At the cost of losing a minority of job-hoppers they retain the cheap majority that:

    - finds job interviews exhausting, or is anxious about being rejected

    - dislikes conflict or negotiation

    - has good relationships with colleagues they don't want to lose

    - has a comfortable commute or WFH arrangement they don't want to change

    - is proud of becoming an expert / go-to-person in some part of the business and doesn't want to lose that source of social capital

    - is proud of product or service they have made a big contribution to and wants to "see it through to the end"

    - believes leaving would place an unfair burden on other team-members or would be disloyal to a manager they consider a friend

    - (US only) cannot risk losing healthcare

It's the same reason why your phone/insurance/whatever provider puts up the prices year-after-year: although some people leave, enough people simply put up with it that they make more money this way. "Do nothing" is an easy choice and companies are banking on enough people making that choice.

In effect this means that while companies that give paltry pay bumps that don't keep up with the market may successfully hold on to lower performing employees, they'll be continually churning through top performers.

I think talent and the capability to market/self-promote oneself (I believe only for the latter capability, the barrier to change jobs is much lower) are mostly uncorrelated.

I think there is an unstated underlying assumption in this comment that "higher performing" implies "drop-in transferable technical/social skills" legible to the target interviewing entity. Maybe for software but for wide swaths of actually engineering (double graduate engineers in this family) I doubt that rather strongly.

The default 2 weeks vacation for the decades experienced new hire is a pretty strong tell.

What most companies are really looking for is undervalued high performers. And there's probably a lot of those still that haven't moved to the bay area.

I think MBA's these days have decided that they'll hold labor costs low by not rewarding high performers, and then hire whoever they can to fit their budget, but then have a yearly 5% layoff to hold their employee's feet to the fire.

And then those same MBA's get a bonus for keeping costs low, meanwhile enjoying their beach houses on the weekends.

Granted it sucks to be an individual contributor, but if you're a manager, you have incentives for cutting costs to the bone.

I'm not sure about that, since very smart people often tend to be, well, "a little bit difficult to handle", in particular by bosses who got to their position by office politics instead of merits (as many do).

If companies were really looking for high performers, they'd create an environment where high performers can really flourish. Because in my observation there exist quite a lot of high performers who are "held down" by their current work environment, this would attract quite some potential high performers, including undervalued ones.

The same effect might even be partially responsible for the OP observation. I.e. the cause and effect might not be "job-hopping gets you paid more" but it might instead be "having a lot of skill gets you paid more and also enables you to job-hop more confidently".

Just because you are a good software engineer doesn't mean you are good at finding a new job.

Firms give paltry pay bumps as default, but will fight with competitive salaries to retain top performers.

Top performers get completive raises by going to their boss with an offer letter from a competitor.

It's "business." Your manager isn't going to make a counteroffer, then wait a month and fire you. I mean, they might if they're a total D.bag, but I've not yet had that experience. And if I had, I'd already proven to myself and my manager that I could get a higher-paying job elsewhere. It'd be a minor annoyance on my side.

I don't want to give away specifics, so take these numbers with a lump of salt; the ratios are correct:

Went from $50k/yr [1]-> $80k/yr [2]-> $120k/yr [3]-> $205k/yr

[1] The company wanted me to stay and raised my pay to match the competing offers.

[2] The company wanted me to stay and raised my pay to match the competing offers.

[3] The company didn't want to pay that much, so I put in my two weeks and moved to a different company.

From my experience, I've found that requesting a raise without a competing offer often leads to a small or no increase in pay. However, when I've approached my manager with a better offer in hand, it has consistently resulted in substantial pay raises.

Also why do I want to stay with the cheap people? They proved to be unable to deliver market rates for my efforts unless I make a big scene about it. I don't like to do business with people like that.

No employers going to give you the maximum that they can afford without negotiation or a reason to. It's not being cheap, it's common business sense.

It's no different than price shopping between mechanics. You can do that while being clear on your intentions and not making any promises you can't keep

I also routinely get asked by managers for promo recommendations for coworkers thinking about leaving. IF they refuse to counter, then you should be asking yourself why you are staying.

You cant pull this maneuver more than once or twice, but it lets them know you are serious and wont just whine and accept token raises in future negotiations.

If you have a market based salary view of the world, and an employee says they're actually worth more than what your merit/market system is paying them (and has proof), you should probably respect that.

The fact they're coming to you first is a risk in and of itself.

We are in total agreement here!

> Coming to me with an offer letter in an attempt to get a pay raise is a thing that I think speaks very poorly of the person.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate your honesty here, But I don't think that's fair, and probably why you're getting push-back in this thread.

Leaving is exactly what JohnFen actually recommended to these employees.

I just choose not to play that game. It's unnecessary. If an employee can't just come to me and be straight about their compensation requirements, that's a problem.

