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>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 th

>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.
  - tibbetts 10y ago
    Or at least not helpful if it is things someone can't change. "You should work on your software engineering skills at a big company known for doing that well" is actionable in a way "changing jobs so often makes us worried it's a problem with you not them" is not.
rodgerd 10y ago
> it leaves a bad taste in a lot of employees' mouths. So it should. I worked for a CTO who signed off on getting rid of a vendor with the rationale that the last-ditch radical license cut they offered, to keep the business, was adding insult to injury. "You've been screwing me for five years and now you want to make it better? You should have given me your best price from the start." Why would employees be any different?
- sokoloff 10y ago
  For me, the past is the past. If I'd been being underpaid and was now being overpaid, I'm going to focus on the latter not the former. It's not like I can go back and right the wrong (real or perceived) that was done to me, so I focus on now and forward.
twblalock 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. In tech, I don't think job-hopping is frowned upon much at all. The most successful engineers and tech executives I know rarely spend more than two years at a company before moving on.
- justinlardinois 10y ago
  I think it also depends on your definition of "job hopping." Sure, two years each at your last three jobs isn't frowned upon in tech, but six months each is. I'm sure there are some industries that would raise eyebrows at two years, of course.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Anyone that I've met like that is either a consultant or a shitshow. Two years is about the timeframe where your mistakes and technical debt start to bite back. If people are moving up hopping like that, they're great self promoters.
  - flukus 10y ago
    I move on that often because the companies already have tonnes of technical debt.
caminante 10y ago
OTOH, I've seen companies STILL overspending on loyalty. For example, super major oil companies are still obsessed with nurturing generalist managers who keep lateraling across divisions over a 40 year career. Talk with their "career development experts," and you'd swear that you're dealing with a cult!
- h4nkoslo 10y ago
  Oil companies in particular have enormous fixed investments in particular bits of infrastructure with their own particular nuances, long-running relations with particular governments, etc. It actually makes sense to invest heavily in people who know where the bodies are buried.
  - caminante 10y ago
    Ha! Though, if that were the case, I don't see the benefits of the LATERAL advancements. You're just moving the morticians from one mortuary to another instead of leaving them in one place.
    - h4nkoslo 10y ago
      You maintain favorable access to that information, and your people get to see different scenery instead of being stuck in one particular, usually crappy, locale. "Hey Bill, back when you worked that field off of Malaysia - was the minister's son more of a whisky guy or a hookers guy? He's the minister now & he's causing trouble."
emodendroket 10y ago
In my case it was more like my employer was resentful and started curtailing all the aspects of the job that made me want to stay (suddenly becoming very strict about never working from home and being in at exactly the appointed hour when this had never previously been an issue, for instance).
- lj3 10y ago
  How people perceive value is a weird thing. Large raises suddenly makes some employers re-evaluate what they're getting for their money's worth. In their eyes, they're paying more money (sometimes a LOT more money) for essentially no change in work. That's profit out of their pocket and that makes them resentful. They don't look at new hires that same way, no matter what they cost, because they're getting an increase in workload for that spent money. I don't at all agree with the above mindset, but I can easily see how somebody can look at it that way.
  - tcoppi 10y ago
    This is definitely an interesting aspect of human psychology that some places seem to be able to work around, like Google, which from what I understand is able to compensate their employees well relative to the market without them needing to job hop.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      Among other things, Google is huge and so it's less personal.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    It wasn't a for-profit business but there was definitely some sense that I was some young upstart who didn't know his place. Whatever, it's water under the bridge now.
  - wyclif 10y ago
    This is a big reason why I tend to think that it's almost always better (some qualifiers apply) to take a new job instead of trying to get a raise after your comp has been "anchored" by the company.
tcoppi 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. I have yet to stay at a job for more than ~2 years over my career, and I still get 2-3 recruiters a week pounding at my door for relevant jobs that would probably be a salary match or beat over what I currently have. So at least for me it hasn't hurt me yet.
alistairSH 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. 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.
- phaus 10y ago
  >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). This depends on the organization. Some government shops have an annual recompete for pretty much all of their contracts and ALWAYS go with the cheapest option, even if it totally fucks everything up and costs more in the long run. I worked for a government organization where every year we got an opportunity to re-interview for the same jobs at lower rates (with the company that underbid our old employer and put us out of with without even having employees of their own), in spite of the fact that our first line supervisors were happy with our work. It took me a while to get out of that hellhole. I'm glad no one held it against me when I applied for a non-contracting job. I've been in my current position for 2.5 years and I don't plan on leaving any time soon.
  - alistairSH 10y ago
    Absolutely true, and if the resume indicated they were moving companies as contracts moved[1], that was fine. It was the short timeframe hopping from unrelated contracts that was a sure sign of incompetence. 1 - We saw some resumes that were grouped by contract or government agency rather than by actual employer for just this reason.
- 10y ago
vacri 10y ago
> has been getting paltry 2% raises for months What a weird bubble we live in where a 2% raise of the course of months is dismissed as 'paltry'.
- Throwaway23412 10y ago
  Bubble? I thought I was being conservative in choosing 2% as a number. Yearly inflation in the past averaged over 2%. I'll admit that the past two years has seen record low interest rates, but 2% raises are hardly a recent phenomenon.
  - gpderetta 10y ago
    The wording of the original comment could be reasonably interpreted asdescribing a rise of 2% month. That's a pretty good rise rate!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
aidenn0 10y ago
Since the pay at your next job is correlated with your past pay for a variety of reasons, I just assumed that the raise made it easier for the employees already thinking of leaving to get a higher paying job elsewhere.
a3n 10y ago
> or if loyalty was really just some fanciful meme perpetrated by employers to keep costs down. That one. Employers who invoke loyalty and passion won't hesitate to unloyally drop if they're costing too much for the money taken in. Which is appropriate. But then they expect individuals to bear the "cost" of working for less at their business, than for more at some other business. It is to laugh.
mathattack 10y ago
I've dinged folks pre-interview for having too many job hops. It's not an issue for junior candidates, but if I see someone who has 12 jobs in 10 years, and I know the goals of the position I'm hiring for are 2-3 years, I won't bother. The person could be great for a lot of things, but the track record suggests they're not the person for long term goals and objective. Or during an interview, it would be hard to ask, "Can you show me a goal that you worked towards over many years." Anecdotally - someone getting increasing responsibility over many roles at a company is a great sign. The people that know them the best are promoting them and keeping them happy. Someone hopping too frequently, or keeping the same job with no switch over long (10?) year horizons is a bad sign. The latter could be a case of specialization so I'd still interview, but one needs to be careful. To your point about loyalty as an excuse to underpay - my experience is Sort Of. When large companies like AT&T and P&G first had to do big layoffs, it did hurt the management teams. They weren't used to it, and were very generous. After a couple rounds, they got over it and got cheaper. (Severance packages almost always get worse over time, not better) And I saw many phone company employees hang on for 2 or 3 more years to get the company retirement party. On the one hand the company got to underpay them for several years just for them to "earn" a $300 party for some colleagues. On the other hand, perhaps the company didn't really need them the last few years, but still held them on.

