software developers. For example, I genuinely don't know if software developers have more of an impact than the product designers, or the legal department even though I pay software developers much much more. What I do know is that it's much easier for me to hire a competent lawyer or UX designer than it is to hire a competent software developer and there are many more competent lawyers and designers out there... so I pay them less, regardless of whatever objective measure of impact may exist.

For some perspective: when I left Intel circa 2010, I was a Senior Staff Engineer fighting to get promoted to Principal Engineer (followed by Senoir Principal, then Fellow, then Senior Fellow, hahaha). FYI I loved Intel for the first 10 years, and hated the last 12.

I made $130k base salary, $70k typical bonus (EB+ECBP), and stock options (most of which were worthless). This was after over two decades there, started in '88.

Recently, a friend (12 years younger than me) was hired by Intel to work in one of the ML groups. He asked if the starting salary was fair: they offered him $400k. I was angry, jealous, and shocked. I have friends that are STILL there, grinding away at sub-200k base salary after nearly 30 years, and they are too scared to leave.

So this idea of coders flitting from job to job just seems so alien to me. I'm obviously from a different generation. I don't even know what I would ask for pay if I ever left consulting. Headscratcher.

From an ethical point of view, maybe. From a rational point of view, maybe not.

Jobs are "sticky" — it's a pain to apply for jobs, arrange interviews, deal with the possibility of getting rejected. And if you do get an offer and accept you will be leaving colleagues that may be friends, risk your position being less stimulating, have to move house and/or deal with a new commute.

There is a very real salary range between "low enough that I'll think about applying for other jobs" and "so low I'll actually start applying for jobs". Employers are aware of this and are paying salaries accordingly. It sucks for everyone in that salary band but — ethics and long-term viability aside — it's still the rational economic choice for employers. Every now and again someone will quit and get their deserved 40% increase, but many will delay leaving for years, or simply put up with it indefinitely, saving employers tons of money.

Of course this may not be the case forever. It seems like recently the cohort of people who find interviewing and changing jobs more tolerable (the so-called "job-hoppers") is increasing in size. If you happen to be a part of this cohort, then congratulations, you're winning the job-market pain-of-change-vs-salary arbitrage game and will enjoy above-average year-on-year salary increases for at least the near future.

1. Organizations will often see bumping up an employee's pay to match another offer as some variant of extortion and it's they view this as disloyal. Never mind that the other offer clearly shows they're now below market. I didn't say it makes sense;

2. There is friction in changing jobs and companies and people will generally have a threshold for making that jump (eg they won't switch for less than a 20% raise). So over the entire pool of employees it's cheaper to let a few go than give everyone a raise when many wouldn't leave;

3. Companies have a philosophy that you do the job you get promoted to first and then you get promoted to it and paid subsequently. Worse, often it takes time for things like equity to catch up. You may get a discretionary grant when you get promoted or you might not. And it can take years of annual refreshes to get to the total comp off a new hire at the same level;

4. Organizations seem to make the standards higher for existing rather than new employees. I think this is in part to avoid level and compensation inflation;

5. Up to a certain point there is an expectation of growth. Some of this is formal (eg up to T5 at Google). Some of it is more informal. They make the determination that even though you're at a terminal level and that's fine, if you've been there for years you're probably not going any higher so you won't be one of their future leaders or stars; and

6. Diversity. Tech companies have explicit goals around having certain minorities essentially over-represented compared to the demographics of, say, CS graduates. I guarantee you such explicit goals create perverse incentives that extend to how they handle retention.

The last company I worked for gave me significant golden handcuffs. Probably 30-40% more than I could get elsewhere. They had a "cost of replacement player" policy, where they count the cost of hiring, sourcing, training over the years, etc, and come up with a number thats almost always way above market rate for people who have been around a bit.

Attrition was lower than industry average...but not by much. The reality is that in big tech, salaries are high enough that people stop caring. People left for a variety of reasons, the most common one being "I want to see how it is elsewhere" (especially from college hires who have been at the company several years). Others leave because they want to work at a startup. Some leave to join their friends. Some because they move to follow a significant other who got a job elsewhere (many prefer offices over WFH, so offering that only helps so much).