That's exactly what they are doing, but with evidence to boot so you are on the same page.

It is no different than giving customers a notice of price increase or giving contractors an option to bid.

Not at all. I've never intentionally underpaid anyone.

> then insinuate moral failing on their part for proving their worth

Also not at all. Presenting an offer letter from someone is not "proving their worth". My objection is the manipulation they're engaging in rather than just asking for what they think they should be getting.

> and left you poorer for it.

Only one of them left, and I was not left poorer for it at all.

I'm not sure why you seem so hostile here. I never dealt with anyone in bad faith, even a little.

First, personally I’ve never asked my employer to match an offer. I just leave.

I do think the thought process makes some sense though.

If I feel I’m underpaid I’m going to look around to confirm before talking to anyone.

If I get confirmation I’m being underpaid then I’m going to wonder why. Here’s where I have a choice… I either assume it’s because you’re intentionally underpaying because you think you can, or it’s because you don’t understand what you’re doing.

I know companies understand compensation because I’ve worked in management and on compensation planning software, that’s why I don’t talk about it.

More naive people might give you the benefit of the doubt, i.e. think you just don’t know what’s fair. Those people give you a chance to fix it, and only then learn that you’re intentionally underpaying them.

It does speak badly of the person but only in the sense that they’re naive and think you “mean well” in some sense.

Sure, many people when they're young are geographically flexible. But that's less true as you age and are tied down by a house, spouse's job, kid's school, daycare, etc.

If you have to come into work, then all those details depend on your job location. You can't just change job locations. Again, this works for some single young people who rent apartments in NYC or SF. But that will always be a subset of job candidates.

This is why the trend towards remote seems inevitable. There are just too many incentives for too much of the workforce to require it. Long term that

Of course these things have always been true, but since remote work became prevalent I think people have realized how shitty of a situation it is - especially when you're not compensated for it. In fact you are actually compensated LESS since you arent job hopping.

Also when a family has/needs two parents working, Spouse A's next job becomes limited to locations that do not require Spouse B to also quit, and vice-versa.

I have a pet theory that dual-incomes are one cause of movement to urban locations: The family needs to be in a location with enough overlapping opportunities in each person's role/field.

As soon as that dual income want kids and can afford it on a signal income in suburbia, they'll take it most of the time.

Just my .02

I wish, but not in my country. Remote here means 2-3 days/week WFH tops and that's it. Nobody offers more. Meaning you're still tied to the location of your employer as you have to come regularly in the office.

It boggles my mind that employers don't see the advantage of employing people remotely nation-wide as that gives them access to a wider talent pool outside their area making it a win-win. But no, old-school boomer MBA managers want to see buts in seats in the office, otherwise to them it means people are slacking off as they can't possibly imagine motivating people to work if they're not within physical reach.

We also need to post pictures of the employees pretending to have fun at barbecues, teambuilding events and sitting in cramped open space offices on yoga balls wearing headphones with coffee mugs with nerdy memes on them. But it's ok, there's a weekly fruit basked, employee organized sports events and you can bring your dog to work. Totally worth spending 2h per day on commuting.

I just don't get it, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Is it me the one being unreasonable, or "is it the children who are wrong"?

Lots and lots of companies have completely embraced remote work. You are not hearing from them because once they embraced it they found people better than you [1] who'll work for a tenth of the price. In other words, offshore.

Put another way, you're only seeing Office-work positions, because once they grasp that the job can be done remotely, they grasp that you're expensive.

I know, I know, soooo many reasons they should pay more to get you. On the other hand the entire manufacturing industry figured out "remote manufacturing" means cheap labor...

[1] obviously I'm speaking generally because I don't know you. But statistically it's likely to be true.

I know the companies in my country, they don't offshore because offshoring has additional overhead and costs they can't afford(small and medium companies), so they mostly prefer local workers they can tap on shoulder, and preferably German speaking.

And those few companies who do offshore(mostly banks and other large enterprises) already had offices abroad, no need for the pandemic to convince them.

I’ve walked the path. Developers won’t develop anything good for $200k, but they will if you give them attention, care, events, and hope. I literally have to refrain myself from giving higher raises, because I’ve made people rich in the past and they’ve stopped being motivated. The more you pay them, the more they have the thrill to play competition.

(Please watch me if I don’t give them fat equity for the exit event, God, they deserve it).

People don't quit jobs, they quit bosses.

Maybe it was worse before the ACA but it sure isn't a picnic after.

In my experience, when you apply on healthcare.gov, you simply enter your estimated income for the year you're applying - that's it, and you get the subsidy. Then when you file your taxes for that year, you either get more subsidy as a credit, or pay some back depending on whether you came in above or below the estimate you provided on the application.

Most employers aren’t really providing much “healthcare value” when compared to simply going on the exchange directly.

