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DeathArrow

3 months ago

ME: I got a work proposal from some company

MANAGER: That sounds awful! Don't you like here?

ME: I like the people.

MANAGER: Is there anything that can change your mind?

ME: It actually is.

MANAGER: It's money, isn't it?

ME: Well, yes. Inflation is 10%, I haven't got any raise. MANAGER: How much do you want?

ME: The other company is offering me +25%, so that's the amount.

MANAGER: I will try to speak to the higher ups, but there's already an order from above not to raise wages.

ME: Please do. How much do you think it will take?

MANAGER: speak to me in one week.

Two weeks after.

ME: Hey, did you speak with the higher ups?

MANAGER: Yes, and they said we shouldn't raise your wage.

ME: Ok then, we should talk about my resignation.

MANAGER: But couldn't you still not leave? You don't have a small salary after all.

ME: The prices are crazy, next year there is a prognosed high inflation too, and I have kids to take care of. So, regretfully, I will have to say good bye.

I wasn't the only one who resigned and for three seniors who left, they only found a junior to joined them now. I don't feel sorry for the company, I feel sorry for my former colleagues who have to endure a higher workload, because business people don't care there is a smaller number of people to do the same jobs.

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Something which made me want to stay where I am even more is a recent counterexample to this seemingly common response...

I went to my CTO with a similar conversation and his response was "totally understand, leave it with me" - 6 hours later he had spoken with whoever it was he needed to speak with, and my ~20% raise was formalised. I was not expecting that response and the way it was handled made me even more happy to stay.

The company I work for even improved their benefits in some ways which do not directly affect the salary spend (added unlimited paid leave) to further sweeten the deal for everyone.

At the time I assumed they wouldn't want/be able to match it so I was very regretfully ready to go.

These conversations sometimes go differently to the way you expect!

Unlimited leave is actually a dirty trick. On average people go on less holiday under such a deal, because there's no "use it or lose it" incentive to take time off. Everyone works under the anxiety of wondering how much holiday is acceptable and whether they're taking too much or not enough.

I prefer what my employer offers: 30 days paid holiday plus the ability to sell days back to the company.

It’s only a dirty trick if they don’t mean it. We actively encouraged vacations, and as founders took them ourselves, and it generally worked very well.

It's also only a dirty trick if you fall for it. I've spent my life being accused of having autism, sometimes it's good to strategically not be aware of social norms like that.

I have never had an issue taking every day I was owed, including taking month-long vacations. I have tried to be sensitive to not taking time off at "bad" times but if I was ever generally told I couldn't take my vacation time I would be interviewing.

It's still just a way to keep it off the books. In the states, you have to pay out leave people earned and did not take when they resign.

That can be very helpful when your pay dates don't line up right due to how different companies handle pay.

It’s not “still just a way” to keep it off the books - that’s just a convenient side effect for the company. The overall effect was that more people took more vacation at our company, which was overall a good thing.

If that were the case you should give people a generous amount of leave and make it expire if unused, 30 days on the first of the year?

And what if someone needs a 31st day?

That’s the challenge this aims to solve. There’s nothing wrong with either approach, and “shaming people into not taking vacation” works either way.

Give them the 31st, but you need to set a floor and commit budget.

It's a trick to reduce the average number of PTO days taken by the employees. When companies offer use-it-or-lose-it 20 days of PTO, the average PTO usage per employee is going to be like 19 days. But when they keep the 20 day policy behind the scenes (because HR systems don't often support "unlimited"), but call it unlimited, PTO usage drops dramatically.

Plus, there are other benefits to the employer, like not having to pay out banked PTO to employees who leave.

Unless it comes with a mandatory minimum, unlimited PTO is a negative for me.

There are a lot of assumptions here.

1) Having a set number of PTO days can also often come with pressure to not take them. When I worked at Morgan Stanley, you got vacation, but taking it made you look bad.

2) Plenty of HR systems support unlimited vacation; ADP and Gusto both do, at a minimum. My company used Gusto, and the acquirer used ADP; both had unlimited.

