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If only things were so easy. Our department gets allocated $XX,XXX each year for raises. My boss has to split that among eight people. If I were to get a 5% bum
by redwards510 10y ago
If only things were so easy. Our department gets allocated $XX,XXX each year for raises. My boss has to split that among eight people. If I were to get a 5% bump like OP recommends, other people would get nothing.
Sounds like typical D-grade manager motivation. "Everyone work yourself to death and I might throw you a bone after one year!" I'd rather give up that 5% to have a sane work-life balance.
It's common knowledge that you must quit to increase your salary. It seems like a stupid practice for companies to follow, but it must make sense economically or they wouldn't do it.
- throwaway2048 10y agoDon't assume it makes sense just because the majority are doing it.
- geofft 10y agoWhat happens if your boss goes to their boss and says, "Hey, one of my employees is planning to jump ship for salary reasons, can we do anything here?"
- posabsolute 10y agoI think you are missing the point, Of course you can do that but you enter another level of negotiation because you are quitting and it might not even count toward the budget at this point. I would not recommend doing that every year as a negotiation tactic either. I tend to agree with Redwards, and unless you are working in a small company if you do your job correctly it becomes more a political game than anything else.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoYou typically only get to play that card once and you'd better be looking to leave in the next two years anyway.
- byoung2 10y agoDefinitely true, but in software engineering it's typical to have short stints anyway. If you change companies every few years, why not play this card all the time before jumping ship?
- user5994461 10y ago> If you change companies every _few years_ Pretty sure that in the current era there isn't a "S" at yearS for someone decent (and willingful). Most companies are perfectly fine to hire/poach from elsewhere whereas most companies are sucking at retention (that is, if not actively pushing people away). The combination is an aggressive environment.
- geofft 10y agoIf the option of giving people nontrivial raises is unblocked, you only need to play it once. It is harder to play it this way, of course, but once you have an exception / your boss has more budget / etc., you can hopefully just do normal raise negotiation.
- ryandrake 10y agoIf "threatening to quit" is the process to get a raise at your company, what makes you think that doing so will suddenly stop that process?
- geofft 10y agoI'm referring specifically to 'redwards510's department, which has a specific budget for raises (and to similar cases). I'm not referring to companies where in general one needs to threaten to quit to get a raise, of which there are a lot more. My guess is that if 'redwards510 threatens to quit, and that goes successfully, that will necessarily involve either raising the annual budget for raises (which, if I'm understanding correctly, is in dollars-per-year, not dollars), or fixing the process.
- kirykl 10y agoat my company the answer would be "good, hire the replacement for 25% less than current so I can tell the vp we're saving money"
- user5994461 10y agoWhat happens if he replies that "We've been recruiting for 6 months for this position and we couldn't find anyone decent enough even at his current salary"?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- redwards510 10y agoHaha! This is exactly the argument I use when trying to negotiate! I say "you won't be able to find anyone for what you are paying me now". Management shrugs. I tell management in no uncertain terms "i need to make more money", strongly hinting that i will begin looking elsewhere. If management truly wanted to "negotiate" then they would begin putting conditions on a raise or something.
- Spooky23 10y agoDepends. I've had success in getting promotions for some people when this sort of thing happens... sometimes it's a wake up call for the execs to light up a back burner conversation with HR. Other times, I've gotten a shrug.
- conanbatt 10y agoThat surely sounds like a negotiation tactic was played on you. "I cant give you a raise without taking it from someone else" or "It's out of my hands" are cut and dry sales tactics. I am a bit pejorative to that tactic because if answered correctly, it actually harms the salesman: proclaiming you cant give X salaries means that they dont respect market rates and thus an employee is incentivized to leave to someone that does. Their inability to give raises is a showing of weakness not of strength.
- AcerbicZero 10y agoI've worked at a number of places which had this basic policy. Upper management gives middle management a % of their budget for merit increases, and its up to the middle manager to break it up how they see fit. While you can certainly try to negotiate increases in compensation outside of this, I've never seen it happen successfully.