  - In a sea of jobs with on-call, workaholic hierarchical reward culture, and night/weekend work, a company may pay less but offer work-life balance that a 30k pay bump in New Corp may not outweigh the risks.

I just struggled through this list for years. First, internally - then I announced my intent to leave.

People raised some of the points in a caring way. I have so many trust issues I don't know if I was being gaslit or if they truly believed it. I started to wonder who it served when I saw the patterns.

Anyway, don't believe the bastards. If you're willing to work, good people will teach you what you need. Find them.

Don't waste your time places where you aren't happy and valued

Both saw a limit on the time someone could be at the company and still be promoted. The C-Suite people really felt if people were at the company for more than 5 years, they were no longer viable candidates to move up because they had become to "accustomed" to the corporate culture and would develop a sense of apathy with pushing their departments or employees to greater success. They have now opted to hire outside executives or managers to try and keep the ideas and approaches fresh so to speak.

I remember my director at the time wanting very much to move up into an executive position and had been at the company some 15 years. He had been a director for some 7 years and had already been passed over twice before for an executive position. He recruited me for a senior dev role and had stood up an entire cloud computing team to take on specific work the company was having a hard time getting done quickly.

6 months in and he pulls me into his office after our 1:1. He tells me he's putting in his two weeks and loved working with me and wanted me to come with him to his new company once he gets set up there. He told me his bosses boss told him she knew his aspirations of moving into an executive position, but it wasn't going to happen here. She told him in no uncertain terms he had reached his ceiling at this company and should move on if he really wanted to be an executive.

Same thing happened at another company. The VP of the company had been in that role for some 10 years and had been passed over at least three times for the CEO position which he wanted very badly. Many of the managers had told me he has just accepted he wouldn't get any higher than VP, but had no aspirations of leaving the company. This unfortunately created a huge choke point in the company because now managers would be at the company for a certain amount of time, and then know that's as high as they were going and leave.

While I agree with your point, I feel like there is some amount of time threshold you can cross where the corporate apathy can take hold and your value starts to decline. It seems that way the higher up the ladder you go.

this is called "up or out", maybe 10-15 years ago my little sister had this same setup at Mckinsey but she's not there anymore. The idea iirc was if you haven't been promoted in 2-3 years then you're better off leaving and trying somewhere else so you get let go. I haven't heard of that setup in a long time.

I often wonder if my lower pay is because I don't job hop, because of my disability, or if I'm just a piece of shit.

As GP said, it's a rational strategy for them. I personally have lowered my expectations of salary growth over the years, and would be happy with some of those other benefits GP listed in the mean-time.

More passive, more avoidant, low confidence.

Depression undermines basically everything that helps initiate complete a negotiation. This is on top of any impact to actual work product.

Now, this is solely based on my own experience, which of course might not apply to your specific field of work and disability type.

What I mean is, most large companies have a voluntary self-identification form at the end of their job application. And I tend to get a lot more responses when applying for roles where I am invited to disclose my disability.

On a funny note, recruiters always want to confirm that I indeed have a disability, but they can't just reach out and ask "hey dude you sure you didn't click on that button by mistake?".

Instead, they always send this very P.C. email that reads like "Here at [insert company name] we pride ourselves on bein inclusive and bla bla bla. You informed us that you had disability, and we want to make sure that we can accommodate you and make you feel welcome. If you need any special arrangement, please let us know".

To which my response is always "Yes I do have this thing, and no I'm fine thanks".

My disability has fucked up a lot of things in my life, but it's boosted my career.

For me having a shit boss, or a company who is crappy in a million other ways isnt a big deal. I can be flexible, in where and when and how in a way others cant.

IF having a good boss or sane hours matter to you, changing jobs is a risk.

I don't know. I try to maintain empathy, even for the most despicable -- but that doesn't mean their actions need to be tolerated.

> or lack of new skillset

Job-hopping is a powerful way of ensuring that your skillset remains current. That's 80% of why I do it.

    - The company has a limit for how many times you can leave and come back. For example (last I checked), Intel is 2, Apple is 0.

    - For large companies, internal transfers can be diverse enough to make someone happy with a change. Although, pay raises are more limited.

In my vicinity the trend seems completely opposite - HR is trying to get a smoother rehiring experience for employees they lost due to their high turnover.

This might be because the talent pool of people willing and able to do IT jobs in my country is very small, so you run into the same people over and over again in this field.

And, from what I've been told about Apple, the idea is that if you can't find something within Apple (since they literally do everything, even textiles!), then Apple probably just isn't a good fit, especially since it is possible to spin up a team to make something new internally.

Ambitious employees "know" that switching jobs will give them the pay they're looking for, because they see those numbers right on the job postings. What's less obvious is that a current employer might really value an employee's skills, and would be willing to match or exceed the competition - if they just open up the conversation.