In the end, again, retention is higher, but when you crunch the numbers, its very debatable if it's worth it for the company. Worse, sometimes companies end up "competing" over it, so even if you pay a lot, the next one offers more because they know your salary bracket, then you raise yours until one gives. That sounds great for the employee but there are budgets and limits at some point.

And then there's the topic of counter offers. The uncomfortable truth is that there's very significant demographic differences when it comes to folks who use the "I got an offer elsewhere, pay me more and Ill stay". If you give counter offers when that happens (as opposed to across the board bracket increase), you quickly end up with statistically significant discrepancies, and that's not ok.

Sometimes people would leave and get a bigger raise than we'd budgeted for them for that year. But at the same time, we never took long to hire a replacement at the same budget we'd been paying them. This required us to be diligent at doing market adjustments when necessary, but also led me to some other thoughts on compensation: if we think employee A is worth $X, and they get a job offer for $X*1.2, neither company has to be wrong. Maybe there's a bigger need at the moment in the other company. Maybe they're going to be working on something more valuable to that company than they were working on here. Maybe to us they've been a solid but non-exceptional performer, but the other company sees potential for them to do more in the interview. Maybe the other company just has more to spend. Maybe they're the third best-performer on the team, and we chose to allocate more to the top two people, so can't do as much to keep them as they'd like.

We see this for example on a larger scale in OLED tech, where a key OLED engineer in South Korea might be worth $250k to the Korean Economy but worth $2.5M to the Chinese economy, which is why poaching was halted by classifying the job as a national security interest.

The profit/employee ratio at Apple is over a million dollars, so a valuable tech employee there should be making seven figures. That kills MBA’s brains (and the traditional power structure), which is why the cartel worked behind the scenes on wage suppression.

Combine that with the fact that it takes a while for the impact of someone's loss to be truly felt (and the fact that developers who leave are often scape goated), and most managers just can't get their head around the idea that a competent software developer is worth $200K/year + benefits.

Not to mention that turnover costs are mostly hidden costs; rarely will anyone attribute a problem to a single individual leaving, and then connect that fact to "we should do a better job retaining people."

*Yes, there are great places to work where this is not the case. That's just not everywhere, even in SaaS companies.

Basically, why do I get such big raises when I switch companies, but getting a nontrivial raise when at a company is like pulling teeth?

How come every company I work for is willing to give me a huge raise and reward me for my achievements at other companies, and not do the same for achievements at that company?

The discussion that followed was illustrative. But I just came to accept it as a fact of life. I wish I could find a place to invest myself in long term, but that has yet to be found...

It happened to me, in my previous company, I was clearly underpaid, but the job was fine, people were nice, nothing to complain about except for the pay. Considering the situation, I looked somewhere else, found an offer for a similar job that was about market rate, went back to my company with the proposal and told them to match the offer. I was even ready to accept slightly less, but I didn't get anything, zero, no negotiation possible. I asked to see my boss the next day, he didn't even ask me why, I think I was already written off.

And I am not an isolated case. The worst part is that I am sure they lose money doing that, because when they hire people at the same skill and experience level, they hire at or above market rate. It is very likely that they hired someone to replace me for more than what I asked them.

Usually, everything else being equal, the more people move, the better they get paid.

A decent and ambitious dev can definitely gain 30% salary increases after their first few jumps, but once you're at the "senior" level, it's just not happening.

In the first 5-6 years of my career, I jumped about 4 times, each with a large increase: from $55K to $80K to $100K to $120K and finally to $140K about 7 years ago in a relatively high COL city in East Coast US.

As expected, even though my knowledge and skills have really increased over the past 7 years at my current gig, the company gives only the typical 2% inflation raises each year, and there is no equity or bonus system based on seniority.

So now I'm at about $160K, which is still okay for my area, but disappointing considering somebody with similar experience and absolutely no institutional knowledge would be hired for my position at $180K (maybe higher in this market).

