18 ms·

When they don’t want new jobs, just more money

93 points by jrs235 10y ago

polartx 10y ago
>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.
- unclesaamm 10y ago
  I heard this from recruiters when I was negotiating salary right out of college. "I want to give you more but we have a policy that unless you have another offer..."
  - sweetnectar 10y ago
    What's to stop someone from just lying about another offer?
    - DavidAdams 10y ago
      I think primarily the fear that their boss will call their bluff, and they'll be forced to either admit the scam or quit the job and have to scramble for a new one.
      - gertef 10y ago
        That's for leaving your old job, not for negotiating with your new job.
    - vmarsy 10y ago
      ethics, and usually they'd ask to see that offer and get the details!
      - Apocryphon 10y ago
        Ethics is one thing, but forcing a candidate to produce a competitor's offer seems intrusive.
        sokoloff 10y ago
        I had a (great) boss in my late 20s who was overjoyed to have me share my offer with him so he could go to bat with the corporate overlords (in another state) and get all the local devs a raise based on market conditions. I was more than happy to share, but we also already had a relationship where I knew he wasn't out to screw me.
      - sseveran 10y ago
        I have never shared one companies offer with another, nor would I. Of course if I company was not willing to negotiate I would immediately walk. I have just learned a lot about the people who work there.
    - spacemanmatt 10y ago
      You've hit the nail on the head. It's poker.
    - darren2000 10y ago
      I'd guess lying for financial gain can be prosecuted as fraud. Same as lying about your previous salary.
      - AlexB138 10y ago
        You can not be prosecuted for fraud for lying about your previous salary. That's ridiculous.
      - Retra 10y ago
        So if a company tells me they don't have the budget to hire me and they really do, I should try to get them prosecuted for fraud? The company might be purposefully undervaluing me for their own financial gain. Lying goes both ways.
    - NateDad 10y ago
      What if your boss says "ok, sorry. We can't match that?". That has happened to me multiple times with real offers. Then you either say "ok, well, I like this company so I'll stay", which sounds disingenuous, or you have to quit and find a new job. If you feel under valued, and talking to your boss doesn't get you a raise, why not just look for a new job? Doesn't cost you anything.
      - AstralStorm 10y ago
        Unless you either don't find one and/or do not want to move to another city.
        NateDad 10y ago
        Not finding one is no worse than not looking. I didn't say to quit. Looking for a job while you have a job is incredibly empowering. It puts you in the driver's seat. You don't have to get a job as fast as possible just to get a paycheck.... you can take your time and find a job that suits you, and that pays you well. You'll be more confident in interviews, more assertive when negotiating salary... Also, companies often tend to value people who are currently working higher than those who don't. If you're working, you implicitly have a reference from your current employer - they obviously think you're worth a recurring paycheck.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- CWuestefeld 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      In the department "Human Resources", never forget that "Human" is just an adjective and "Resources" is the noun.
      - jonaf 10y ago
        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.
  - tcoppi 10y ago
    > 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. I also thought the same thing, but a month or two into my first job quickly dispelled that illusion. HR is for the benefit of the company, not the employee.
- retbull 10y ago
  Yeah happened to me. I had a low paying job for Seattle and decided to ask for a raise after I fixed a couple of seriously expensive bugs in our S3 management scheme. They told me that I would only get a raise if I had another offer. I said "There doesn't need to be another offer for me to get a raise" and they disagreed. I am now making 57% more at another company which is less fun but definitely more lucrative.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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).
rayiner 10y ago
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.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  I'm in a country where everyone can easily find out everyone else's salary. I find it weird (because I'm American). Also, unions are more common, but different because management will also often have unions, so they are the ones that do the negotiating. This means the process and facts and figures are much more open. And while I find it weird, this does also mean that pay scales are more appropriate and fair. You can have seniority plus merit based pay, for example, so long as you are honest about what qualifacations people need to meet to earn more pay, and also lessens the gap between women and men's pay. Some of the gap between women and men will take societal change, and most likely take laws and such to force people's hand to do it.
  - sokoloff 10y ago
    > this does also mean that pay scales are more appropriate and fair It means that the pay scales are more equal. Whether or not that's fair is unclear as determining fairness requires determining a significant component of performance and results. Paying a mediocre developer and a superstar developer (or salesperson) the same amount is equal, but is not fair, IMO.
    - Broken_Hippo 10y ago
esoteric_nonces 10y ago
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!
sweetnectar 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Austin's a pretty hot market, from what I understand. Sounds kind of low to me.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - sokoloff 10y ago
    In Boston, that's barely half the going rate for a fresh grad from a top school.
- onion2k 10y ago
  "Undervalued" is relative. To Google your skills might be worth $150k because you'd add $1.5m to their revenue. To the business you're in you may 'only' add $500k, so you're paid accordingly. You aren't undervalued so much as under-utilised - the company you're at isn't maximising the value they could get from you in the way Google could (or maybe they are; there is an upper limit). Either find a way to make a bigger impact on your company's bottom line, or change company. To draw a startup analogy, if you decide you want to take 25% of an established $100m market that's unlikely to happen because that's really hard to do, so people don't value your startup as having a potential $25m revenue. But if you can think of a realistic way to grow that $100m market to being a $125m market then people will readily accept you potentially have a $25m revenue business. Same result, very different impact. Within your company you need to grow the market for your skills.
mrbird 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      Presumably that would be covered in "smarter and more proactive next time."
drawkbox 10y ago
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.
dmatthewson 10y ago
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 10y ago
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.
shostack 10y ago
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.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I think this is kind of hard because of "soft" benefits (not sure if there's a better term). Some companies let you work from home, some don't. Some have free snacks, some don't. Some have relaxed hours, some don't. So matching pure paycheck value isn't really apples to oranges.
- sokoloff 10y ago
  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.
Throwaway23412 10y ago
>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.
- greenshackle 10y ago
  > 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. Would the candidate know it if that was the reason? Do hiring managers usually give truthful feedback or generic platitudes? I'm genuinely wondering, it occurs to me now I've never been turned down after an interview, or fired.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    No, it is extremely rare to share such feedback, because it opens the door to quibbling with your reasons.
    - greenshackle 10y ago
      I figured they wouldn't.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    It's pretty dumb to give honest feedback.
chrisbennet 10y ago
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.
Roritharr 10y ago
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.
sjg007 10y ago
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.
NateDad 10y ago
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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93 points by jrs235 10y ago