IME it's not even (always) any kind of rational decision on behalf of management to "stiff" people. If you have a happy employee making a wage they're satisfied with (+ annual COL), then these conversations about TC may not even come up at all. It's easy to just turn on autopilot here.

If you like your job, but you're not happy with your TC, make sure you're letting management know. It could be that everybody could end up happy. Even a good manager might not be doing this for you until/unless you advocate on your own behalf.

I've had 50% pay raises that were nearly matched by the current employer. My last manager literally said the words, "What if we offered you a big bag of money to stay?". I left.

Now I work at a place where people stay literally until the die, 10, 15, 25 year tenures. My coworkers are mediocre. I'd say it's a mixture of laziness and sometimes maybe just incompetence.

It's a two fold problem. Employees that stay this long do not progress in their careers or learn new skills. I've learned next to nothing in my 5 years here. Employers that don't create churn in their workers create numerous problems. If we didn't hold a monopoly in our field, I'm sure we would have been bought out and had mass layoffs by now.

Oh no, you tell them before you start looking that you feel like your TC is too low based on your contribution. You don't threaten to shop around, you just tell them your skillet has value beyond what they're offering.

It goes like this: either they come back with something to make you happy and everybody is satisfied, or they don't and you start applying.

But people don't always give employers this chance and just start applying first. Then when they go to leave things get weird with counter offers.

If you think your job sucks and you're ready to move on, there's no reason to bother with this approach. But if the only reason you're thinking of moving on is to increase your pay, it never hurts to ask first.

You could subsume all of these points into "moving house is hard", but the details matter. We moved across the country for a job for the money and even with an empty nest it was dauntingly difficult, the hardest thing we have ever done over 4 decades, and we didn't have to worry about money!

To be honest, none of the stuff I've worked on I've gotten comfortable within a year. At Oxide I feel like I understand maybe 30-40% of the stack at the moment after 18 months?

One day my boss "forgot" to bring up a very small raise I had negotiated with the CEO (who signed off on all raises personally), failed to see any urgency in fixing the situation to restore trust and gambled on me being one of those people that don't find another job. He seemed very surprised to be wrong.

My raise from switching jobs was about 50% - and I got to work with people who hadn't given up on improving things half a decade ago.

I really believe if your career goal is to peak a lot higher than just middle-management or senior software engineer, and earn the pay that comes with those higher positions, you need to stay on the same company and even same project for much longer periods of time (I would say 5 year absolute minimums). If I look around at the careers of Distinguished Engineers and senior principal engineers, or VPs of Engineering at FAANGs, etc., these people always have massive chunks of time at the same company, often many years on the same product even. If they have changed companies a few times in their careers, it’s after a string of promotions and delivering big things. It is really hard to build a portfolio of high-level impact with 2 year stints.

It’s a gamble though and I needed to play hardball when negotiating with the owner for the new salary to properly reflect my new position. That only worked because I was more willing to walk away than he was.

I’d honestly recommend doing 2-3 years stints in the early 20s and then progressively longer but only if the company had room for growth and ways of to get into difficult projects where you both learn something and deliver actual quantifiable benefits to the company

I think past a point (roughly ~senior SWE level) it becomes hard to develop deeper expertise in a series of two year stints.

I’ve seen folks go from new grad to staff in under 4 years at FAANG. They just had a favorable relationship with their manager. It’s a ton of luck. You don’t get to entirely choose your manager and company trajectory in most cases.

Almost everyone in SV is overqualified. I’ve rarely met anyone who I felt was incapable of doing the job adequately. Often when I felt that way, it was someone who was “distinguished” in the way you’re mentioning… which speaks more to my point. It’s about your relation with management and your luck in said relation.

If you're nihilistic and believe all employers are rotten, then jumping ship every 2 years might be a decent game strategy, but I tend to believe that good employers do exist and are just somewhat rare. So if you find a unicorn, I would recommend holding onto it.

By contrast, a place that has expensive employees is going to see their time as more valuable, so there's a direct monetary incentive not to waste it and the cash flow exists to do things. Doesn't always work, but it dramatically improves the odds.

probably relevant detail is that I did contractor work for backend/server stuff for those gaming companies. And the two studios in question have each published the biggest games in their respective categories in the world(which basically means they both have infinite money)

I've never worked in game dev, but at least in NYC I was being interviewed by Rockstar Games for a pretty senior-level position a couple years ago, just to find out that it maxed out at considerably less than my previous job. I didn't continue the process and I just assumed that it was standard in the games industry.

We also live really far away from eachother, so that might be a factor as well. I'm based in Stockholm, which is _very_ different from NYC.

As I said, I've never worked game dev, but people who have here told me that they are pretty brutal, expecting you to work a lot of extra unpaid hours. It would not surprise me if Sweden has better labor protections in this regard.