- byoung2 10y agoI've never seen it happen successfully. I've done it at least half a dozen times in my career. I was told "the maximum we can give is a $7k raise since there is a fixed pool for raises in the department." I said if I quit and you have to replace me, not only will you have to hire 2 devs to replace me (as I pulled dev and sysops duty) and pay them market salaries, you will have to pay a recruiter 20-30%. They still wouldn't budge, so I got a counteroffer for $30k more than I was making, plus some other perks. They not only matched, they also matched for other devs on the team. Do not fall for that fixed budget BS...the pie can always get bigger.
- amorphid 10y agoIt is worth nothing that another way to get a raise is to earn a promotion :)
- JoshDoody 10y agoYep! If you're near the top of your pay grade, then there may not be much room to move up with a raise and a promotion might be the best way to go. Hard to know that without talking to your manager though. Managers will often hint at this by saying something like, "There's just no room to bump you up in your current job." That's a signal that pursuing a promotion might be the better way to go.
- artmageddon 10y agoThat's assuming you work in a place with upward mobility or the ability to advance. At my last job, I worked in a place being a new hire meant you were pretty much on the same level as a senior engineer who had been there 10, 15+ years(not including the clout and reputation, though). The only way up from there was to become a manager, which meant waiting for someone who had been there 20 or even 30 years would have to quit or retire.
- sk5t 10y agoBeing the very best at your job doesn't always put you in line for management to have you stop doing that job... "too valuable to promote" is a thing.
- rosege 10y agoKinda like The Dilbert principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
- logicfiction 10y agoThat might depend on the type of promotion. It's actually becoming shockingly common these days (at least in the US?) to not give raises on promotions anymore.
- maxxxxx 10y agoMy experience is that if they want something to really happen, most of times it will. The keyword is "really"
- JoshDoody 10y agoThis can be true when companies have a "focal" process where everyone is reviewed at the same time. If that's true at your company, your best bet is to shoot for an off-cycle raise (6 months out from that "focal" process) when there's a separate budget or possibly no fixed budget. I wrote more about this here: https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/do-you-have-to-quit-your-job-to-get-a-big-raise/ https://fearlesssalarynegotiation.com/do-you-have-to-quit-yo... Sometimes you have to quit. But it's worth pursuing an off-cycle raise and coordinating with your manager to see what's possible.
- amelius 10y agoThat sounds like a communistic regime :S
- duaneb 10y agoSounds like you need to collectively demand a raise for the department. Our industry is long overdue for unions.
- freddyc 10y agoIf threatening to quit is the only way to get the raise that you (presumably) deserve, then it's probably a good sign that it's time to, you know, actually quit and move to a better opportunity where your contribution is properly valued.
- user5994461 10y agoNah. It's just a standard negotiation strategy. If you want to stay, come back with a better offer and ask your company to match. Be prepared to leave if they don't want to.
- coredog64 10y agoDevil's advocate: At a low-performance company, perhaps they aren't able to extract any more value out of a developer than what they are paying (plus overhead).
- user5994461 10y agoThat's especially the case of consultancies. They resell the human dude at a daily rate. Giving a raise is just lowering their margins.
- majormajor 10y agoThat may not be the full story. I also get a pool to allocate for "regular" annual raises between the people on my team. There's a different, bigger pool that can get pulled from if there's a case of a mismatch with market rate (e.g. we'd hire someone new into that position for considerably more than the person currently in it is making). There's also a pool (possibly the same pool as market adjustments) that can come into play for retention/negotiation if an employee asks for a raise. But at my employer, at least, the point of proactively doing the second is to hopefully prevent this one from being needed - once you're in a "thinking about leaving" situation you're more likely to actually leave.
- geomark 10y agoI've been on both sides of this, receiving and allocating raises from a merit pool. Last time around I got the order from senior management that raises would be awarded on a curve in all departments, no exceptions. I had 6 direct reports at the time and to fit the curve I had to give 0% to one person, max% to one person, and some middling% to the other 4 persons. It seemed so stupid that I would have to point out how this approach fails for small numbers. In my case all 6 of my staff had received awards during the year for outstanding performance that had impacted the bottom line of the company. So giving 0% to anyone would have been utterly lacking in integrity. Rather than follow the order to do something that was completely arbitrary I told them to zero out my raise and spread it across my staff. I never even implied it, but they apparently feared that a consequence would be I would quit and take the staff with me. At the time that was a likely event. Ended up scrapping that whole idea and blowing the raise budget. Company had a banner year after that. You'd think they would have thanked me (they didn't).