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.
- tibbetts 10y ago
  Or at least not helpful if it is things someone can't change. "You should work on your software engineering skills at a big company known for doing that well" is actionable in a way "changing jobs so often makes us worried it's a problem with you not them" is not.

rodgerd 10y ago

> it leaves a bad taste in a lot of employees' mouths. So it should. I worked for a CTO who signed off on getting rid of a vendor with the rationale that the last-ditch radical license cut they offered, to keep the business, was adding insult to injury. "You've been screwing me for five years and now you want to make it better? You should have given me your best price from the start." Why would employees be any different?

sokoloff 10y ago
For me, the past is the past. If I'd been being underpaid and was now being overpaid, I'm going to focus on the latter not the former. It's not like I can go back and right the wrong (real or perceived) that was done to me, so I focus on now and forward.

twblalock 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. In tech, I don't think job-hopping is frowned upon much at all. The most successful engineers and tech executives I know rarely spend more than two years at a company before moving on.

justinlardinois 10y ago
I think it also depends on your definition of "job hopping." Sure, two years each at your last three jobs isn't frowned upon in tech, but six months each is. I'm sure there are some industries that would raise eyebrows at two years, of course.
Spooky23 10y ago
Anyone that I've met like that is either a consultant or a shitshow. Two years is about the timeframe where your mistakes and technical debt start to bite back. If people are moving up hopping like that, they're great self promoters.
- flukus 10y ago
  I move on that often because the companies already have tonnes of technical debt.

caminante 10y ago

OTOH, I've seen companies STILL overspending on loyalty. For example, super major oil companies are still obsessed with nurturing generalist managers who keep lateraling across divisions over a 40 year career. Talk with their "career development experts," and you'd swear that you're dealing with a cult!

h4nkoslo 10y ago
Oil companies in particular have enormous fixed investments in particular bits of infrastructure with their own particular nuances, long-running relations with particular governments, etc. It actually makes sense to invest heavily in people who know where the bodies are buried.
- caminante 10y ago
  Ha! Though, if that were the case, I don't see the benefits of the LATERAL advancements. You're just moving the morticians from one mortuary to another instead of leaving them in one place.
  - h4nkoslo 10y ago
    You maintain favorable access to that information, and your people get to see different scenery instead of being stuck in one particular, usually crappy, locale. "Hey Bill, back when you worked that field off of Malaysia - was the minister's son more of a whisky guy or a hookers guy? He's the minister now & he's causing trouble."