In recent years, I've worked for clients that didn't give me the information I needed to do my job and then were mad when the work was delayed. Every pay cycle I got paid and every night I went home and slept like a baby.

Contrast this with early in my career when I was at times struggling to make rent. My managers at that time weren't bad so much as unmemorable: what I remember is being unable to sleep because I was worried about how I was going to make ends meet.

The things employers do besides pay their employees usually just don't have the impact on workers' lives they sometimes think they do. Outside of egregious outliers like verbal, sexual, or physical abuse, there really isn't much a manager can do that's going to impact their workers as much as stable pay and benefits.

Worst job I ever had paid about 60% of what I usually earn, and I was told of by the manager for pointing out that there were compilation errors in our master branch (at this place, anything pushed to master was automatically deployed into production, with zero testing. The only reason prod didn't burn that day was because the pipeline crashed when it couldn't produce the jar file)

(Well, prod did burn that day, it burned every day at this place, but none of those fires were because of the non-compiling commit in question)

There were a lot of other problems at this place, but that was the day I handed in my resignation.

But I still would've hated every second of it. At 10x I definitely would've tolerated it for longer, but only by steeling myself with the thought that if I work 12 more months, I can basically retire afterwards.

Out of curiosity, how long did it take from hiring day to resignation for this to become apparent?

There is no such thing as a good employer who doesn't pay their workers competitively.

While this may not be your intent, your post sounds a lot like a manager narrative that "sure, our pay and benefits leave bit to be desired, but we have a great culture and we're well managed". That's not a thing. A great culture is one where everyone is paid enough to live comfortably, and when the company does well financially, workers do well financially. The primary measure of managing well is paying your workers well.

The things management does besides paying their workers simply do not have enough impact on workers' lives that they can "manage" well enough to make more difference in an employee's life than a 20% increase in pay, let alone a 50% increase in pay as you describe. Beyond behaving at all in an appropriate manner, i.e. not verbally, sexually, or physically abusing your employees, your actions as a manager simply don't impact workers' lives as much as that much money does.

And in fact, other attributes of management are correlated with pay in my experience. The company you describe, that pays well but is otherwise terribly managed, is not one I have experienced. In most cases, a company that pays well is great to work for in other ways, and a company that pays worse is terrible to work for in other ways. The management mindset that is stingy toward workers doesn't stop at pay.

I instead suggested that there are bad employers who pay above market rates as a way to compensate for problems with employee retention. Sure, they'll run out of money doing that eventually, but you'd be surprised how long a business can cover up their mistakes with such a strategy, especially with the right funding partners behind them.

If you have not had the misfortune of working for such a business, that's great, but I believe there are plenty of comments here on HN to support the notion that such businesses not only exist but are fairly common in any industry touched by Venture Capital or Private Equity, and I have seen many even suggest that their higher financial compensation ends up not being worth it in light of the added psychological and physiological toll.

I got laid off three times last year, and that already looks pretty bad on a resume, but then seeing a bunch of jobs beforehand where I was only there for two years makes a lot of employers really hesitant to move forward, especially in 2024 (ten years after this was written).

At this point I'm happy enough to just sit my ass down and stay at my current place; I didn't realize how much I valued stability over anything else until 2023 came along and became the worst year of my life.

No matter what story your resume tells, social connections will usually be a louder signal.

Some of them, though it's hard to become really good friends with a coworker after only three months of a remote job.

At the jobs that I stayed two years at I definitely made lots of friends

> Did you maintain contact?

For a few of them, the ones that I got close to (generally the people that were as geeky as I am about bizarre CS concepts). That was immensely handy to get job referrals, and it's in no small part why I was able to land my current (very decent!) gig.

In most places I've worked, people generally like me ok (I hope), and usually I will develop one or two pretty close friends as a result if I've been there sufficiently long.

> In those three jobs you were laid off from did any of your coworkers also get laid off?

Yes, though in the more recent laid off jobs I sadly didn't know people well enough to get them to give me referrals or anything.

> No matter what story your resume tells, social connections will usually be a louder signal.

I mostly agree, but only to a certain extent. If you can make it to the interview stage, a good referral and social contacts can be great and really helpful, but the problem with short stints is that you're considerably more likely to fail the initial screening by the internal recruiter.

I get it, I don't really blame them, you can't go into super thorough detail on every resume that's submitted, so they have to look for red flags to immediately filter out stuff.

That's exactly why I was trying to guide you into a back door.

Problem is, my part of the company isn't in Houston, so qualified employees are hard to find. So we need to hold on to people, which is hard when we rarely hand out raises. I do my best to train up my guys, but I know that they're probably going to move on in a couple of years. My goal is to make an enjoyable environment so that they'll come back eventually at a higher pay rate.

