
When they don’t want new jobs, just more money - jrs235
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/atwork-advice-when-they-dont-want-new-jobs-just-more-money/2016/08/26/67a559f6-54f7-11e6-bbf5-957ad17b4385_story.html
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Throwaway23412
>Not only does this trolling for raise bait waste hiring managers’ time, but
employees who are “won back” with a counter-offer are still more likely to
leave the employer within the year, SHRM noted.

People often think that this phenomenon occurs because employers decide
afterwards to fire the employee who has recently gotten that significant
raise. From what I've seen anecdotally in /r/personalfinance, what really
happens is that employees realize that they've been undervalued for an
extended period of time. If a well-performing employee has been getting paltry
2% raises for months or years and their employer quickly matches an offer of
double their salary, it leaves a bad taste in a lot of employees' mouths.

It makes me wonder if loyalty was ever really valued in past generations or if
loyalty was really just some fanciful meme perpetrated by employers to keep
costs down. I often hear that short periods of time spent at jobs is a
negative signal to hiring managers but I seldom hear anyone actually point to
it as the reason they weren't hired for a job.

~~~
alistairSH
_I often hear that short periods of time spent at jobs is a negative signal to
hiring managers but I seldom hear anyone actually point to it as the reason
they weren 't hired for a job._

Last year, we declined to interview several candidates who had jumped from job
to job (many 6-12 month stints over many years, and not doing independent
consulting/contracting).

We also discovered after several interviews that candidates who were jumping
from one government contract to another regularly were often not being re-
hired when contracts renewed/moved (because they were mediocre employees).

The best candidates we interviewed were typically staying at jobs 3-6 years. I
assume this was long enough to do some real work, possibly over several
projects, but not long enough to stagnate.

These were mid-career and senior developer positions in the DC area.

~~~
sokoloff
I absolutely look negatively on a candidate who has never had a 2-year stint
on their resume and has never gotten a promotion with the same company. It's
not an absolute bar, but it's a negative signal for sure.

I'm not worried about job-hopping because of ambition that can't be met at a
given company, but I am worried about incompetence that takes a while to
ferret out and causes job hopping in that 9-18 month window.

~~~
scarface74
I've been working professionally as a software developer for 20 years and I'm
doing the same thing now I did 20 years ago - programming. Of course not at
the same company. So I've never "gotten a promotion". If I'm lucky, I can go
another 20 years without being promoted. I like development and I would die a
thousand deaths if I had to be a manager. I would probably leave any company
that forced a promotion on me.

~~~
lacksconfidence
It perhaps depends on where you work, but here is one example of levels of
promotion while still being a programmer and not a manager (at google):

Software Engineer 2

Software Engineer 3

Senior Engineer

Staff Engineer

Senior Staff Engineer

Principal Engineer

Distinguished Engineer

Google Fellow

Senior Google Fellow

~~~
NateDad
Lots of places don't have formal categories. Canonical, the place I work now,
just has "Software Engineer". Job titles are dumb. So, I have a different name
beside my picture in the company directory? Great. Does that help me pay my
mortgage? Does it make the people who work with me every day respect me any
more or less? Nope.

------
rayiner
One of the things I like best about my industry is that compensation is
standardized for people in the first 8-10 years of their careers. At large
firms (and government), people get paid based on publicly known scales on a
strictly seniority basis. This is bad for people who are good at self
promotion (whether or not their is a real basis in that self-promotion), but
great for women generally and men who do more than they talk about doing.

I've grown very skeptical about he idea that the "market" will fix
discrimination in pay for women. There are a couple of lawsuits happening
right now against law firms where female partners are alleging that they were
paid a fraction of what men were paid despite bringing in far more business. I
suspect that phenomenon is not unique to law firms--just highly visible there
because contribution to the firm can be so easily quantified.

~~~
koolba
(emphasis mine)

> One of the things I like best about my industry is that compensation is
> standardized for people in the first 8-10 years of their careers. At large
> firms (and government), people get paid based on publicly known scales on a
> strictly seniority basis. This is bad for people who are good at self
> promotion (whether or not their is a real basis in that self-promotion), but
> great for women generally and _men who do more than they talk about doing_.

