'Peanut butter' pay raises could cost companies their top performers
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I’m several hundred applications in and have hired a recruitment firm to help me find positions. Multiple companies where I referred by friends of mine declined to even phone screen and then those respective friends reported that the position was closed and they were given zero info as to what was happening.
Most jobs shouldn't exist at all. The value captured by "firms" should instead be captured by the state and distributed peanut butter style to everyone.
Everyone who sells themselves short also sells everyone else short too by comparable TC.
I was hired IC5 $280k TC at Meta in 2020 with the help of a salary negotiator/coach and had an EDTX IP lawyer do due-diligence and walkthrough with me the hiring document terms. That would just barely qualify me for 50% D/I for the house I grew up in. It'd take a minimum of $470k to afford the house my grandparents bought in 1968 for $30k. And, unlike my parents and grandparents who pulled up the ladder behind them, I wouldn't get CA Prop. 13 like they did. But what's crazy is I could instead live in a car or on a boat for about 6-8 years and then buy an SV house with liquidated proceeds of investments outright.
> I cared much more that my employer fire the incompetent
This is magical thinking and not your problem. I don't understand why you think you're not worth being paid a livable salary.
As an alternative, move somewhere cheaper rather than futility compete with a surplus of rich people and NIMBYs whom prevent development.
I haven’t said that at all. I think I’m worth a two-digit percentage of gross revenue in the executive market and have a track record of strategic prediction, untapped market identification, proven competence at leadership, and the tech chops to working-prototype my own ideas to faster than I can explain and delegate them and to assess and address top-tier engineers trying to slack off under the hood on a formal implementation of same.
But this isn’t a conversation about how I value myself as an executive. This is a conversation about how I value being paid as a worker. Workers don’t get paid enough to be strategic visionaries. Workers can sleep at night and don’t usually have to submit to court interviews under oath. I like being a worker, I’m an excellent worker, and I stand by my above comments on the topic of peanut butter raises: so long as executives and strategists and workers all receive peanut butter raises without unfair bias towards the formers, they seem perfectly fine to me. When executives get double-digit raises and strategists get paid worker wages, I get offended and angry and find alternate employment or outright change careers.
(Yes, if you’re being paid less than seven or eight figures a year to provide long-term strategic vision and development to your company, you’re probably being cheated out of the wage they’d pay you as strategic consultant to do that same work. Study your written job definition more closely and stop donating unpaid-volunteer work to your employers. If they object, ask them to revise your job description and increase your pay accordingly. This is all bog standard corporate worker stuff that everyone here already knows.)
Managers could include owners or not.
A worker is worth the least the employer thinks they'll stay for. I've heard one too many new, smart-ass line manager say "oh, I got her/him cheap".
To advocate for oneself as a worker, it requires continuous calibration, documentation of results, and well-timed initiative to expand within degrees of freedom that would be desirable to maximize bottom-line results directly or indirectly.
> Workers can sleep at night don’t usually have to submit to court interviews under oath.
Boundaries. Those aren't the problems of a worker. It's best to be an excellent worker if one is going to be a worker, but that's still not enough. It also requires communication: advocacy, persuasion, and showcasing results to get the job, keep the job, and then to periodically justify and negotiate more income above the rate of inflation. Below the rate of inflation is a pay cut.
Be exceptionally useful, helpful, and professional.. just don't help managers find ways to pay you less or work yourself out of a job unless you already have a thriving side-hustle. ;) 996 and crash schedules are for the birds.
This is a public forum and thus nothing is ever bog standard because presumably every week new people join with varied to no experience in the ways of the corporate world. Further, much of the software ethos is about being a worker/owner, which rarely comes true and takes some time to realize is incorrect.
now it's a corporate dystopia
I assure you there are people who live there who can afford to do so because they make enough money. Switching from startup salary to bigco at the same experience level in the same location doubled my comp. A few promotions later and it doubled again. That's when housing started to look affordable.
In my opinion, management should cull -1Xers, while also trying to reward top talent, even if it has it’s downsides.
However: I’m extremely hostile to overall wages as a fraction of revenue being held artificially low to increase the imbalance of payouts in favor of executives and shareholders. I think it’s appropriate to pay executives more because they bear a higher proportion of legal exposure than non-executives; I do not think it’s appropriate how most executives treat workers raises as a “cost center to be minimized” differently from their own pay as a “profit center to be maximized”. Similarly, I think that there’s a solid argument for paying your company’s long-term strategy cross-functional team according to having to bear the long-term responsibility and awareness of risks and so on. You can’t ask a base wage worker to care about your company; that’s a lot to ask, and requires an additional share of payment than just a day job would.
No disagreement about the harmful-when-present workers, though!
Corpos are very sick right now, friends that stayed behind with +8y xp are very burnt out and annoyed having to deal with barely functional employees for a "peanut butter" raise.
I'd rather make -20% less and work with people who don't drive me crazy while having an equity stake in the company. It may not pay off, but I'll tell ya what, my blood pressure is a lot lower!
It doesn't motivate anyone to do anything above and beyond expectations, obviously.
Getting a new job is onerous in tech with how we interview and companies made the bet that they’d do better off not increasing their labor costs across their employee base and dealing with a higher per position recruitment cost for a smaller number of roles.
I worked in aerospace in the early '90s. After the Soviet Union fell you were really happy when your raise was large enough to cover inflation.
Maybe I'm jaded, but I suspect this is the only reason.
Later points in the article about being more equitable don't seem valid, as companies generally did not care about that before.
Cost cutting seems to be the only idea executives have left.
My company not only gives percentage based bonuses but gives a higher percentage to higher salary earners. It pisses me off every year that the people who would be most positively affected by the extra money get less. But worse with the "performance" based raises where they have a fixed number of annual raise percentages means the unlucky sods who have shitty managers get less than inflation every year while I get higher every year.
I also expect best people to be more open to join startups, those that have a chance of overcoming the moats built in 2010s.
I expect the stock market to adjust their stock prices due to the reduction in growth by 2035, all the great people decided to leave between 2026 - 2030.
Corporate America apparently can't even make sandwiches correctly.
> There’s always a tension in organizations of how to how to balance the needs of your high performers while taking care of the entire group,”
I don't need you to consider my "needs." Consider your profits then consider my work. Pay me what it's worth.
This obviously incentivizes doing the bare minimum and not rocking the boat, but sometimes that really is what a company needs. Sometimes a company doesn't need to innovate, they just need to keep the money printer alive.
Anecdotal, but I see people out of a job for years on end, saying they applied for 2000 jobs in the meantime, while others still keep getting recruiter messages on LinkedIn and can get a new position in a matter of weeks.
Granted, people who quit because of a low raise are probably having other problems as well, which maybe is beneficial for companies. But I still feel like this is companies investing in mediocrity.
They just keep their radar on and stay in touch. It's a whole job in itself.
Making things seem effortless is what makes them so attractive to begin with. Confidence and options come with the experience.
many of those are blasts, and the jobs they are hiring for are vaporware.
i wasted a lot of time as a younger worker thinking that headhunter and recruiter chats on linkedin were worth the trouble.
make no mistake, sometimes they are, but for easily 50% of tech workers they're a waste of time
That's how me and several people in my network have gotten jobs in the last few years.
That's also how I relocated to another country 10 years ago. Via recruiters.