My best worker - the one I'm training up to be a lead - is the lowest paid member of the team, and I can't do anything about it. It sucks.

As a worker, I simply don't care if other people are paid well as long as I get paid well. This mindset of "it is not enough for me to succeed, others must fail" is absurd.

Generally, employees do want people who are more productive to be rewarded more, but are rightfully cynical about employers' ability to judge who is producing.

> So there will be 10% salary difference between a guy working 45 hours a week and a guy wo shows up in the office and has all day long coffee breaks.

Almost nobody should be working 45 hours a week. Certainly no one in my field.

It's telling that your primary example of performance is "time spent at desk". This sort of terrible mismeasurement is why employees are cynical about employers' ability to judge who is producing.

> [Unions in Germany] don’t protect one from being fired.

That's probably because they learned from the mistakes of unions in the US. Having to work with incompetent or straight-up drunk coworkers because they can't be fired isn't a great experience.

> Doubling salary over whole career… I don’t know if that’s a good deal.

"Only" doubling salary because you started at a higher wage is a great deal. Union workers are paid more than nonunion at every stage of their career, but how much more disproportionately favors people early in their careers.

My first job I was an entry level developer. If I had stayed there for 25 years earning 3% raises each year... my salary would have finally doubled last year. In real life, I left there after ~2.5 years, and left the next job after 2.5 years, at which point my salary had already doubled.

Of course staying in the same company, I'd likely have moved up some and gotten some promotions with meaningful raises along the way. That company was pretty small but... I know that a lot of colleagues at that time stuck around and are VPs of some sort now, as the company has shown consistent meaningful growth. Early on, though, there was little room for growth in the short term at such a small company.

My largest raise staying at a company was going from $9.05 / hour to $13.05 / hour. That's 44.2%. Ha! But realistically since being salaried, my single largest raise was a couple years ago during the inflation rush, where I got 13%. Often changing jobs would land me 15-20%, and I could generally do that every 3 years without any obvious negative consequences. Assuming a more conservative 12% at 3 years intervals (with 3% in the years between), after 24 years I'd be at around 4x my original salary after 25 years.

Comparing 4x to the 2x from my first example, I've come out double. Factor in possible promotions and maybe it would've been 2.5x vs 4x which is about 50% more. If the promotions came with substantial pay raises, it would start to favor staying put. Personally I haven't seen any promotions like that because I've always been valuable as an individual contributor, and less so as management. But individual results may vary. We're looking at "on average" though.

If you have been at a company for a few years getting promos and stock refreshers is always a struggle due to limited budgets and internal politics. On the other hand if you "boomerang" (quit and come back after a year or so) you will automatically get a higher title and a fresh new hire stock grant.

It goes up 20% each switch, but there still has to be a ceiling where the company can just hire 2-3 young people for the same price.

Consider someone making $60,000 getting a 10% raise vs someone making $200,000 getting a 5% raise.

The first will get $6,000 more per year, the other will get $10,000.

These days you also have to look at total comp as well.

From my experience, I don't think this is the case. In your twenties it's definitely true, but when I look at the highest paid people (in their later career) it is not true that they did this.

I think the reason is that as you progress up a leadership structure, stability becomes increasingly important and candidates who have exhibited short tenures in roles are passed over because it is assumed this behavior will continue. It's highly damaging to have a VP leave an org leave after only 2 years in the role.

I have never quit a job without a major life event forcing me to (spouse getting a job, moving, etc.). I've had great experiences everywhere and I'm probably underpaid for it. I have no regrets. I'd prefer my lifestyle and job satisfaction to money.

Or I could be a sucker and 100% wrong.

Most FAANG total compensation dips in year 5 due to 4-year vesting schedules, and refreshers for existing employees being lower than nee hire grants (assuming stock price remains flat).

But do I today have more RSUs earned cumulatively than a brand new hire at the same level? I would say yes, but only because of promotions and bonus grants -- Based on levels.fyi (grain of salt), my stock compensation is comparable to a new hire one level up.

FAANGS are unusual in that they actually do reward productive employees.

I'm the top performer on my current team. After 3 years of no raises, I threw a bitch fit, and after a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit, I ended up with +6%. I have 0 stock or benefits because I am a contractor, which is a whole other load of shit I could complain about.

I decided to work in higher education after a WILDLY successful short career in sales. I lost over 80% of my compensation annually to make that switch in the first year.

And I did it because the time off benefits, pace, and stability are much better for my mental health and well-being.

If you feel like you are compensated appropriately for what you're doing, don't worry about gaming the system. Just be happy with your life. Have you ever read The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham?

I see what you mean, but I don't think the parent commented about career success, but just specifically pay. I agree with what you're saying in that there are other valuable things besides pay from a job.

