Hacker News Reader

Comment by SEJeff | Hacker News Reader

Corporate loyalty died when companies stopped paying pensions, or severely reducing pensions. Our parents always worried about pensions and corporate loyalty. In our generation, and especially technology, we make a lot more money, and can generally make even more by switching jobs. Therefor, corporate loyalty, in the current tech industry, is virtually dead.

The one case that it isn't is perhaps companies like google where an employee gets the founders award, which is millions of $$$ of stock options that vest over a relatively large stretch of years. I know a guy who won this award and he is google for life.

View on HN

Corporate loyalty is a two-way street.

In medieval times, the vassal paid homage and swore fealty in a commendation ceremony, and the lord granted him a fief. The vassal had a duty to aid his lord, and the lord had a duty to protect his vassal. The vassal gave loyalty, and got a secure income in return. It was a permanent relationship. To dissolve it, you had to use an axe, rather than a pink slip.

Corporate loyalty died when management culture forgot that the company owes duties to its employees in addition to its shareholders. Defined benefit pensions became defined contribution retirement plans. Then the employer contribution disappeared. Health insurance plans dwindled from all medical expenses paid to you paying 80% of the premium, $30 co-pays at every turn, and deductibles that are met midway through the twelfth month of the plan fiscal year, then reset. Training programs evaporated. Severance packages got smaller, or vanished. Even the amount of notice I get whenever permanent layoffs are to occur has become days, rather than months.

So there are no more loyal vassals. We are all mercenaries now. I'll start sending out resumes if I so much as notice that the building has a new janitor.

  H. R. tells new hires:
  "How great it is to work here!"
  Give me cash, not lies.

If corporate loyalty is dead, it is because corporations have killed it.

Exactly. There's no "there" there.

The death of pensions really did it. My wife and I each stumbled upon positions with a pension, and it seems as if the roller-coaster just stopped. We had no "loyalty" and moved around whenever the mood struck us, but now we look at the risk/reward of a more exciting job vs 25 years of stability and a secure retirement... it's not a hard decision to make.

Just be careful. I used to work at Nortel in Canada which at one point had over 90k employees. When I worked there, I believe they were making $18 billion a year in revenue. Profits appeared to be good.

A few years later it turned out the "good profits" were actually accounting fraud. The company tanked and everyone lost their job. But Nortel had a fairly good pension system, so the people who had worked there for 25 years or more were fine, right?

Well, the company feared that while they were tanking the "best and brightest" executives would leave. Oh my! What to do? They were allowed to siphon the pension money into "executive retention bonuses". Of course this didn't stop the company from ultimately running out of money, but it did get rid of a large part of the pension money.

Investigate your pension scheme and make sure you understand what will happen to your money should the company go out of business. Especially find out where the pension system is ranked as a creditor. No company is too big to fail.

As for me, I only worked there for 5 years and left when it was at its height. After I quit I got a letter from Nortel stating that my minimal benefits were not worth it for them to administer. They were going to keep my pension money and I was welcome to sue if I didn't agree. I guess as it turned out, it didn't make much difference...

It wasn't mentioned if the job was public or private sector. Many government jobs have good pensions.

In Australia, this gets taken out of the equation as we have compulsory superannuation.

Listen to this guy. I'd much rather get a big 401k match and have the money be mine than trust that my pension will be there based on the whims of the company and market.

Look at the airline industry. Plenty of pensions have been restructured during the string of bankruptcies. Pensions are guaranteed by a federal body, but only up to ~$50K/yr I believe. You'll never get less than that, but you $100K/yr pension might get cut in half and the gov't will say "that's the best we can do".

Yes, these days a private pension isn't worth the paper it was written on in many cases.

These things should always have been administered by 3rd parties and required to be fully-funded.

No "executive" can look at so much money "just lying around doing nothing" without wanting to get their grubby little hands on it.

Very sad for a lot of people

Could not agree more, the only downside is that some companies see you as a job hopper, but you can just explain to them that losing 30K-40K/year (aka staying in your job) is not an option

I've worked at companies at a minimum of 2 years or more and have switched between 5 companies. Would that be considered job hopping?

If I was a hiring manager, seems totally reasonable to me.

I have been at 6 companies in 10 years and have not had a problem explaining it. In tech, 1 year per company is reasonable as a minimum.

Same here, I had to explain to a HR manager once, but I told them if they don't get it they are not looking for me. :)

Maybe at Silicon Valley startups but it will raise flags in many places. That may be fine based on your interests however.

Is 30k-40k really correct? That seems a bit high to me.. If you could make even 30k more a year from switching jobs, and you started at the standard 100k, after 10 years you would be making 400k.