3) Mandatory minimums are a fantastic idea, and it's something we implemented as well. Agreed there.

Whether PTO usage drops dramatically when unlimited is entirely dependent on how the company treats unlimited vacation; if they encourage it, that isn't true. Also, the flexibility of being able to 'not run out of sick days' and take a longer vacation during the holidays, etc., is something that all of our employees greatly appreciated.

Point is: just like anything else, it can be done poorly, but that's not as a result of it being unlimited.

I don't even understand how that's legal. If you took 100% of your time off as leave, what recourse would they have to fire you? Presumably this only happens in regions with laws that have few legal protections for employees?

There's a reason you predominantly see this from companies in the US, with at-will employment.

Because if you took 100% of your time off, you wouldn't meet objectives. You'd have zero productivity.

> added unlimited paid leave

Make sure to use at least 20 days a year

Take a whole week off per quarter and set that expectation

and the Christmas to New Years time doesnt count so double it in Q4

> added unlimited paid leave

The only time this works is when the company's in early-days stages, when you'll be severely underpaid in cash and paid in equity instead, that the VCs have added a tolerance for crash-out-time to their spreadsheets.

I've never worked for a company that put "unlimited paid leave" in their job-ads, let alone the actual contract, so I'm curious how those things are spelled out.

Under at-will employment, the company can fire you for any (legal) reason, but if you bunk-off work all the time, but your contract says "unlimited paid leave", what case do they actually have? Has it been tested in court?

You can be fired for any reason, aside from a few exceptions, but since the "reason" simply never needs to be one of the exceptions, it undermines the point of the exceptions.

In New York, a compliance officer was fired for reporting compliance violations and this former employee challeneged that and lost, and lost on appeal, helping people realize that its a check-the-box job filling a seat.

https://www.jacksonlewis.com/resources-publication/new-york-...

So, as these will always be at state levels and will remain unresolved for all states within your lifetime, you have to make assumptions for how to achieve and maintain standing in society. Best to just assume its the same everywhere. As this extends to nearly anything regarding employment, there is no reason to elevate "using paid time off" as any higher reason you'll get fired than anything else. If you are intimidated and feel there will be a disruption in your ability to exchange time for food and shelter, then there is no assurance that US employment can offer you.

You have to try to make in-office leverage yourself, and then rely on the assumption that you have it.

I like unlimited PTO because it doesn't "accrue". I don't stay at places long enough to accrue PTO.

In the US contracts aren't very common for average employees. I assume that executives and maybe upper management have contracts, but not the peons. Most of the US also has at-will employment so they don't _need_ a reason to fire you.

My guess is they the word "discretionary" tends to come up, and all leave still has to be approved a respectable amount of time in advance.

If its conditional upon approval then it isn’t “unlimited”.

Something like unmetered or untracked is probably a better term. Of course, it's not literally unlimited.

It really does need to come with a top-down culture of taking vacation which a senior former Netflix person told me was the case there. (Though I've also heard it varies by team.) It also isn't great if you want to switch around jobs a lot because you won't get any payout when you leave.

Though you do have issues with people taking vacation even in a more traditional system. In a prior job I took some month long vacations and there were some coworkers who were incredulous that "I could do that."

It's all horse shit. I worked somewhere in the UK where we had "unlimited leave" and someone was fired for taking the piss.

All holiday is subject to approval here, whether it's under your allowance or not.

I agree that 'unlimited leave' is incompatible with at-will employment.

However, this presupposes that most (all) employment is at-will, which obviously isn't true, especially globally.

Sounds low. Make it seven weeks. That's what most of us get in France.

It's why so few companies want to invest in France and things like Activision Blizzard closing all their French offices. And of course, the radically lower salaries there.

This has absolutely nothing to do with companies wanting to invest in France - or not. Blizzard closing its Versailles HQ is also a very bad example, one, because they are in a middle of a massive crisis, and two, because the move was motivated by unnecessary greed and it will most likely cost them an arm and a leg in severance packages.