Other FAANGs will likely match. That's how comp went bonkers the last four years (and is normalizing now). People were leveraging their unvested stock appreciation in negotiations for new offers.

(Netflix and Meta in particular have said they'll beat any other offers from FAANG).

Now if you're already at Meta and got a huge grant at the low, then yeah you're probably topped out for a while but congrats on being pretty rich :)

My big learning from employer hoping as a JavaScript developer is that it’s risky. There is a universal assumption that the people who do that work fall below an accepted baseline of delivery and maturity compared with other developers as qualified by the amount of tooling and hand holding they require. That said many employers will not invest much in these employees and thus expect them to jump ship.

The other side of that coin is that employees see this too. Those who tend to be more competent and have a really good situation with their employer tend to be the people that stick around knowing they are missing out on pay raises by moving around. For example if I get to spend half my office day watching movies and working on side projects in a stable company with no stress that potential raise from the next employer might not be worth it.

tbh when I'm on the hiring side, this is why I consider a long tenure in the same role at a company a... not really a red flag, but maybe a yellow flag, something to talk about in an interview.

Hate to say it, but lots of long-tenured employees are in this situation. They remain at companies because of interia. Processes have been built around them; they have tribal/domain knowledge which is poorly documented and not readily replaceable; they may be functionally a "C player" but they have additional value they bring via historical context ("Oh, this bit of weird nonsense code? Yeah, I remember we hacked that in right after the acquisition in 2017, we don't need it now...") It's a real concern that someone coming from a situation where they only do ~4 hours of actual work per week might not be able to handle a new job where they have to provide value through other means, i.e. shipped code.

It's not a total disqualification of a candidate for me, obviously, but it'd certainly be something I'd ask about.

1. Ambition is more a product of social mobility than product delivery.

2. Success is more a product of prior established salary than personal goals.

From an economics perspective these seem weird to me for two reasons. The goal of economics is always to redistribute resources to a more desirable pattern.

One of the first things I look for in job interviews from interviewers and hiring managers is perception of bias. This is easily discovered by looking at what they want which can be some mixture of technical competency, charm/vanity, or communications dominance. Interviewers want to control the conversation, so just let them until the conversation concludes or I achieve communications dominance passively. I don't want to play games, but when there is noise in the inter-personal communication I have to be a little bit smarter than I appear. I just want a job doing what the paper says, but people are silly.

The second reason why its weird is that in the past I have been that 10x (or much more) developer because my goals are different. The only point of software is automation, which means if I can automate my own job then I don't have to do it either. I usually keep this to myself, because the goal is time maximization so I can do other things with my day while delivering superior quality work. If I told other people about it my peers would whine and I would be tasked to do things outside of product delivery to compensate for their whining. I am certainly not looking for anybody's adoration. I just want to do less stupid.

> The only point of software is automation, which means if I can automate my own job then I don't have to do it either. I usually keep this to myself

I'm sure most hiring managers would agree, all of this is strongly reinforcing my initial assessment that long-tenured employees in the same company and position are yellow flags that need to be handled with care :)

Economics is a social science that studies and attempts to explain the behavior of markets.

I am coming up on 10 years and I frequently help my newer peers avoid pitfalls we fell into previously. Historical context is useful. That doesn’t mean I live there.

I don't change every two years, though. I usually go about 5. Even then, I don't change jobs for the purpose of getting a pay increase (that's just a nice side-effect), but more typically because I've learned everything that I'm going to learn from a the job and need to move to a different one in order to learn new skills (or sometimes just to work on something fresh).

Too be fair the last 3 startups I worked at failed financially but still.

I would love to go work somewhere for 5-10 years. It's just hard to find these days.

Everyone crooned on and on about all the "boomerang" employees and long tenures during interviews. I realized after joining that the employees were coming back after being laid off!! WTF!?

They were absolutely over the moon to get me and have been blown away by my work and are remodeling a new office for me and queuing me up for bigger projects but I can't leave my eggs in this basket. This will be my shortest tenure ever at under a year.

An old CIO friend is creating a new Principal Architect role for me now at another company. I will dive into that startup for 3-5 years until it is acquired.

Back in 2014 when this article was posted, it was probably more true. Lots of money frothing around and salaries were growing and growing faster than employers were willing to keep up with for existing employees (although even then, I had a job that gave me a substantial raise just to keep up with the market.)

The "job hop for a salary bump" conversations always seem to assume you are early in your career, where this works. My first job hop was for about +50%. My second one was for around +20%. 20 years into my career, job hopping does not seem to increase my comp at all. The plateau is real.

After a certain point, you have to change roles and/or move into management.

Always be reevaluating, though, the situation could change in a couple years. But until then I sleep well at night knowing I'm paid near top of market at a decent company. Not worth chasing those last couple percentiles, personally.

Changing jobs sucks anyway.