I haven't heard of any developers who make 400k. Then again, I suppose you never said this was for developers, so is there another job where this actually applies?

There's only been one documented (via a lawsuit) in the 400K range, although that was a few years ago: http://adtmag.com/articles/2011/05/27/what-highest-paid-prog...

I was following this pattern: test engineer, administrator, junior developer, developer, senior developer, principal developer, architect, principal architect.

My last 2 job changes were in the 20 - 40K increase range.

250K is not unheard of. I guess this caps out somewhere, but if the US immigration keeps H1Bs under this control than we are going to soon experiencing 300K wages.

Ah okay I think when you said job change I just assumed it meant going to another company, not having a new position or title. I do wonder how quickly you can change positions though. I imagine once you get to senior it's very difficult keep going higher. At least this was what I heard at Amazon.

Do you know if it's easier to get promoted when switching jobs? I have a hard time believing that since I think you would have had to accomplish something significant on several projects to get to principal, but if you switch companies it's very hard for them to truly the impact of what you did.

I think you are overestimating companies... For most of my career (12 companies, 3 of them my own) it has been easier to get hired at a higher position in a different place than being promoted internally.

When you are applying for a new, higher, role having enough experience at your current level, being sure enough of yourself and demonstrating the ability to create value within the test period will be more than enough for most companies out there.

When trying to get promoted internally you have to deal mostly with office politics. In a way, the quality of your work is only a small part. And, if you are good enough, it can go against you, I know people that have been skipped for promotions for years because their managers knew that the whole department depended on them.

Of course, there are exceptions and I admire those companies, but they are just that: Exceptions.

Interesting. Well, you would know better than I do since you obviously have way more experience! I appreciate the advice and will keep that in mind!

Staying with one company is hard. Especially getting promoted in Amazon, that is crazy crazy hard. Your best promotions are when you are changing jobs, I think the best time is to change when you can get a more senior position with obviously more responsibilities but also more recognition.

In SF this can be achieved quick, enough if you demonstrate your knowledge during the interview loops. For certain positions they also ask for previous experience but those positions more of the management side I think. If somebody walks in and writes good code we are willing to hire even into senior position, I don't care too much about the history. I have seen a candidate walking in to the interview from a grocery story where he worked as a cashier. Not only he got hired based on the interviews but he became one of the top performers on the team.

I think it is definitely easier to get "promoted" by changing jobs, especially if you are in a meritocratic environment, like some of the startups in SF.

You absolutely can make 400k or more by working as a developer in finance. I work in finance and have made more than that some years at my previous job.

Hey I appreciate the input. I'm actually EXTREMELY interested in finance so I'd love to know more about it.

Do developers in finance require any unique skills? Also is there anything special one would have to do to break into the finance industry?

I guess analytical skills, math probably, but these are pretty general. What unique skills are you thinking about?

I don't have the slightest idea since I don't work there. I was more wondering if there was anything I would need to know before applying specific to the industry or if it's just like any other software engineering job.

Math... and a lot of it. Look up job descriptions for a Quantitative Developer or Quantitative Analyst.

To succeed in financial dev you need to be comfortable working in a heavyweight, slow large-corporate environment. Think lots of meetings, lots of time estimation & metrics, using Java, C# or C++ (shudder), people caring what you wear. If you can deal with this, the rewards are great. If you can't, it's hell.

There are finance startups where the above doesn't apply, but they don't pay like the banks do.

What you describe in the first paragraph aren't roles that pay 400k...

I got a $40k raise when I switched jobs the first time, and I was paid pretty well before then (not quite $100k, but I'm not in a tech hub either).

Then again, that's the only time I've ever done it, so I can't really say at all whether that trend might continue (almost certainly not).

Plenty of developers at Apple, Facebook and Google making 400K per year total comp. They aren't the majority, but there are enough of them to not be rare.

A 10 or 15k pay increase per job hop should be easily achievable by much of the Hackernews demographic/stereotype. Sticking around several years for a single digit percent annual payrise could easily cost you 30k/yr over 2 or 3 years compared to switching jobs yearly or faster.

The speed with while a typical ~100k dev role gets promoted or awarded payrises to become a 200k position is _much_ slower that the dev who cherry-picks better opportunities when that arise, and works out close-enough-to-truthful explanations for any resulting 6 or 12 months roles (usually with ex-colleagues who'll give references backing up your post-role-claim that it was a 6 or 12 month contract role, not a permanent position.)

Then they'll simply complain that you're only "motivated by money" and that you "don't really want to be part of this team". This is, of course, ignoring the fact that everyone is motivated by money, and almost none of their employees would still be working there if they stopped paying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com