Most people who think they deserve a significant pay raise probably don't (or maybe not enough relative to others competing for limited promotional budget).
I've seen enough people extremely qualified being denied promotions because they were "too good" at their current role. Meanwhile I've also seen as of late "promotions" that are just a title change while only adding to your workload with no extra pay. There's no winning with many companies.
If it's not your dream job or it truly is the best comp in your area, you need to be very careful with promotion tracks and have a plan to keep poking the people involved. But all that already means it may not be a good fit of a company who cares about growth anyway, so...
Many people also confuse how hard they work for how much business value they create. Staying late, working long hours is only beneficial if it creates value. Is that work something that anyone else could do? Does it reduce costs or increase revenue? Reducing costs has a limited upside. For a lot of work, the difference in productivity between two workers might be 10%, 50%, even 100% you can still be a commodity. From my experience, doing something that only you can do that results in enduring, increased revenue is the best way to make real money. Learning the business, becoming indispensable, and help to grow the business takes time and experience, but will be rewarded. And if it isn’t, move on!
> Many people also confuse how hard they work for how much business value they create. Staying late, working long hours is only beneficial if it creates value.
Ok.
> Is that work something that anyone else could do?
Maybe not anyone else, but someone else, sure.
But here is the real point. In order to get promoted you have to be selfish. You have to shirk doing the work that isn't perceived as creating the highest value, and leave it to some other sucker. If no-one did that work, what then? It's not like plumbing fields around SBE messages is difficult, or writing some additional business logic is difficult. And the same goes for running some performance tuning, and shaving a few micros here and there. Any developer on our teams can do either task. But the person who can prove that they shaved a few micros off tick to trade latency and made us a bunch of money is going to get noticed a lot more than the poor sucker who plumbed in a few fields to allow risk team to monitor things more carefully.
Almost all work that moves the company forward is valuable. Some just has greater perceivable value, and results in the higher reward.
We've all been through this, we know how it works.
I don’t think your point disagrees with my point. The better aligned your perception is with management on where/how value is getting delivered, the better you will judge how to invest your time. You might be right and they might be wrong. But if you know the business better than your bosses, then you might be working for the wrong people.
And I think you're missing my point. If everyone is perfectly aligned and recognised what will be rewarded, no-one wants to do any other task.
I work in finance. We have a lot of regulatory requirements. Assume some boring regulatory requirement comes in that all of your agorithmic trading on electronic venues needs to stamp an algorithm id on each message to the venue (this was a real thing). Someone has to do a huge amount of boring work aligning everything to do this, and in the end, there is little visible value creation from this work, and you're not going to be rewarded for doing it (people weren't). But without it, your business will cease to function entirely.
The problem is the stakeholders controlling reward are far from perfect. They will judge this project against a project that tweaked the algorithms for better performance (as I already alluded to) and reward the latter, because it made dollar sign go up.
So basically you end up in a shark tank where developers are acting selfishly, desperately trying to get their name attached to the correct projects, and the loudest voices win.
The value of a quiet, but excellent developer, who writes correct code, doesn't introduce stupid complexity, makes the right decisions for the future, even if it takes longer, is very high. But that value isn't easily visible and I'd argue this is rife across the every industry that employs developers, not just big finance.
I think your assumption that everyone gets to select the tasks they want to work on is probably inaccurate for most organizations. Any reasonable manager will ensure that important but unglamorous work is getting done. They might assign this work fairly or not. It probably depends on the org.
I was speaking to how a developer should try to maximize their career potential and income.
You are assigning a personal value on several factors (simplicity, functional correctness, future maintainability) that may or not be shared by an organization.
My stance is, unless you have equity, it’s not your company. Deliver what your company wants. If they’re not smart enough to figure out what’s right for their business, find somewhere else or start a competitor.
My implication is that if you think the company doesn't understand the business value of something you think is valuable, you should try to see it from their perspective or at least verify your assumptions. Most of the time they are right.
over the last ten years the tech industry has 10x'd the value it has created, which is obvious if you look at the accrued wealth of the leaders in the industry.
you know what has NOT gone up 10x in the decade I've been working in this industry? MY SALARY
Are employees at google not being paid for what they're risking?
An investor risks their post tax capital, and then when it works like google gets the upside and when it fails they get...shares in blackberry or IBM.
An employee risks their time, which they are guaranteed by law at least for the time they risk, to be compensated in cash and benefits.
An employee also risks their reputation and career opportunity cost for which they get...checks notes...options that go up/down the same as an investor.
An employee is participating in both value buckets, and one might argue at Google specifically, in the most compensatory bucket proportion in the history of all people ever.
Why don't you start your own company, make a lot of money and hire people with 10x salary? Who's stoping you? Show us how you pay 1M to each of your SWE.
It doesnt have to be 10x. Working in "Mid Tech" should at least guarantee you a raise that beats inflation. Sadly, it seems the only way to guarantee a raise that is proportional to the companies increased productivity is to shop offers around.
Either you're too bad (at best average; same thing I guess?) or the company management is shit. Either way you should not be in that company. So what's the problem?
There's virtually no relationship between who gets a raise and who deserves it.
The people who get raises take active steps to obtain them. Typically that means pushing, or getting a new job. The reality is that life is not fair and corporate America is not a meritocracy.
