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Comment by iteria | Hacker News Reader

Is that true? I am only a dataset of one, but while my wage at a job may not rise quickly, my raise at a job jump rockets up. We can say that employers should reward employees who stay, but in an industry where getting your next job is trivial (in my experience anyway), I just say sucks to be those companies when I take my institutional knowledge with me. Also it's been my experience that remote work has put real pressure on local companies to pay higher than they did before the pandemic.

I work in the Atlanta Metro, so it's not like it's a place you think of when you think tech.

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> my wage at a job may not rise quickly, my raise at a job jump rockets up

There's a well-known plateau in tech wages that affects most tech workers. Look at what your current employer pays people 10 or 20 years older than you for the type of work you do and you will be able to observe the plateau.

> > my wage at a job may not rise quickly, my raise at a job jump rockets up

> There's a well-known plateau in tech wages that affects most tech workers. Look at what your current employer pays people 10 or 20 years older than you for the type of work you do and you will be able to observe the plateau.

I've been doing this for over 10 years. When is the plateau coming? Even lateral moves for me bump my paid up to whatever market is at the moment. Maybe that's just a 5K bump if i left in a hurry, but it's not like I lost money to inflation with a jump. I demoted myself during the pandemic due to family stuff and even taking a lesser title I still got a pay bump.

I'm still of the opinion that enough money exists, but I just haven't ever experienced that my salary has gone down with a job jump I've experienced meager annual raises and skipped bonuses, but I've never not been reset to market rate however many thousands of dollars that is. I think my record for a salary jump was 40K? I stayed at a jump I liked for like 5 years. Even still, I never felt my lifestyle decrease in those 5 years. I was always paid enough and I remember once there was a 12% raise in there to help that we were too far behind market rates.

I sort of guessed you were earlier in your career. The plateau broadly is around $250k in TC, with engineers having to move into management (e.g. change jobs) to earn much more. (Yes, there are some companies where this is not true. But most tech workers do not work at pure tech firms and so this is more aligned with their reality.)

Let's approximate a non-plateau career ladder this way:

- 20s: $150k

- 30s: $250k (+ ~65%)

- 40s: $410k (+ ~65%)

- 50s: $670k (+ $65%)

Does this look roughly like the compensation path for median engineers (people who spend most of their time writing code) at your company? If there are not a lot of people there in their 50s, it is likely that they are not paying median engineers with 25+ years of experience $670k. (This hints at the other plateau, which is that very experienced engineers are often pushed out of the field entirely. Would not want to be a 50+ engineer looking for work.)

To me those numbers look insanely high. Like even the 250k that you're using as a baseline for the plateau, that's around double what is expect for that experience.

I'm about 25 years into my career, and I can definitely say there is a plateau. Yes, my first job switch resulted in almost a whopping 50% increase. Wow! Second job switch was about +25%. Third was +10%. Fast forward a decade, my last two job changes were pretty much even. Maybe 0.1%+ if that. You will get to that point if you don't go into the executive leadership suite.

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