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Quick poll: Has anybody here ever received a year-end salary increase on the same order of magnitude as what they'd get from simply switching jobs? I didn't t
by jasonkester 16y ago
Quick poll: Has anybody here ever received a year-end salary increase on the same order of magnitude as what they'd get from simply switching jobs?
I didn't think so.
Early in your career, your market value increases so fast that there's simply no way a percentage raise can keep up.
I remember a situation at my 2nd job after college, where I knew that I was worth almost double what they were paying me. I told them as much and laid out the case as to why. They bent over backward and scraped together something like a 20% raise, which they probably thought was pretty good.
Of course, on top of a junior dev salary it was still way out of line with what I should have been at. I polished up the resume and within a couple weeks I accepted an offer for roughly double my pre-raise salary. At my exit interview I told them how much I loved working there (it really was the best job I ever had), but I just couldn't afford to leave that much on the table.
It was probably the smartest career move I could have made, and it really drove home the point: You don't adjust your salary through raises in this industry. If you want to be paid what you deserve, you need to switch jobs.
- hessenwolf 16y agoAaarrgghhhhh... I raise my coffee to you. I just got a 2.6% increase after two years - despite that I am a one-guy centre of competence. However, they are paying for me to emigrate (shipping + language courses + letter of guarantee for apartment deposit), replacing the inappropriate job-title-suffix 'assistant' with the awesome prefix 'research', and it is an awesome job.
- danssig 16y agoIf you look around you might find you can have all that plus more money. You only live one time, I wouldn't sell myself short if I were you.
- farout 16y agowell said. Time != money Money can be made. Time is much hard to make if at all.
- danssig 16y agoExactly. We're trading our time for money so the more we make, the less of our time we need to sell (if we're responsible financial planners anyway). EDIT: Ambiguous wording
- hessenwolf 16y agoYes - but I am also learning a lot. I don't think I would have ended up knowing the things I know somewhere else. I am pretty good at dead-panning through negotiations :). In two years I will have a full suite of financial modelling code that has been tested on billion dollar products.
- ig1 16y agoYes, throughout my career I've averaged around a ~25% raise/year (I quit to start my startup after 6 year when it was getting to the point where it would be unrealistic to try and get that kind of payrise anymore). The trick is knowing your value and making sure your company knows your value as well.
- whimsy 16y agoI'm about to graduate in June, so this comment is particularly relevant to my interests. Thanks. How early is too early to switch jobs?
- jasonkester 16y ago2 years. Before that you're so green that you're essentially still a college graduate with no experience. It also depends on what you're doing and whether you're genuinely good. If you have a chance to build something that you can point to to prove that yes, I really am good at what I do, then you'll have a much easier job convincing the next place to take you on.
- whimsy 16y agometawhimsy.com is my current (crappy) resumé. I'm not quite a college graduate, but I wouldn't say I have no experience, either. Unfortunately, I don't have much to point at, either, since most of my experience is sysadmin-y stuff. Does that change things at all?
- TuaAmin13 16y agoMy friend is taking a 1 credit hour "learn to get a job" type course in his senior year. Among the few pearls of wisdom, they told him that the average duration for a college grad is 18 months. So I'd say 12-24 months is definitely plausible, as I've heard of people leaving in as little as 8 months. I don't think at that point it's for the money, it's more for the environment because most people don't have a lot of work experience coming out of college to know what type of work environment they'd like. Money isn't everything, and you have to enjoy life beyond your salary. Experience per unit time would really depend on the company, or if you're in a large company, the team you're working in. My last job was a medium sized company (~200) but my IT team was 7 people when all 5 of the interns came in. I got to do a ton of things that I probably wouldn't have done in a company with more bureaucracy, and that was at intern level.
- 16y ago
- barrkel 16y agoIndeed. After my first year, I got a 36% raise staying on; on changing jobs, I got an effective 200% raise (i.e. tripled my salary).
- wazoox 16y agoYou can switch jobs inside the company. My salary roughly doubled over 3 years when I started work in the 90s; but my job title changed several times, too.
- danssig 16y agoDepends on the company. A lot of companies will have must-get-CEO-involved-for-exceptions style caps on raises under any situation, so moving to a different part of the company still puts you with a max possible raise. The new team will also know everything about your previous conditions, making negotiation harder.
- allenc 16y agoThis may be an outlier, but Google's 10% raise last year + adjustments to base salary, in my case anyway, made them way more competitive and would easily match what switching a job would be.