But I'm stuck. I can go and play the interview game. And based on what I've seen, at best I'm going to get a salary offer of maybe $180K, and of that $20K increase, I'll end up pocketing maybe $1K / month extra, as all of the extra income will be taxed at my max rate.

Is that worth leaving a company where I've earned respect, have a lot of knowledge, know is tolerable, and where I've got "credibility" and a history with senior executives and management?

It's not for $1K / month, which may even be less if it turns out health insurance has a higher deductible, or I end up having to spend $200 / month more on commuting costs.

I think most seniors hit this same glass ceiling earlier and earlier in their career - by mid to late 30's. And unless they move into management or really strive to jump to the next tier (e.g. FAANG company or finance industry), then there's no real financial incentive to jump, and a lot of risks if your current git is tolerable. And employers know that.

I was a manager for 25 years (and stayed at the company for almost 27).

When my team was finally dissolved, in 2017, the person with the least tenure had a decade. The person with the most had almost 27 years (he and I started on the same day, in 1990).

The pay was...not so good. The corporation had some fairly lousy HR policies.

I'm told that I was the reason that these folks stayed.

Apparently, I was a half-decent manager. I hated the job, but did it well.

These were a different breed of engineer from what seems to be the benchmark, these days. They were very experienced, senior-level C++ engineers. We did image processing pipelines, and various forms of "engine" code (like that BASF ad: "We don't make the software you use. We make the software you use better."). A lot of my management style involved abstracting the corporate HR policies, and working with my team. They all had families. One actually had a serious medical issue, during his tenure. Most had to deal with various emotional and family issues.

I also completely supported them pursuing any training they wanted; whether or not it directly applied to their work with my team.

I had to deal with each person as an individual. I had to understand their drives, and work with them. I treated them all with the utmost respect.

They worked very hard. They stepped up to the plate, when it was crucial, and I let them have slack, when the dust settled.

It seemed to work for me. YMMV.

I'm the lead dev at a small co that does work, mostly custom WordPress, for gov / edu / SMB (mostly NGO or trade groups). I'm the senior technical staff... there's a junior dev and a "project manager who codes but doesn't read log files".

I've been working with this company for 7 years and never gotten a raise. We have "unlimited PTO" which really just means I have no idea how many days off I can take. I mostly work with the biz because it used to be quite flexible and was only a 30-hour-a-week commitment. That's become much less flexible as we lost the ability to stack hours without "approval", I've started to be the only person on-call, I now have a junior who more or less reports to me, etc, etc.

I'm looking for work now, mostly because the cost of realestate where I am is outpacing my ability to save for a down payment.

The thing that got me a bit worked up is that when I asked my boss if they'd ever done the math on what it'd cost to replacement (even leaving out the cost of training) and their response was that they were 100% sure I'd make more money at another company-- they are just paying me what they feel like they can afford.

Then they gave me an immediate 5% raise and 1.5% cash bonus.

None of this makes one bit of sense to me... if I leave, they are going to have to find someone (or several someones) who can operate containers in GCP, write WP/Gutenberg blocks, Figma->PHP WP themes from scratch, and write integrations/ imports/ scrapes for these sites they build.

I've been interviewing and know what that kind of work pays, and how much the folks charge for that... but this boss of mine seems prepared to let me quit rather than up my pay. For full disclosure, I'm making 70K/yr+ health insurance and who the hell knows how many vacation days.

It's fun to do job interviews after all this time, and pretty gratifying that folks are so interested to speak with me, but I'm a bit worried how this person is going to get the stuff done that I've been doing at the price they've been selling the work.

I talked mostly to startups between 10 and 400 people, but the problem I heard from most leaders was "if they are thinking about leaving, fuck em, they are dead to me already". I tried to reason with them, but it was fought as if held like religious belief. I mean if it's your baby they are unhappy with, I guess you can get defensive and maybe you are still in a scrappy mindset, but it was a bit frustrating for me as my idea was not hitting very well :/

My wife was considering leaving her job, but not because she hated the work, or the company, but because she wasn't challenged, given opportunity or paid for her effort, when colleagues got paid more to do 1/20th of the work. If she was managed and compensated properly, she would have been more than happy to be retained, and I imagine there are a lot of others in that scenario (but more who just want to escape their manager of course, which is also very good valuable for the boss to have when trying to retain people).