It sounds like it's great for people who want to do the bare minimum too. If
excellence pays the same as mediocrity, why strive for more?

~~~
twic
Because people aren't motivated by money! Why is this mistaken idea still in
circulation? Surely we've all seen Drive by now:

[https://www.thersa.org/discover/videos/rsa-
animate/2010/04/r...](https://www.thersa.org/discover/videos/rsa-
animate/2010/04/rsa-animate---drive)

~~~
random_rr
Human society revolves around getting, trading, saving, and spending money. I
think that money is a primary motivator for many, many, many people. Including
myself - why else would I show up to a job every day?

I show up because I need money. I perform at a high level in order to ask for
more money. I use that money to do things that I want. Money is a great
motivator - I care about trivial things because I am paid to care about them.
I would never care if I weren't being paid.

~~~
dagw
Obviously money is my primary motivator for going to work, but offering me
more of it won't necessarily make me work more or in itself convince me to go
work for someone else. Two salary negotiations ago I turned down money in
exchange for more vacation days for example. I've turned down jobs offering
more money because they placed greater demands on my time. I've also taken
jobs offering less money since they offered me more intellectual freedom and
autonomy as to how I go about my work.

------
Roritharr
As someone who is responsible for these kinds of decisions, this is actually
the most uncomfortable part of my job, and that's not because I'm not good
with people or have issues talking about money.

It's because there is no single socially acceptable way of handling this, and
people differ wildly over what they expect of the company.

As someone who employs developer's, I'm often in a position where starting the
conversation with one employee because it's on his quarterly schedule can
trigger another employee to question his relative position and start a job
hunt because he just had his evaluation talks and the results he was happy
with then don't look so great now.

Similar things happened with a general fixed sum raise for the whole team,
where once everyone's numbers changed people wanted to be treated differently
compared to their colleagues...

Currently I'm following a "to-each-his-own" philosophy, where we try to reach
a market Level for each employees, and then try to give whatever the employee
actually needs for his prefered Lifestyle, be it remote-work with a package of
paid airplane tickets, or a company loan, or more holiday days... but this is
also not perfect since it's often down to the creativity of the employee and
the Manager/hr, but also because these packages tend to have a "Grass is
greener" side of things as employees get jealous of other employees perks
while forgetting their own benefits...

I've yet to find a frustration free system of compensation negotiation that
leads to the one thing that's most important for my companies, retaining
talent and team spirit.

------
sweetnectar
Honestly I'm working as a full stack developer, mainly node.js/angular here in
Austin at a small/medium sized company. The business isn't really tech, but we
have a ~10 or so dev/design team. Only paid 55k per year and I feel like I
won't ever get to market rate just staying here. I love the company, the
culture, and the people, but I just feel way undervalued. I know I'm going to
have to look elsewhere, because I need the money, but at the same time I wish
I didn't have to. This is my first "real" job out of college.

~~~
67726e
How many years experience do you have? If you're fresh out of college and
making 55K that sounds reasonable unless you're in some insane location like
Silicon Valley.

~~~
davidw
Austin's a pretty hot market, from what I understand. Sounds kind of low to
me.

------
mrbird
As a manager, when an employee comes to you with another offer, you (or the
company) have already failed in some way.

This situation is not a root problem, it's a symptom.

~~~
dusing
I've found that when I match or beat the offer they leave anyways in 6-9
months. So now, I no longer fight to keep them. If they were a great employee
I chalk it up as a loss and try to be smarter and more proactive next time.

~~~
dikdik
But if you had matched the offer before they ever went out job searching,
would they end up being around a lot longer? That's the big question.

~~~
BirdieNZ
Presumably that would be covered in "smarter and more proactive next time."

------
esoteric_nonces
Many of these discussions seem to leave the elephant in the room of what is
'enough'.

If your company can only extract 50K per employee, and a home costs 500K in
the region, then I don't think you have a legitimate business, and I don't
think it should be surprising that people leave for pastures new.

I've spent far too long trying to improve companies' profitability to the
point that they can actually afford to pay my mortgage - it's looking likely
that I'll be lounging on 10 hours / week for the indefinite future.

Burn my youth so I can rent a fancy apartment? No thanks!

------
drawkbox
Just like complaining gets those customers more attention over regular non
complaining customers, so to is bargaining and leverage influential in the job
market game.

Everything is a push and a pull, if you aren't pushing you are being pulled,
and vice versa.

With market values out there, if you aren't putting up other offers or
leverage then the weight of the bargaining isn't on your side. It sucks that
the game is like this, in a perfect world you'd have people that just wanted
to work at one place without needing to play the game and employers that paid
you actual market worth, but in reality that market value has to be checked to
gain leverage.