>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.

unclesaamm 10y ago
I heard this from recruiters when I was negotiating salary right out of college. "I want to give you more but we have a policy that unless you have another offer..."
- sweetnectar 10y ago
  What's to stop someone from just lying about another offer?
  - DavidAdams 10y ago
    I think primarily the fear that their boss will call their bluff, and they'll be forced to either admit the scam or quit the job and have to scramble for a new one.
    - gertef 10y ago
      That's for leaving your old job, not for negotiating with your new job.
  - vmarsy 10y ago
    ethics, and usually they'd ask to see that offer and get the details!
    - Apocryphon 10y ago
      Ethics is one thing, but forcing a candidate to produce a competitor's offer seems intrusive.
      - sokoloff 10y ago
        I had a (great) boss in my late 20s who was overjoyed to have me share my offer with him so he could go to bat with the corporate overlords (in another state) and get all the local devs a raise based on market conditions. I was more than happy to share, but we also already had a relationship where I knew he wasn't out to screw me.
    - sseveran 10y ago
      I have never shared one companies offer with another, nor would I. Of course if I company was not willing to negotiate I would immediately walk. I have just learned a lot about the people who work there.
  - spacemanmatt 10y ago
    You've hit the nail on the head. It's poker.
  - darren2000 10y ago
    I'd guess lying for financial gain can be prosecuted as fraud. Same as lying about your previous salary.
    - AlexB138 10y ago
      You can not be prosecuted for fraud for lying about your previous salary. That's ridiculous.
    - Retra 10y ago
      So if a company tells me they don't have the budget to hire me and they really do, I should try to get them prosecuted for fraud? The company might be purposefully undervaluing me for their own financial gain. Lying goes both ways.
  - NateDad 10y ago
    What if your boss says "ok, sorry. We can't match that?". That has happened to me multiple times with real offers. Then you either say "ok, well, I like this company so I'll stay", which sounds disingenuous, or you have to quit and find a new job. If you feel under valued, and talking to your boss doesn't get you a raise, why not just look for a new job? Doesn't cost you anything.
    - AstralStorm 10y ago
      Unless you either don't find one and/or do not want to move to another city.
      - NateDad 10y ago
        Not finding one is no worse than not looking. I didn't say to quit. Looking for a job while you have a job is incredibly empowering. It puts you in the driver's seat. You don't have to get a job as fast as possible just to get a paycheck.... you can take your time and find a job that suits you, and that pays you well. You'll be more confident in interviews, more assertive when negotiating salary... Also, companies often tend to value people who are currently working higher than those who don't. If you're working, you implicitly have a reference from your current employer - they obviously think you're worth a recurring paycheck.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
CWuestefeld 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    In the department "Human Resources", never forget that "Human" is just an adjective and "Resources" is the noun.
    - jonaf 10y ago
      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.
- tcoppi 10y ago
  > 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. I also thought the same thing, but a month or two into my first job quickly dispelled that illusion. HR is for the benefit of the company, not the employee.
retbull 10y ago
Yeah happened to me. I had a low paying job for Seattle and decided to ask for a raise after I fixed a couple of seriously expensive bugs in our S3 management scheme. They told me that I would only get a raise if I had another offer. I said "There doesn't need to be another offer for me to get a raise" and they disagreed. I am now making 57% more at another company which is less fun but definitely more lucrative.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

