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Comment by doublerabbit | Hacker News Reader

Two years and six months.

If you do not get any promotion, perks or increase of benefits during that time, your not going to get any ever.

Waiting with the mindset of "maybe I will this year" will only cause you mental anguish, to the point you'll become disgruntled and end up shooting yourself in the foot.

Why two years six months? It's takes three months of constant effort just to score an interview/new job and three to properly resign on pleasant terms or negotiate an upgrade.

Two years, is an substantial amount sum of time to work for a company and the bare minimum you should work in any company in my honest opinion.

Jumping ship will always bring more money. The truth is that businesses don't care much about you as much as they like you to believe. In that your forgotten in seconds flat and were only hired for your talent.

So why give it to them if they're not going to return the favour?

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Maybe I'm the old man in the room, but I worked for non-tech companies for the first twenty years of my career.

No promotions, no perks and no real change in benefits is the norm for the vast majority of American workers.

What's wrong with getting paid a reasonable amount of money for a career you enjoy and are good at?

You valued your time differently than others value theirs. Every hour you’re paid for is an hour of life you’ll never get back.

Comfortable gig with adequate comp for some, “fuck you pay me” for others. We’re all replaceable, and you never know when you’ll run out of time and be unemployable (through no fault of your own). Maybe people just learned being reasonable got them nowhere. Sometimes it does, but not most of the time.

I assure you estimated attrition rates and compensation controls are built into spreadsheets somewhere. I’ve seen such artifacts at more than one org.

The fact that the ownership is capturing a huge multiple of your effort and you could go somewhere else to capture more of the money you create?

Let's invert it - why should I just make my boss more money forever while I get the same cut?

>Let's invert it - why should I just make my boss more money forever while I get the same cut?

It sounds like you're assuming OP is getting a small cut. What if his salary is generous and there's a profit sharing bonus pool every year?

The idea that in every career one needs to be continuously promoted to new positions doesn't make a whole lot of sense in my opinion.

Nailed it.

In fact, individual contributor salaries were public and constituted ~80% of the company's entire annual budget. Rent, utilities and all management salaries were contained in the remaining 20%.

And how much was... profit? When you say budget that's not directly tied to the revenues of the company, that's just the amount they decide to spend this year.

Ha, it was a non-profit, so... zero. We didn't sell anything so we didn't have any revenue.

Well, then the OP is among one of the very few people that couldn't find a better job for the position.

In my experience I have had 22 jobs in my life, half software, half not - every time I asked for a raise and even got a good one it was never more than 9% in a specific position, in moving positions I have received over 100% multiple times.

There was no such thing as profit sharing, I was seriously underpaid many times. There was 401k matching at best, and anywhere that offered stock basically went bust or used means to ensure they never paid it.

Ultimately I would love to stay somewhere that paid me well and treated me well, but getting both for a steady period is hard!

> If you do not get any promotion, perks or increase of benefits during that time, your not going to get any ever.

SV bubble. Getting a promotion every 2.5 years is very rare in traditional engineering companies.

It's partially a SV bubble, and partially a early-career bubble (and partially an I've-only-seen-the-good-times bubble, probably)

When having these conversations people often forget that it's pretty natural for the time between promotions to increase significantly as your experience and role level increases.

FWIW "promotion" i mean a meaningful change int he scope of your role, not a banding exercise to pay you a bit more. That can also be achieved without promotion; companies have different approaches to the 6ish meaningful role buckets in a technical career.

This means that advice about "how long is too long" isn't really general.

Yep. All this is telling me ie that there are still a bunch of sheltered HN users that are in for a rude shock when they see what it’s like to work long-term in an environment without free money keeping everything afloat. A lot of you have been living in a make-believe world.

Nothing exists in a vacuum. Times have been fairly good for companies since the peak of the millennial generation graduated undergrad. As a result it's like you say, easy to get jobs, lots of fast moving work to come by.

This is concurrent with the worst housing market and biggest asset bubble anyone alive has ever seen. Even if you're pulling 90th percentile incomes, in most metro areas where those jobs are, you aren't gonna be buying a house ever. Housing is starting to take up the majority of everyone's take home pay and the rat race as it stands for the younger demographics here is building net worth, without a hyper leveraged guaranteed-line-go-up real estate asset, fast enough to outrun enough of the population so the next big disaster doesn't smash them to a paste.

Easy money means assets aren't. Regardless of how economics works, you still need food and shelter.

Good, I'm not the only one reading those comments and thinking, "oh, you sweet summer children who didn't graduate into the Dotcom Bust or Great Recession..."

A promotion? Sure. But not even a modest raise in 2.5 years, that's not a good sign.

As you get closer to the top, people keep their positions longer and there are generally less of them. Natural progression.

Two years six months is also a reasonable time as some companies have salary discussions only once per year.First time around, you might have only been at the company for a short time, after your first full year you might not be able to, want to go for a salary raise or you might not get it, but if you don't get it the second time, it's a sign that is hard to ignore

This is, though, with an asterisk that you made a reasonable effort to get your raise.

If you didn't, for example you had too much going on in your personal life, and therefore you couldn't put in the quality hours, it might make sense to just be happy with what they give you as in other places you might not be able to tend to your personal stuff as well as in your current company.

Salary discussions can happen at any time, though. Restricting it to once per year is just delaying tactic. If you resign and they want or need you, all of sudden everything is possible

Vast majority of large, publicly traded companies (at least in the US) only do pay determination (and associated raises) once per year. Promotions can definitely happen whenever but there may be a cycle associated with that as well.

You truly believe that such rules are written in stone? There's always exceptions if a need arise. Budgets of whole countries can be changed mid year but salary of some employee can't? :)

I worked in a large multinational bank with yearly promotion/raise process. When I was quitting, they managed to get a 50% raise in counter-offer.

Until you find a new position and they want to match it. Then you hate the paperwork within the day.

That's what calibration meetings are for. To determine who is worthy of promotion.

Jumping ship stops bringing in more money once you get old, unless you transition to management (which not all of us can or want to do).

And once you are in the management jumping ship is even more difficult.

Two years for a company that isn't horrendous to work for. If it is clearly not working out - a no brainer - then just leave. Might be on day 1!

Funny you mention that. Looking back, there's at least one company that I should've left on day 1. The flags now look bright red. But my thinking back then was that I'm probably wrong with my understanding of the situation - maybe this, maybe that. There's an emotional undertaking when you leave your old role and show up at a new place and there's bound to be some struggle.

That place was a disaster. I mean the half-the-team-ends-up-leaving kinda disaster.

Figuring out when "it's you and not me" takes a lot of introspection and that's usually accompanied by a lot of self doubt. You can't really tell except long after the fact.

I might have been over the top. Unless something illegal is going on, or you are getting harassed, you could say "hey it is day 1, I don't like this, I will set a calendar reminder for 2 weeks to check in again, and assess".

Plan continuation bias is hard to overcome though.

Waiting for "maybe I will this year" will only cause you mental anguish

The problem there is the 'waiting' bit. If you expect other people to see your impact and reward it you won't get it. You need to advocate for yourself. Make sure you're talking directly to stakeholders and leaders in your org. Post about things you've worked on in company channels. Update everyone when you hit goals and milestones. Celebrate your wins.

If nothing else this makes work more fun.

It might be good for the career but this sounds like the opposite of fun to me.

Jumping ship will always bring more money.

Thats not true often. I have known so many people ended up in worse place after jumping.

Why did they make the jump then? The work environment was worth the trade-off?

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