From the engineer point of view, this is a bad deal as the knowledge they get is precisely not transferrable to another company. So staying is a risk (these skills won't even exist elsewhere) and there is a lost opportunity for the employee. They could be at another job, learning actually transferrable skills, thus improving their standing on the market.

Solution: minimize company-specific knowledge, make it easy to grok and not company-specific. To be a bit blunt: your flavour of pile of poo codebase isn't particularly interesting so why should I learn it if compensation doesn't match the missed opportunity?

The other point is that money is not the only motivator (esp. in our industry). People just like change, either more responsibility, or less responsibility, maybe more autonomy or more direction, maybe different leadership, etc.

Last, signing bonuses are quite large...

I could probably get more by leaving and finding a new job (15-25%) but 11% is more than enough to convince me to stay. Also, there are factors other than money at play, such as not having someone breathing down your neck, having coworkers who are nice, respecting your superiors, and so on.

I have a friend who recently left a position at a startup paying ~200K (which is a lot here, we're not in SF/NY) for a 145K position purely to avoid dsyfunction, stress, and incompetence.

Engineers can leave after months and still get jobs. You're not guilty of anything for leaving after 2 years for a VP position.

It is hard if not impossible to attribute an individual employee's performance to company growth. Many variables can impact company growth - so even if engineering does their job,product many not and vice versa.

Even if everyone does their job exceedingly well, a sub optimal strategy could kill the company. Or the market could shift. How do you account when company stops growing? If the spending will only go up, how will the company justify the increase in budget when there are bad times.

The company would offload the work of finding market rates onto its competitors while potentially gaining insights into competitors' operational logic. And as a machiavellian bonus, this arrangement might depress its own employees' market rates because other companies might be hesitant to extend offers to candidates they suspect are not serious.

I notice developers who switch jobs a lot claim to do so to “grow”. But they might not really stay anywhere long enough to get good mentorship and feedback. Growth takes tough feedback that we often don’t want to hear.

There’s almost no market incentive to “grow”, and much more incentive to job hop, never leaving a honeymoon phase with an employer.

Why would you grow as a developer? It’s much easier to switch jobs for a pay raise.

The market is hot for developers, that there’s very market pressure to grow, TBH. (That is if your priority is purely financial, which often is not the full picture)

When I started my career after the dotcom bus, salaries were quite low. At one point, I was making less at each position after yet another layoff. Then the market improved, and I was making considerably more with each new job.

Nowadays, I still job hop, but primarily because I do not like the role I am in. Companies will over promise and then never deliver. Bad managers. Many many bad managers.

On the other hand he touts his use of a compensation formula, reducing engineering salary to a formula rather than taking into account an individual's background, experience, expertise, demeanor, and individual impact. (To be fair, he does emphasize that the formula will include "performance" in some way, but I've always been leery of boiling down performance to a simple equation. We've all been in roles where people have had material impacts other than lines of code committed, features completed, or KPI scores.)

I suppose I fundamentally agree with the author's premise that tech salaries should rise with the overall market to keep institutional knowledge from walking out the door, but on the other hand I don't think following a simple equation is the best way to get there.

Using money as a mechanism for alignment is not always effective or useful in creative fields. Engineers join a company for a variety of reasons, such as wanting to be part of the mission, coworkers, personal development, brand/location/perks/benefits, and so on. If somebody wants to leave, it's because they have fallen out of alignment. When people are out of alignment they can grow resentful or hard to motivate, and that in turns creates a bad state of affairs for both an employee and the company. There's an opportunity cost here where somebody could join the company who has better alignment.