Yeah I put it just below what people in developed nations get, because the holidays and sick leave put it much closer on par (5-6 weeks)

I don’t consider france a productive environment that has struck a balance for doing business reliably, with a hostile sentiment that permeates down to seemingly everyone and so I don’t really put much stock in their particular labor advances

Why do you think that is? Is the balance of power in France tipped in favour of labour rather than capital? Or is the arrangement in France fairly typical for European countries, and it is countries like the US that are weird exceptions?

I think 4 weeks is bare minimum in Europe, 5 common, 6 or close to 6 pretty often (my case). I guess in some places it goes to 7.

The US tends to be one of the only countries literally obsessed with worker productivity. Many other countries value worker happiness over worker productivity, generally speaking, partially because of a social safety net.

in australia it is standard for all full time permanent roles to have 20 days paid leave a year, in addition to national/state holidays (there are about 10 of these). moreover, if you have accrued a balance of leave when you quit your job, you get paid out for it.

having "unlimited leave" where you can't cash it out if you don't use it seems pretty bogus.

I have 30 days per year (plus another 12 days of public holidays). How does “unlimited paid leave” work? Can I just sign the contract and then never show up but still get paid? Or is it just a euphemism for “we expect you to never take a day off”?

In my experience, it's closer to the latter.

Perhaps helped going to the top of the food chain? Otherwise the 3 managers betwen you and the decising makers start to wonder if they too deserve a 20% pay raise and bat harder for themselves than for you.

Perhaps one of the reasons I received the response which I did is that there is no middle management :)

Imagine getting the chain of emails through 4 levels of middle management we need +25% for this little guy down here - oh and while we are handing out candy, me too.

As a manager myself I've had a couple of experiences where my reports have read others negative experiences on HN and presumed it would be true for them also.

It's very disheartening to not be even given the chance to fight for more money for my team.

Be kind to your manager. If you're seriously interviewing around at least drop hints in your 1:1s so your manager can start the ball rolling about your raise internally.

Why do you need reports to drop hints? Once they are even considering leaving for a greater salary enough that they are interviewing, they are half a step out of there already. You should be proactively fighting for your team on their behalf regardless.

You need to give your manager the ammunition.

A manager going to HR with "cost of living increase please" vs "I have a valued member of my team who is dropping hints theyre unhappy about pay" are very different things.

You're presuming all employees are like yourself. Not everybody is motivated by money. I have team members who are well paid, know it, and turn down large increases elsewhere due to the projects they have excite them, etc.

Because not everyone has the same priorities.

Like, your manager in their mid-30s might value steady employment, a good salary and good benefits, whereas their low-mid 20s report might value fast promotion, salary growth and relocation potential. So if their request to move from London to Seattle got denied, the manager might think it's not a big deal, while for the report it's a complete deal-breaker

This is it exactly. The only "hint" that a manager needs than an IT employee is thinking of leaving is that their salary isn't increasing faster than cost of living. I guarantee they know that they can leave and get a bigger raise.

If that happens multiple years in a row, it's not just possible, it's likely.

All the time 100% of the time? There has to be an upper limit somewhere. Your manager is not a mind reader. You need to tell them when you are not happy with your comp.

Of course, it's your manager's job to make sure you are more comfortable talking to this about them than you are interviewing with strangers, which honestly is not a high bar to clear.

That’s great to hear. However I’ve always had trouble trusting my manager. There’s a lot of information managers cannot legally disclose to employees. So it feels very one sided when I get well-rehearsed-seemingly-ok responses.

What is stopping my manager from doing a 20% raise today, then replacing me in 3-6 months with a lower cost person? How do you build trust or guarantee a 2-5 year timeline attached to that raise?

Bingo, I have little incentive to accept a counter offer. It requires alot of trust and if that trust existed, I wouldn't be leaving.

I thought I had trust with my manager, but when I converted from contract to FTE (required), they rejected my request for a small raise and tried to lowball me. They eventually settled on the same pay rate, so 2 years with no raise. Only to "adjust" my salary up in year 3 because 2 people quit. I'm still looking at an easy 15% increase and less stress by jumping.

At my current job (Series E+ fintech) 3 of my team of 4 are quitting over an 8% pay rise being too low. This would have been unthinkable a few years ago, but the market is going nuts.

