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Comment by beaumartinez | Hacker News Reader

You are doing the same job as last year, except with a whole nother year's worth of experience.

Experience is secondary. It's only any good to your employer if it increases the value you provide.

I think not; from what I've seen, just moving to another company unfortunately makes you suddenly worth more.

I've seen that first hand with more than a couple of friends: people who remained in the same company saw a much less significant raise over time (10 years) than people who changed 2 or 3 times of company in the same timespan.

This is unfortunate but it seems to be a fairly common pattern (at least here in France), including getting much higher offers from companies which you left one year ago partly because you could not get raises.

Here in the States, I worked at one company where two overachieving colleagues had been trying to get raises for years. In both cases, they got fed up and found other jobs. The interesting thing is that in both cases, their respective bosses at our company told them to immediately apply for the positions they were vacating at our company. In one case the employee was hired back into the exact same position with a very significant raise less than two weeks after outprocessing. In the second case, the employee literally outprocessed one day, took a single day off, and inprocessed back into the same position the following day, again with a very significant raise.

> just moving to another company unfortunately makes you suddenly worth more.

It's important to not confuse what you're worth generally, what you're worth to a specific employer and what an employer is actually paying you. Don't make the mistake of thinking that you are automatically worth only what you are getting paid.

The goal of negotiation is to end up getting paid what you're worth to your employer. If you move to another employer and get paid more, then either you're worth more to your new employer than you were to your old employer, or your old employer was not paying you what you were worth to him.

Some employers will never pay you what you are worth to them. They take advantage of the fact that most employees are either poor negotiators or not in a position to risk moving. This is more likely to happen after you've been there a while, since that tends to be when even more employees are poor negotiators or not in a position to risk moving. The best thing to do is to move (if you can).

Experience in the exact same role at the exact same company is going to be maximally valuable in that role, at that company. It translates to deep understanding of the problem domain and of the existing systems you are maintaining and building upon. It's completely perverse and backwards that you get a raise for switching companies and don't get a raise for staying put, because most of that understanding becomes irrelevant when you switch companies.

This is less relevant than it seems, except for "leaning" experience (for example, familiarity with a system)

You won't grow by staying in the confort zone. And that's what most people do.

It depends on your level of experience before. If you have 20 years experience, 1 more is probably negligible. If you are an entry level new starter, 1 year is massive.

It is also not as if the job is rote work.

I absolutely agree with you, but I can't think of rote work that should be salaried to begin with? If it is done by rote, wouldn't the person just punch in, work, then punch out?

There is an argument for a raise is when the replacement value is high. The key is to be indispensable by adding value.

very off topic, but i've always wondered whether 'nother' was an acceptable word to use.

no native english speaker here, but i guess "a whole 'nother" would be correct. but let people be lazy when typing online. actually i guess you'd also need to switch the words to be gramatically correct: "another whole year"

native english speaker here, and I grant that english is flexible enough that such things are largely a matter of opinion, but "nother" bugs me. I would write 'other with the apostrophe used to indicate the mixing of "a whole other" and "another" into 'other. I would pronounce it "other" if I was thinking, but possibly "nother" if I was being sloppy.

It works in speech, but makes no sense in writing. 'nother is more confusing and awkward to write that another.

It makes sense if the intended interpretation is the same as the spoken version.

I cringe when I hear people say this. It works in speech to the extent that "irregardless" or "I could care less" are acceptable.

> I cringe when I hear people say this. It works in speech to the extent that "irregardless" or "I could care less" are acceptable.

I'm not sure where you're from, but in Yorkshire you'd end up saying such things yourself before long. What matters is comprehension, and whilst writing to an audience means you need to ensure clarity, the same concerns are less applicable to chatting to a lifelong friend.

I never thought about this until now, but I think this is a case of an interfix. So, it is turning "another" in to "a-whole-nother" much like "abso-f*ing-lutely" or "legend-and-I-hope-you're-not-lactose-intolerant-because-the-second-half-of-that-word-is-DAIRY!"

Technically it's not an interfix (interfices don't have a semantic meaning) but a tmesis.

It seems like a horrible mangling of syntax. I don't see why you wouldn't simply say "...another whole year of experience..."

It most certainly is not. It's up there with "irregardless," "supposably," and "pacifically/the Specific Ocean."

If you're a native English speaker there is absolutely no excuse for that kind of ignorance.

It is not strictly correct, but it is firmly planted in the trenches of programmer linguistic games (qv the jargon file.)

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