I feel like the ceiling for me is awful, since in Florida the cost of everything is going up, but companies aren't willing to pay competitive salary, despite boasting about it, they all seem to pay standard / average pay.

You probably won't be CBW2 for your entire career so you'd get a new celling.

The employer gets labor at a lower price, and the employee gets lower volatility.

If you want the best price, you have to do the work to keep buying and you have to do the work to keep selling, only way any market can work.

The former is not controllable from the perspective of a labor seller, but the latter is. Whether or not the tradeoff is worth it is dependent on the seller and always in flux.

I would say the tradeoff is usually not worth it.

why isn't this a better explanation: High performing, "desirable" or "skilled" employees get enticed (i.e. rewarded) for jumping to a new employer. Average schlubs do not.

explanation from TFA:

Why are people who jump ship rewarded, when loyal employees are punished for their dedication? The answer is simple. Recessions allow businesses to freeze their payroll and decrease salaries of the newly hired based on “market trends.” These reactions to the recession are understandable, but the problem is that these reactions were meant to be “temporary.”

My theory:

- low performers can’t

- mid performers can and do

- high performers can but aren’t comp motivated beyond a certain point

So that at least seems to imply that they adjust for that. Specially the line where you can get a 1% raise or a 10% new offer.

Some people enjoy making big changes and shaking themselves up, and that's fine too, but don't confuse that with some sort of inherent superiority.

As a hiring manager, three 2-year stints would be perfectly reasonable for an L5 candidate, but five 2-year stints I would be very concerned about hiring an L6 expected to drive long-term architectural directions.

Ultimately I think the "learning or earning" advice is better. When you are young you should chase your interests and prioritize personal growth and finding out what you are good at. The primary heuristic should be whether you are learning quickly, and are you surrounded by people and structure that help you with that. Later on in your career when you have more personal responsibilities you should prioritize earning, and hopefully you have built a foundation of strong and deep expertise that qualifies you for more senior positions. Of course if you can get both, that's great, but you also need to be careful because a lot of things you learn at the best paying companies have limited applicability outside that bubble.

For example, we still have the equivalent of early Medieval English right of "socn" ("soke") — the right to withdraw our loyalty from one lord and grant it to another. We're not "tied" to our corporate overlords the same way that serfs were through strict infeudation.

A recent court case threw out most of the nonsense non-compete clauses also helped beat away or forestall the rising threat of "you can't leave with what you know... I'll make you unemployable." But that was a threat to modern day "sokesmen."

One can even establish themselves as their own freeholder by incorporating, say as an LLC, or remaining a "freelancer" like the errant knights of old.

In other terms of what I consider "corporate feudalism:"

• Do you wear any "corporate heraldry" (logo'd gear like t-shirts, hoodies, polos, backpacks, laptop stickers, etc.)

• Do you participate in any "corporate jousting?" (benchmarks, competitive bakeoffs, panel talks or meetups)

• Do you have or retain any intellectual property you've created during your employment, or was it all work-for-hire and assigned away in perpetuity?

And don't get me wrong. I am somewhat of a big fan of the medieval period and feudalism. In a way there were more freedoms under feudalism than we realize.

Certainly we had far more free time.

I just find it an interesting mental exercise to spot the commonalities and the differences of then and now.

What about having an SP500 index fund (or other broad market fund) compose the majority of your life savings? Or your city/county/state government’s pension fund savings?

There's also different concepts of weath. A medieval villein or sokesman might own 120 acres of land. A knight might own a whole 1-5 square miles of land (600 - 3,200 acres). Even a cottar might have 30-40 acres of land.

So what percentage of us are "land poor" these days in comparison? Almost all of us. Most land lots are about 0.2 acres in size in the U.S. "Not even big enough for a garden croft" a medieval bordar would have scoffed.

Meanwhile, there were urban burghers who did invest in various ventures increasingly over time. Yet "coin" was, admittedly, a tiny percentage of medieval wealth.

Sadly, today only about 3/4 of Americans even have a retirement account, and the median value is only $87,000 as of 2022. None of us are living like barons.

There is no guarantee that your current stable job will not suddenly come to an end for many reasons. Outside of a few rare companies, there is absolutely no reason to stay, if they are not paying you market rate.

Nevertheless, after job-hopping a bit, in my twenties, I stayed at my last job for almost 27 years.

I have found that money isn't everything. I know that's basically heresy, around here, but it's been my truth.

The only time this would maybe not apply is director/VP level roles, though if you're switching at that level you presumably have a pre-existing relationship with someone near whatever role you're trying to move into.

Fuck HR. 12 months is nothing for actual deep learning. I've seen job hoppers come through my company and it's obvious most of them don't get very deep in the work and just move on instead of becoming a real expert in the system. It's one thing not to hold it against them, but it's something else to say count it as an advantage at such short intervals.