I'm currently on a TC of £130k and I've been offered roles with a TC of £470k (this is UK remote)

This is interesting. I'm currently on £150k in the UK working for a startup (non-VC backed, just an owner with very deep pockets) and have an ownership stake vesting in 3yrs. Like you, i'm trying to weigh up the risk of staying (minimal salary raises for 3yrs) and get the equity or bail for an offer at £175k.

UK market is extremely hot right now.

3 years isn't very long and once that equity vests you can presumably leave for a £200k job, and still keep it?

> At my current job (Series E+ fintech) 3 of my team of 4 are quitting over an 8% pay rise being too low.

With RPI at 7%, this is actually fairly understandable, it's essentially no raise in real terms.

Is that higher TC on offer from an American firm? I didn’t realise such numbers were accessible from the UK. Even FAANGs in the UK seem to top out around £200k for mid level.

Yeah, American company but UK Remote working - they've just set up a UK company to employ British people through

> I've been offered roles with a TC of £470k (this is UK remote)

Because no-one else is saying it, I will:

Bitcoin, random cryptos, NFTs, etc, don't count as TC.

I’ve never been offered a crypto token or asset as a form of compensation, but I’d count anything liquid and with reasonable volume as cash equivalent assuming you can sell it.

Ironically I’d count crypto towards TC more than what you actually see more often which is counting ISO or private RSU as TC. Mostly since I think there is much more risk they will never be liquid. And even if they go liquid they are tough to evaluate exact dollar value unlike something being actively traded. For example many private companies got valuations before bear market that would be worth a lot less if actively traded but doubt the recruiters at those companies admit that.

It's none of those things, Staff role in an American fintech company

> American fintech

I hear that they capture your soul in a banker's box now, but in the 1990s it used to be a 3-ring binder, is that still true?

Are you just bitter that someone would earn so much? Why are you being so snide and nasty to this person sharing their compensation? We all benefit from that.

> Are you just bitter that someone would earn so much?

…no?

Look, anyone who admits they’re working for fintech is fair-game for punch-upwards jokes, regardless of their total-comp. I’d be cracking jokes about their soulessness even if they said they were working for a minimum-wage job in the sector.

It’s only slightly less disgusting than admitting you work for the Trump Organisation or Scientology.

Where do you draw the line. Would you maintain such ire for someone that worked at, say, mastercard? Unarguably 'fintech', but almost everyone would agree that efficient global transaction networks provide a lot of utility..

> Where do you draw the line.

Arbitrarily and hypocritically. This is the internet, after all.

> punch-upwards

> minimum-wage job in the sector

I don't think that means what you think it means.

> Look, anyone who admits they’re working for fintech is fair-game

I'd love to take a few cracks at you! Nothing better than a good insult.

> punch-upwards jokes

> It’s only slightly less disgusting than admitting you work for the Trump Organisation or Scientology

Ah, damn, sorry. I understand your situation now. I won't make any jokes as that would be punching down. Morally, I simply can't.

Thanks for saying it:-)

Hey I’m UK based too. Those amounts are way higher then what I’m on, 60k. I’m curious about the type of companies paying such TC, do you have an email to chat more?

You can get above £100k fairly easily by working in finance or even just a profitable PLC in London (eg I know of Sainsburys offering that several years ago albeit for an EM role). Even if you don’t like investment banking or hedge funds, high street banks also pay well and have generous pension, annual leave etc.

Never seen £470k TC though!

Staff SWE at Google UK can get you to 400k+ (depending on stock grants / stock price gains).

This is nuts, Honestly good for you mate, I hope I can find similar offers.

I rarely see numbers like £470k in UK. Can you advise who is offering that type of package? Is it a FAANG?

it's probably a US-based FAANG pegged comp that they haven't done market adjustments for

FAANG in London is around £150-300k (for L4-6), very senior could be £500k+ though I suppose

Large American fintech company, this is for a Staff+ role

Would you mind sharing the companies since you're using a throwaway anyways?