Another way to look at this is that some level of turnover can be a good thing. In the same way that some universities will not allow former students to become professors in order to inject new thinking, companies benefit from new people coming in and injecting new ways of thinking into their organizations. So encouraging people to stay to maintain organizational memory is probably bad over the long term.

One possibility would be it's because of the price point that the manager has in his head for that individual. I don't remember the actual term from Dan Ariely's book, but it was about becoming attached to the first price you hear. So if you know the current salary of employee X, and they want more, you could be reluctant. But an unknown person that you want to hire will ask for more, and that might be fine.

Another possibility is that the management doesn't always know who they should keep, or simply they have a different perspective on who or what is valuable. So a regular employee might wonder that they let a person go, but their contributions were maybe either unknown or not as valued by the management.

In short, the software engineering interview (and leveling) process is designed to discriminate between employees with different levels of competence signaling and negotiation skill, so each employee can be paid as little as possible.

It is interesting that 99% opinion out there between engineers community is always the same. For you to get a better pay rise / career leap, you have to move company. I'm not sure why this is always the case, I guess it is different for those who joined startup like Netflix, Stripe, etc before they go viral.

Actually at this point because I'm still young, I'm sure I can do career jump many times for the next decade. But yeah, at one point having 1 company that appreciate you with good compensation is kind of like the end goal when I'm pretty old and don't have the energy to keep moving

Back to the point. I imagine somewhere in the next few years I will get another offer at 25% bump after a few years of small 2.5% bumps. Just the way it works. I chuckle, but then I think there must be something I don't know.

There are pros and cons to losing employees, and quite often it’s Pareto optimal to let people move on to bring in new talent. Engineers are generally paid pretty well, so money is rarely what a departure is about. I’ve seen a lot of engineers go, and only once was money the first reason.

The most successful company I've ever worked for had over 300 employees and 0 in HR.

If you are a smaller company or start-up where you cannot give tradable equity then you have to offer something else. But if Amazon are hiring in your city then best to not try to compete.

    in proportion to their impact

Unless you are selling software to a customer software is always a cost center. It is a tool, a means to end, which may enable business down the road but at any moment is just a money sink. That said it is generally lower risk for all parties to allow developers to write shitty software than attempt to connect software releases to revenue change.

In the world of web most developers I have worked with over my nearly 2 decades toil in configurations and composition. There is little or no application creation, and the application creation that does occur does so by a few internally trusted individuals irrespective of their pay or title.

To be very clear shitty software decisions almost always come down to a single question: Is a given decision primarily focused on business goals or developer preferences. For example is Spring MVC, Angular, or whatever a consideration because it will save the company $10 million over the next 2 years or is it because the company is more invested in hiring developers than internally training them?

It's true that long-tenured engineers (if they're good) can do amazing things. Things that other engineers don't have the implicit knowledge or political capital to do. The problem is that once that project is over, it's not guaranteed that the next project will be as impactful.

So ... do you pay them for their impact? And promote them? Knowing you're guaranteed nothing the next quarter?

Or do you put up barriers to promotion? "Sustained performance" or "multiple successful projects?"

I'd love to see an approach to IC comp that's variable. Land a huge project; get a bonus. Everything past Senior Engineer is temporary; if you want to be paid like Senior Staff or Principal, do the work in that year. I suspect orgs could justify being more generous with bonuses because it's not recurring.

It's at odds to a lot of the way engineers look at comp, but it would align money with what individual businesses need in a more interesting way than the current "plan on your RSUs going up by 50% next year" comp plans at FAANG.

Feel free to teach me a lesson, but I feel this could be possible because:

- If people were paid to stay, then the supply of engineers in recruiting pipelines would decrease.

- If top performers were paid to stay, then the mere existence of a "counter-offer" mechanism would open up the door for bidding wars, where each bid is actually positive indicator for the quality of the talent. Today bidding wars largely only exist for somebody with multiple new offers, where neither company actually has a great measure of the talent.

- Retention pay is likely a compounding expense for the employer. Finance departments hates compounding liabilities.

