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In my 10 years of engineering, I’ve seen a whole bunch of such guides. Promotions are hard to make them fair. Promotions are also biased because it’s fuzzy and

by nojvek 7y ago

In my 10 years of engineering, I’ve seen a whole bunch of such guides. Promotions are hard to make them fair. Promotions are also biased because it’s fuzzy and there are humans involved in it. The only true way to get to know your worth is to test the market. It’s a supply and demand game. Most raises I’ve got is by switching companies. Most companies usually overpay their newer hires and underpay their older hires. Why should they pay more if they’re not asking for it ? Managers will always get paid more as you move up. They make bigger decisions and have bigger impact. Their impact is their management tree’s summation. As an IC you plateau out. You either start your own thing or work in more lucrative industries. Promotions never land on your feet, you gotta fight for them.

zuhayeer 7y ago
This is so true, and often overlooked by a lot of people. There's no new incentive for companies to reward older employees (you're at the company already). But to get new employees to sign their offer, they're prepared to stretch their resources. Additionally the market has likely advanced and salary bands are probably higher. By staying at a company over a long period of time, you lose out on being compensated at the periphery / edges of the market. And you probably lose out on your read of the market too.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  > There's no new incentive for companies to reward older employees Is this just plainly not true. But the reason you may be led to believe that is simply a matter of inefficiencies. If a company loses a senior team member, they’ll need to replace them with one of equivalent competency. Putting aside the fact that recruiting and on boarding costs quite a lot of money, there’s a few basic economic reasons why they may have lost that team member to begin with. 1. They hadn’t adequately assessed the competency of that team member, and that person was able to find a better paying job elsewhere. 2. The company might not hire people for that position very often. If they don’t know how much money it takes to secure a candidate of that caliber, then they might not know they’re not paying them adequately. Both of those scenarios involve employers not understanding the market properly, and if that results in them losing skilled staff, then that is very costly for them. So there’s a very clear incentive for companies to invest in retaining staff. However the truth is that the world is full of poorly run companies, this is a problem that’s actually quite hard to get right, and there’s a very slow feedback loop when it comes to measuring how good you’re doing at it. For those reasons, that’s why it’s often better for people to seek new opportunities rather than seeking raises or promotions, because that’s the best way to make sure you’re getting a fair market rate, and will allow you to bypass any inefficiencies in the way your current employer may be doing things. There’s also another possibility, where the people on the payroll are simply developing their skills faster than the company can provider more advanced opportunities for them. In this case the employer doesn’t need to replace you with somebody of equal competency, they just need to find a replacement for a role that you outgrew.

by nojvek 7y ago

zuhayeer 7y ago

This is so true, and often overlooked by a lot of people. There's no new incentive for companies to reward older employees (you're at the company already). But to get new employees to sign their offer, they're prepared to stretch their resources. Additionally the market has likely advanced and salary bands are probably higher. By staying at a company over a long period of time, you lose out on being compensated at the periphery / edges of the market. And you probably lose out on your read of the market too.

AmericanChopper 7y ago
> There's no new incentive for companies to reward older employees Is this just plainly not true. But the reason you may be led to believe that is simply a matter of inefficiencies. If a company loses a senior team member, they’ll need to replace them with one of equivalent competency. Putting aside the fact that recruiting and on boarding costs quite a lot of money, there’s a few basic economic reasons why they may have lost that team member to begin with. 1. They hadn’t adequately assessed the competency of that team member, and that person was able to find a better paying job elsewhere. 2. The company might not hire people for that position very often. If they don’t know how much money it takes to secure a candidate of that caliber, then they might not know they’re not paying them adequately. Both of those scenarios involve employers not understanding the market properly, and if that results in them losing skilled staff, then that is very costly for them. So there’s a very clear incentive for companies to invest in retaining staff. However the truth is that the world is full of poorly run companies, this is a problem that’s actually quite hard to get right, and there’s a very slow feedback loop when it comes to measuring how good you’re doing at it. For those reasons, that’s why it’s often better for people to seek new opportunities rather than seeking raises or promotions, because that’s the best way to make sure you’re getting a fair market rate, and will allow you to bypass any inefficiencies in the way your current employer may be doing things. There’s also another possibility, where the people on the payroll are simply developing their skills faster than the company can provider more advanced opportunities for them. In this case the employer doesn’t need to replace you with somebody of equal competency, they just need to find a replacement for a role that you outgrew.