Funny, it's the same for freelancer: ME: I'm working on this project for one year, we were due to discuss about raising my fee BOSS: yeah, but you already have a lot ME: yes, but I'm doing more hours than I should. I like the project but I have another lined up with what I want. BOSS: we're already paying you a lot, so, well, it's normal you do more ME: no, it's not. You're paying me for X, not for X+Y. BOSS: oh so you're only here for the money and want to be a civil servant? ME: Ok, so here's the end of contract BOSS: but...

If you're a freelancer, you should say CUSTOMER, not BOSS. Also, you decide when you raise your prices (yes, it's still a negotiation, and yes, it depends on your contract).

You decide when to raise prices, but the other party can just break the contract, much the same as with normal employment (except it's the other party raising wages and you breaking the contract in the absence of a raise).

I am astonished at how accurately this describes the situation in many other companies, with the difference being that sometimes they give you e.g. 5% raise instead of 25% and promise "future growth" also underlining how important you are to the company. You just forgot to mention that they are probably giving market level salaries to the newcomers. Such a pity.

> promise "future growth" also underlining how important you are to the company

No-one can promise future-growth: if they don't offer an immediate equity grant in lieu of cash then just walk.

Why do you feel like you need to justify your pay requirements?

Does your CEO need to invoke inflation to justify his multi-million pay package?

If other companies are offering you +25%, then that's your current market value. You do not have to justify or apologize for it, no more than your CEO apologizes for the far higher pay package required to hire and retain them.

Depends if you care in any way about the outcome.

If you in general want to stay, just with a higher compensation, it's good idea to help them rationalize your salary. Especially if your manager will have to argue for you with his boss.

If you simply want a raise and don't care where, indeed that will not benefit you.

I think you and NeverFade actually have different definitions of "justify"

If you can point to where you went above and beyond, which improved the company's bottom line by $X, that will never hurt you in salary negotiations. In that sense, being able to justify your raise strengthens your position.

But you don't have to defend yourself against accusations of sinful greed, or justify why you should earn 3x what teachers or nurses earn. You're talking to someone who is paid more than you, not speaking at a college anarchists' debate about fat cat bosses. You don't need any special justification in that sense.

In such case - you're right. Good CTO should know if what employee requests is within market range for his position. If so - not much point in arguing with the market - it will come to bite you sooner or later.

Personally playing the "I have kids to feed" justification just acts to remind me (coldly) that you can not afford to not be collecting a pay packet from me or someone else.

The market for me is $X, you are paying $X*0.5 - that is unsustainable

It may sound cold, but it's so true. With or without kids, never let others think you have no option

Agreed. I prefer:

"The salary and benefits package I'm given is a direct measure of how much I'm valued as an employee. This other company values me 25% higher".

Alternative (observed in my company six months ago).

MANAGER: your salary was just raised by 25%.

SWE: wait, why?

MANAGER: that's the new market salary for you.

SWE: ok...

For a lot of companies, this is economically sound thinking. If someone who is considering leaving because of a low salary is already a good few steps towards the door in terms of decision making, pre-empting any such motivation from occurring can be a lot cheaper than losing employees who are fully up to speed and have a lot of internal know-how. They're not getting an adequate replacement for the same salary after all.

The same happened to me this past week. A 30% "re-benchmarking".

Any insights into why companies are allowing people to walk? I've been at both ends of the carnage which can occur when a senior member exits, replacing the knowledge that went with them can sometimes take years (and in some cases it never happens). Training replacements is expensive and has a measurable impact on a team's output.

Why is offering even a small raise so unpalatable?

That's a question that lingered through my whole career so far (about 18 years).

I've been through so many cycles of: work 1-2 years on the same domain (or product), finally achieve mastery of all its components: infrastructure, dependencies, dependents, product vision, to the point where I can give detailed and relevant assessments on the future planning of whatever I'm working with.

Whenever I get to that point my salary stagnates, I need to change teams or domain, or company, to get a decent bump (10-20%), if not I will be stuck on the forever cycle of either aiming for a promotion or getting 2-5% raises/year.