Altogether would it make the labor market more efficient? Probably. Would it make businesses less profitable? Probably.

They do, eventually - there's a term: "golden handcuffs"

You can't just give one guy a raise. Especially in this age of Level.fyi, salary transparency works both ways.

Basically they are cycling through every other strategy other than an across the board pay band raise.

Once you are within a company you will be given catch-up raises but in a fast moving market you will always be able to create a bidding war for your talent and increase your pay beyond what the employer will offer you.

You have 3 options.

1. Climb the ranks. Technical or managerial. This takes time and is rewarded generously at most tech companies.

2. Get lucky with insane stock appreciation. Stay four years. Leave when your income drops in year 5.

3. Leave every couple years for significantly more money, by combination of up-leveling and getting the now higher market rate.

Number 3 is the easiest path.

HR's exists to keep minimizing liabilities - maintaining set of excuses to enforce minimal possible pays, ensuring employees have little or no say over important matters, prioritizing diversity over talent and painting a good face over all the necessary corp BS to maximize profits.

Engineers are necessary evil that "cost lots of money but doesn't bring any revenues". This of course an idiotic point of view but that's how execs are thinking.

And add the fact that technical interviews are still designed to be as painful a process as possible, so much so that people I know have given up guaranteed raises just to not have to go through it again.

The number of people out there who are happy being underpaid because of inertia far, far exceeds the number of people who will actively leave a job for another to get a bigger pay day.

Companies are caught because if they give the subset who are actively dissatisfied a raise, they are giving the "inert employees" a raise as well.

Hence they have a huge disincentive to give anyone a raise.

There’s no economical value of holding him back.

It’s cheaper to hire a replacement within planned budget.

Another point — in well organized business any engineer in any position is a replaceable unit.

Otherwise business is not scalable.

So companies do the right thing.

The right question is — why many engineers are staying for so long, even though its not profitable for them after some time/experience?

Performance is hard to measure. It is highly dependent on the biases of the person measuring. So despite having a "formula", the outcome is not at a all predictable.

I like this approach. It incentivizes and rewards. Even if things changed and this turned into a buyer's market, it should help with employee happiness. Buyer's markets tend to drop employee happiness as employees feel trapped.

Ofc this would be dependent on how critical that specific personnel to the group or company overall.

One thing to note though, when the employer is handed over the 2 week notice, for the employee, the process has been at least months in making. I don't think at that point, it is merely a matter of money, sometimes people do want to shake things up.

One thing we know for sure: most people don't quit a company, they quit a manager. Companies are traditionally bad at identifying good managers. I think poor loyalty is mostly symptomatic of poor management.

Engineering compensation at big tech is too rigid to award high performers adequately. Some folks double the impact of others in the same role / level, and make 20% more, at most.

Leaving and joining a competitor moves you to market rate. You fall behind each year at the job / role in this market.

This isn't just for programmers or engineers - it's any job.

Even McDonalds and fast food joints do it. They have benefits that cost a lot if the employee continues to work there.

Always finding new employees via citizens or H1B Visa workers.

The point is that companies should compensate their top-impacting engineers with equity, not money.

Best to keep my head down, don't want to push elbows with this lot

Companies just do not value their own employees over new ones.

What are you, a communist? :)

Never fails to make me smile watching capitalists advocate for planned economies :)

The challenge is performance is transitory and pay is forever. Specifically, you will have engineers who happen to be on a project at a time when they can have a big impact, and they do and you want to reward that. But then the next few years might be polishing that project's stability and corner cases which will "feel" like very little impact. As a result if you change their pay to reflect their impact when they first deliver, and leave it like that, then the next few years will "feel" like the curve is inverted and your paying and not getting the impact that you would expect from that level of pay.

This is why, invariably, engineer pay tends to evolve into "base pay" + "bonus pay" which can be thought of as the cost of keeping you around and the appreciation for what you have done for us this year. Many people make the "bonus pay" a fraction of your base pay, in that way an increase in your base pay will be reflected in larger bonuses later. Google famously did this and then added a twist which was called a "personal multiplier"(PM). This PM could range from 0 to 3, and the trick was it was kept secret. In that way you could never know whether or not your manager was "playing favorites"[1]. But it gave them a nice talking point about being "open" about how you would be compensated while not letting you convert the how into actual numbers.