emodendroket 10y ago

In my case it was more like my employer was resentful and started curtailing all the aspects of the job that made me want to stay (suddenly becoming very strict about never working from home and being in at exactly the appointed hour when this had never previously been an issue, for instance).

lj3 10y ago
How people perceive value is a weird thing. Large raises suddenly makes some employers re-evaluate what they're getting for their money's worth. In their eyes, they're paying more money (sometimes a LOT more money) for essentially no change in work. That's profit out of their pocket and that makes them resentful. They don't look at new hires that same way, no matter what they cost, because they're getting an increase in workload for that spent money. I don't at all agree with the above mindset, but I can easily see how somebody can look at it that way.
- tcoppi 10y ago
  This is definitely an interesting aspect of human psychology that some places seem to be able to work around, like Google, which from what I understand is able to compensate their employees well relative to the market without them needing to job hop.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    Among other things, Google is huge and so it's less personal.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  It wasn't a for-profit business but there was definitely some sense that I was some young upstart who didn't know his place. Whatever, it's water under the bridge now.
- wyclif 10y ago
  This is a big reason why I tend to think that it's almost always better (some qualifiers apply) to take a new job instead of trying to get a raise after your comp has been "anchored" by the company.

tcoppi 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. I have yet to stay at a job for more than ~2 years over my career, and I still get 2-3 recruiters a week pounding at my door for relevant jobs that would probably be a salary match or beat over what I currently have. So at least for me it hasn't hurt me yet.

alistairSH 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. 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.

phaus 10y ago
>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). This depends on the organization. Some government shops have an annual recompete for pretty much all of their contracts and ALWAYS go with the cheapest option, even if it totally fucks everything up and costs more in the long run. I worked for a government organization where every year we got an opportunity to re-interview for the same jobs at lower rates (with the company that underbid our old employer and put us out of with without even having employees of their own), in spite of the fact that our first line supervisors were happy with our work. It took me a while to get out of that hellhole. I'm glad no one held it against me when I applied for a non-contracting job. I've been in my current position for 2.5 years and I don't plan on leaving any time soon.
- alistairSH 10y ago
  Absolutely true, and if the resume indicated they were moving companies as contracts moved[1], that was fine. It was the short timeframe hopping from unrelated contracts that was a sure sign of incompetence. 1 - We saw some resumes that were grouped by contract or government agency rather than by actual employer for just this reason.
10y ago

vacri 10y ago

> has been getting paltry 2% raises for months What a weird bubble we live in where a 2% raise of the course of months is dismissed as 'paltry'.

Throwaway23412 10y ago
Bubble? I thought I was being conservative in choosing 2% as a number. Yearly inflation in the past averaged over 2%. I'll admit that the past two years has seen record low interest rates, but 2% raises are hardly a recent phenomenon.
- gpderetta 10y ago
  The wording of the original comment could be reasonably interpreted asdescribing a rise of 2% month. That's a pretty good rise rate!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

aidenn0 10y ago

Since the pay at your next job is correlated with your past pay for a variety of reasons, I just assumed that the raise made it easier for the employees already thinking of leaving to get a higher paying job elsewhere.

a3n 10y ago

> or if loyalty was really just some fanciful meme perpetrated by employers to keep costs down. That one. Employers who invoke loyalty and passion won't hesitate to unloyally drop if they're costing too much for the money taken in. Which is appropriate. But then they expect individuals to bear the "cost" of working for less at their business, than for more at some other business. It is to laugh.

mathattack 10y ago

I've dinged folks pre-interview for having too many job hops. It's not an issue for junior candidates, but if I see someone who has 12 jobs in 10 years, and I know the goals of the position I'm hiring for are 2-3 years, I won't bother. The person could be great for a lot of things, but the track record suggests they're not the person for long term goals and objective. Or during an interview, it would be hard to ask, "Can you show me a goal that you worked towards over many years." Anecdotally - someone getting increasing responsibility over many roles at a company is a great sign. The people that know them the best are promoting them and keeping them happy. Someone hopping too frequently, or keeping the same job with no switch over long (10?) year horizons is a bad sign. The latter could be a case of specialization so I'd still interview, but one needs to be careful. To your point about loyalty as an excuse to underpay - my experience is Sort Of. When large companies like AT&T and P&G first had to do big layoffs, it did hurt the management teams. They weren't used to it, and were very generous. After a couple rounds, they got over it and got cheaper. (Severance packages almost always get worse over time, not better) And I saw many phone company employees hang on for 2 or 3 more years to get the company retirement party. On the one hand the company got to underpay them for several years just for them to "earn" a $300 party for some colleagues. On the other hand, perhaps the company didn't really need them the last few years, but still held them on.