It looks so stupid from the factory floor side, when I'm finally a master of what I'm working with I get devalued. When we hire a new senior+ engineer they will get a similar or higher salary than I have. That will naturally push me to search for something else.

I simply cannot understand on an organisational level how can not giving raises but paying premiums for new hires is sustainable or even in the best interests of said organisation... I have never got a good answer from CTOs (or other C-level executives).

Having been employed at both very small and very large companies, my experience is that the former cannot compete, while the latter prioritise money over talent.

Two examples to illustrate this. Back in the 2000s, I got an offer from a larger corporation, for 25% more than what I was making at the time. Told my then manager and his counter was a 5% raise, plus a not quite moving “we are all a family here” speech. It wasn’t only me though, at least ten other engineers left in a few months, all were offered between 3% and 7% raises. The team was eventually disbanded and people were reassigned to other projects. After some years, someone told me that they simply didn’t have the budget.

In the late 2010s, while working at a large multinational, I asked for a raise. At the time, I was repeatedly told that the project I was leading was, by far, the most impactful of the whole division, so I thought I would deserve it. Manager went to HR they recommended that I shouldn’t get a raise, since I was doing “well” already, according to their salary charts. Now, my manager could have fought it harder, but the disconnection and power over budget HR and higher ups have, made it so difficult and dragged for so long, I ended up leaving.

When there's a buyer's market for talent, making the raise process difficult and slow is a negotiating tactic on the part of the corporation.

Instead of telling your employees "no" you can tell them "ask again in 6 months" because of the "budget process" or "headcount approval" or "appraisal process" or "salary bands" or "fixed pool for raises" or some other nonsense, as a soft way of refusing their request. Junior managers will be able to deliver that message sincerely, because they genuinely believe it. Maybe the company finds there's a good chance the employees stay around.

Of course, if the job market favours workers this tactic doesn't work any more. But how many companies are agile enough to respond quickly to changing employment market conditions?

I'm not justifying it, but at most companies a budget is set for a team. Most CFOs rule with an iron fist and so any money for raises comes from general budget raises.

As a manager it's your job to wheel and deal within that constraint. Eg turn a vacant role into a less senior position to free up budget for keeping a valued team member.

people here are not talking small raises. Like what job can match a 30-50% raise in compensation? That's absurd. Do you think they can sustain that over time?

They will just pay it to someone newer. Costs are costs and they are going up. I worked with a guy 3 jobs back who is just now making a bit less then what they hired me at. He's good, but won't change jobs. He's been with the company for 20+ years. I've had 3 jobs since then and I'm close to double his salary now.

The extremely sad thing about this is that threatening to resign is the only way to get a decent raise in my experience. Nobody cares if you just phoned it in during the last period, or went above and beyond and implemented great ideas that ended up saving hundreds of man-hours.

My manager is busy arguing with senior management to ensure that he, myself, and my team receive at least a CPI adjustment this year. Preferably something more, since the job market is so competitive. I'm not getting the impression it's going well. It's a pain to change jobs but if they won't keep up with wages then I see no choice.

Personally, I'm not going to endure a higher workload just because my teammates left. The company will just have to find and train replacements or deal with slower delivery and missed deadlines. The worst they can do is fire me and that will just hurt their projects even more.

Keep in mind that it is very likely that your new employer is treating their own employees the same way.

A company offered you a new job with a 25% pay rise and you kept them waiting for two weeks? Sounds fishy.

Is it that surprising? Colleague of mine rejected a 50% pay rise at another company because the commute would be too annoying. He then took it when the next company offered full remote. Another colleague of mine is struggling to pick between all the companies offering him almost double his current salary. That's the market right now.

It's surprising to me that OP made them wait two weeks.

When you're getting showered with options, 2 weeks is low. We tried to hire a guy who told us he'd only give us an answer more than month later.

It makes sense because leaving a job you're actually happy with is a big step to take, especially if said job may choose to match or go beyond the other job's offer.

Just leave. I've seen more than one senior engineer given a raise, then the.company extracted their knowledge and laid them off in the next downturn when it was harder to find any job.

tell them: its just business

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