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 10y ago
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).

rayiner 10y ago

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.

Broken_Hippo 10y ago
I'm in a country where everyone can easily find out everyone else's salary. I find it weird (because I'm American). Also, unions are more common, but different because management will also often have unions, so they are the ones that do the negotiating. This means the process and facts and figures are much more open. And while I find it weird, this does also mean that pay scales are more appropriate and fair. You can have seniority plus merit based pay, for example, so long as you are honest about what qualifacations people need to meet to earn more pay, and also lessens the gap between women and men's pay. Some of the gap between women and men will take societal change, and most likely take laws and such to force people's hand to do it.
- sokoloff 10y ago
  > this does also mean that pay scales are more appropriate and fair It means that the pay scales are more equal. Whether or not that's fair is unclear as determining fairness requires determining a significant component of performance and results. Paying a mediocre developer and a superstar developer (or salesperson) the same amount is equal, but is not fair, IMO.
  - Broken_Hippo 10y ago

esoteric_nonces 10y ago

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!

sweetnectar 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Austin's a pretty hot market, from what I understand. Sounds kind of low to me.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- sokoloff 10y ago
  In Boston, that's barely half the going rate for a fresh grad from a top school.
onion2k 10y ago
"Undervalued" is relative. To Google your skills might be worth $150k because you'd add $1.5m to their revenue. To the business you're in you may 'only' add $500k, so you're paid accordingly. You aren't undervalued so much as under-utilised - the company you're at isn't maximising the value they could get from you in the way Google could (or maybe they are; there is an upper limit). Either find a way to make a bigger impact on your company's bottom line, or change company. To draw a startup analogy, if you decide you want to take 25% of an established $100m market that's unlikely to happen because that's really hard to do, so people don't value your startup as having a potential $25m revenue. But if you can think of a realistic way to grow that $100m market to being a $125m market then people will readily accept you potentially have a $25m revenue business. Same result, very different impact. Within your company you need to grow the market for your skills.

mrbird 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Presumably that would be covered in "smarter and more proactive next time."

drawkbox 10y ago

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.

dmatthewson 10y ago

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 10y ago

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.

shostack 10y ago

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.

CaptSpify 10y ago
I think this is kind of hard because of "soft" benefits (not sure if there's a better term). Some companies let you work from home, some don't. Some have free snacks, some don't. Some have relaxed hours, some don't. So matching pure paycheck value isn't really apples to oranges.
sokoloff 10y ago
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.

Throwaway23412 10y ago

>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.

greenshackle 10y ago
> 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. Would the candidate know it if that was the reason? Do hiring managers usually give truthful feedback or generic platitudes? I'm genuinely wondering, it occurs to me now I've never been turned down after an interview, or fired.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  No, it is extremely rare to share such feedback, because it opens the door to quibbling with your reasons.
  - greenshackle 10y ago
    I figured they wouldn't.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  It's pretty dumb to give honest feedback.

chrisbennet 10y ago

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.

Roritharr 10y ago

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.

sjg007 10y ago

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.

NateDad 10y ago

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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