The second thing is that everyone is different. And even when they are a lot the same, they are different. Sometimes people will reach a compensation level that meets all of their needs, and lets them save for retirement, and they don't "need" any more than that. Tandem had a great term for that, it was called people who "retired in grade" which was code for someone who was not being motivated by pay any more so they weren't working as hard as it was possible to work them.

The third thing is that sociopaths love a score. They really really do. All you have to do to get the most out of a sociopath is tell them how you are going to score them and let them see how they score relative to other people. (you'll say "pay" in your discussions but the sociopath will hear "score.") These folks will invest all of their time and effort in "winning", and because they are sociopaths they won't necessarily use that tactic of "work harder than those you are competing with." They may in fact spend all of their time developing schemes to sabotage other efforts in order that their effort stands out. Really not a great place to be, really.

The bottom line is that compensation is hard, doing it well requires that you be honest about what you would pay someone to replace the person you are evaluating and verifying that you are paying them at least that much. And when people start going the other way, you need a plan for that too (you can fire them of course, but as the article mentions they have lots of domain specific knowledge that is handy). Generally successful companies move those people to working on projects that are important but not urgent.

[1] To no ones surprise, the managers were playing favorites.

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One thing I personally have said for a long time, is that when you are just starting your career, you should get it in your head to change jobs as much as possible - so through your 20s to mid-30s. The reason is because a job move will almost always increase your pay, much more than any company ever will.

The trajectory of income earnings at your early stages will be the most dramatic because there is a ceiling, for the most part (there will always be outliers), on how much you can earn, no matter what. You'll never see a programmer making $2 million, doing programming, for example. So if you start up at $60,000, just for example, the faster you get to $150K or $200K, if possible in your specialty if you have one, the better, because incremental increases will slow down at that point, no matter what. It will be much more difficult to get a job at $200K, as it will be to get to $75K. (Don't worry about the exact numbers, I'm just using them as an example).

When you're in your in the 32 years old to 35 years old, you can start looking for a long-term job that has your values and interests.

It used to be that companies wanted people at their jobs for a long time because it showed stability, and that they would stay with the new company a long time. I'm sure there are companies like that still out there, but if you change jobs a lot, like every 2 years, hiring companies will more likely look at your history and think you are a "hot commodity" that everyone wants to hire which causes more competition from hiring companies.

There's also the fact that if you go from $50K to &75K to $100K over 6 years, rather than $60K to $76K over 6 years, the hiring company will find it much easier to increase th pay the person making $100K to $130K, rather than pay the $76K person to $130K. Even if both have the same exact skill level. It's just human nature. And it is kind of true. The person making $100K knows their value and goes out and gets it, the other is more complacent, whether you think that or not or have all kinds of reasons why this is not true. Those are your reasons, not the hiring company's reasons.

Finally, the other thing about changing jobs a lot at the beginning of your career and making more money is that when you do get a raise, let's say 10% raise for the two people in this example, the person staying at the same company for 6 years and goes from $50K to $78K will get a raise of $7,800 (and the same with a bonus), while the person going from $50K to $100K will get go get a $10,000 raise (and bonus). And that difference will keep getting larger the more money you make, obviously.

Fuck loyalty to the company - they have zero for you. And your friends will still be your friends as you all disburse over time to new companies, and you will have a nice network over the country. Plus you will make new friends at your new company and expand your network even more.

And, by the way, your absolute best way to get more job offers and higher pay, is by giving talks and publishing. I know one guy that gives technical talks twice a week, anywhere there's two or more people. I talked to him about it, and he said that he gets at 2-5 job offers per day sent to him. When you do public speaking, you become a thought leader, or industry leader. The same goes if you publish something - in a well-known website or a chapter in a book compilation, or whatever. You are again a thought leader.