Other market value checks on skills/employees/entrepreneurs are out there such
as success, college, projects in addition to offers, but it needs to be a
market value check externally to the organization/workplace to be valuable.

Like players in sports free agency, loyalty is gone from both employer and
employee, you might have to move to a new team if you want to get paid
sometimes and you need a few teams vying for you when it comes time to
negotiate.

------
polartx
>I suggested we increase the standard pay for this position. My boss’s
response was, “If [employees] want more money, they need to go and get another
job offer.”

Is this a common workplace practice?

tl;dr-yes.

~~~
CWuestefeld
I recently hired a new developer for my team. She stupidly asked for what I
believe is well below market rate. I want to build a team for the long term,
so I (and the CTO, my boss) had to stand up to HR to get her what we think the
position is really worth.

In my experience, it's HR that stands in the way of employee satisfaction
(whether that's salaries, or flexibility in various benefits, or whatever).
You'd think they're there to be the champions of the worker in the
corporation, but it seems to actually be just the opposite.

~~~
jrs235
Correct. There's a misunderstanding by many. Many believe that HR is there for
the employees, which is not the case. HR exists to serve and protect the
company. Squealing to HR about problems isn't likely to help an employee, it's
more likely to put them on the chopping block.

~~~
sokoloff
In the department "Human Resources", never forget that "Human" is just an
adjective and "Resources" is the noun.

~~~
jonaf
At my company, we call the department "People and Talent," but it's
colloquially known as "PeepOps" here. Company is about 800 people and publicly
traded.

------
dmatthewson
Article's title sure is misleading.

A better title would be "When skilled talent wants to be paid market rate, but
can't get it without leaving".

------
darren2000
It can be good and bad:

good: a company tries hard to pay well, and welcomes being proven wrong by an
offer letter so that they can correct the pay scales for everyone.

bad: by default, management won't review salaries or give pay raises for
anybody. Every single employee must go interview with other companies -- and
waste both their times -- to get an offer letter and then a pay raise. This
rewards disloyalty, as the employees who don't waste time interviewing
elsewhere end up paid the least. It also encourages employees to be
disingenuous (or dishonest): some engineers (myself included) refuse to be
disingenuous: if another company made a much better offer I'd take it, and
would refuse counter offers.

Of course, there's a third possibility: companies that do not welcome being
proven wrong about salary, and don't want to have money conversations or pay
raises at all.

------
chrisbennet
I worked for decades for great employers but I don't recall asking for a raise
except once where I'd prenegotiated it as a condition of signing on [at 6
months => go to market rate].

It just wasn't worth the hassle to me to negotiate when I could just go to
another company that valued me more. There was nothing keeping the employers I
left from proactively giving me a raise.

------
NateDad
The thing I hate is how stingy companies are with salaries. Pay a hard working
engineer who has immense institutional knowledge that'll take years to replace
$15k more per year? No way! Pay a million dollars for a fancy automated video
conference room that will barely ever get used? Sure!

Guess which one of these things contributes more to your company's success?

How much would you pay the perfect candidate? Someone who knows all the tools
you're using, knows the problem space, knows your customers, someone who has
even gotten their hands dirty in the code fixing bugs and implementing
features? Plus, they're a known quantity because you've worked with them
before. What would you pay this perfect candidate? A ton, right? Guess what?
You already have this candidate. It's the person already at your company. Are
they making "perfect candidate" money? If not, why not?

------
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------
shostack
Do people have much experience with services that provide salary data to
companies to help them set salaries at fair market rates?

I feel like such a service might just be a way for a company to say "here is
the data, they say market rate is lower than what you are asking." But I could
be wrong.

~~~
sokoloff
We use such a service to give us "market reference point" in our comp planning
tool. I mostly ignore it, as I have a better sense of the market from actual
hiring and have a philosophy that developer A and developer B are actually
different and have different value to the company, yet will have the same MRP
figure in the tool.

------
JustSomeNobody
Some positions are only worth so much money. However, if you _know_ you're not
paying a fair wage, then this is a bad practice and those employees who leave
would do much better for themselves.

~~~
kmonsen
All companies do this, there is no such thing as a fair wage. (Speaking from
experience at a company know to pay well, there are many paid below average
that are highly rated).

------
sjg007
yc is founder friendly. As such those yc companies should be employee
friendly. Do that and do right by your employees and the sky is the limit.

