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Ask HN: How are you handling salary/compensation with high inflation?
Curious to get peoples opinions about the current state of inflation and compensation.
Have you broached this subject with your company/ boss? Are you waiting till stuff gets really crazy with inflation? Do you think this will pass and October was just abnormal?
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoI'm going to see what happens with my annual COL adjustment. If they give me 1-2%, they're going to get a strong protest. If they ignore that, I'm likely to start looking. Why bother giving them the protest? Because they've been a good place to work, and have mostly been sane in how they make decisions. If they blow one, I'll give them a chance to fix it... for a little while. Probably not forever, though.
- bberenberg 5y agoI had an employee bring it up this summer during his annual review. We adjusted his salary based on that.
- avgDev 5y agoSupply chain is still struggling. Chip shortage is still a problem. I cannot buy a car at a reasonable price. I'm in manufacturing and our company is constantly rising prices due to shipping issues and high cost to ship overseas. This will pass, imo but I'm not an economist. I'm just a schmuck with CS degree that can tap a keyboard and produce some code. I got a MASSIVE (50%) raise this year so I'm going to wait till my next review to worry about inflation.
- brodouevencode 5y agoYou're on to something here I think - your employer probably wouldn't have given you a massive raise had they not seen the light at the end of the tunnel. The problems, as I understand them, can be made more temporary if the right incentives were in place, and the wrong ones removed. Yes we are in a hole right now but it's not really that bad. A backlog at the ports, driver shortages, and warehousing issues __should__ be easily fixed. However, the longer this lasts the harder it's going to be to get out of this hole because we really should be focusing more on the long term consequences and decisions. If anything this time has proven that some links in our supply chain are fragile. How that's fixed is a mixture of business changes, technology changes, and political changes, but they must be fixed. This time has also shown that there aren't enough leaders willing to take responsibility and fix the problem. I'd love for a Gates/Musk/Bezos to step up and offer help to the governments that want it. I'd love for the US government to actually get some input from people that run real businesses too.
- naikrovek 5y agoI'm predicting a 5-out-of-5 review, again, and a < 1% raise, again, while my employer posts record profits quarter after quarter, and the executives get 50% raises every year. things are gonna collapse soon, so I'm going to chill here until that blows over, while being thankful to have a job, and then I'll probably move on to a company that looks better on paper but proves to be somehow even worse with raises in reality. I regret having kids, because they are going to have a very difficult time.
- 908B64B197 5y ago> while my employer posts record profits quarter after quarter, and the executives get 50% raises every year. Just switch to a mostly stock based comp.
- naikrovek 5y agoif only it were that easy.
- OJFord 5y agoIf you assume your total compensation is static (which it must be if you also assume/control for risk) then it is pretty easy? Just invest whatever you're getting in cash that you wish you were getting in stock. And really ceteris paribus that's better - you can invest it wherever, not just where you work.
- chudi 5y agoI have every quarter a salary review to match inflation
- Ancalagon 5y agoWhich company and are they hiring?
- SamuelAdams 5y agoI switched companies. Why wait for CoL increases when you can get 20% jumps?
- sickmartian 5y agoI live in Argentina, we breathe high inflation.. it's not nice, but good companies will compete on how to handle this, currently: - Some companies pay part of the salary in a stronger currency (USD) - I get this is probably not viable for your current scenario, and it a perk I don't actually get, but my wife does. - Some companies have quarterly or bi-monthly inflation rate adjustments, this is semi-automatic, we subscribe to an independent party that measures inflation and whatever number they come with goes, this is because Argentina has a history of fudging the numbers to make the government look good. It will still require adjustments from the individuals, even if you have a cooperating employer, for example you probably want to buy stuff as soon as you get paid, otherwise you are losing money.
- pedalpete 5y agoI thought the gov't was making it harder to trade in USD. Is that not correct? What about crypto? I was also under the impression that Argentina had strong crypto use as savings.
- m0llusk 5y agoHaving lived through the sustained high inflation period of the 1970s this seems to me like next to nothing. Careful shopping finds most staples haven't really changed. The inflation we are seeing is mostly in very specific products and much has already faded. Wood products are nearly back to normal and shipping is falling fast. The inflation that I really worry about is the increasing extremism driven by social networks with their likes and bubble forming algorithms.
- Bilal_io 5y agoHousing (rent specifically) rised and most likely won't fall back. In Houston rent went up by around 25% in the past 6 months alone. This is extremely serious, considering that housing is one of the most important product people pay for.
- m0llusk 5y agoHousing doesn't go down. So it will take inflation to bring extreme commodity prices down. This is how bubbles work and is why inflation is essential.
- muzani 5y agoWe have a housing bubble popping where I live. Prices dropped a little, about 20%. What really happened was the loan terms became better: no deposit, bank pays 5 years for free, 20% cashback, and so on. Thankfully salary inflation here has been great.
- refurb 5y agoI heard this exact same thing about oil prices in 2006. “$4/gal gas is here to stay! There will never be cheap gas again!” A year later it was $1.26/gal.
- ldbooth 5y ago2 possibilities imo. 1-asset prices reflect inflation due to M2 increase, cpi will catch up. 2-asset prices are up due to low bond yields, bond investors moved into retail assets such as housing (like Blackrock) and this is driving up costs and thus rent. If the fed raises interest rates, the corporate debt levels are unsustainable and a recession will ensue, but housing will return to normal prices as institutional bond purchases resume. If not, more of the same. This is all 2008 and quantitative easing playing out... The fed wants to prevent market busts and as a result will create more drastic busts playing with fire.
- diveanon 5y agoFinding a new job is always the easiest way to get a raise.
- muzani 5y agoIt took me 7 months to get a new job this year, despite being approached by companies twice a week. It's not easy, but was a lot easier than asking for a raise.
- diveanon 5y agoSorry to hear that, I had a pretty different experience this year but maybe I’m an outlier.
- muzani 5y agoNothing to be sorry about, I got a good job and a good raise! But it still consumed all my energy for half a year.
- digitalsushi 5y agoI put my stuff on 'passively looking' 30 days ago and I've had 48 people approach me for scheduling interviews. Even though my stuff makes it pretty clear that I don't work on application health monitoring, site reliability, or any of the other modern stealth phrases for 'you are on call', all 48 of them have been for oncall support positions. It's very easy to get a 6 figure job in IT. It's not very easy to get a job in IT that can promise a 9-5 workday.
- anm89 5y agoKeep in mind the COLA for social security was 5.9% percent this year. Im going to be negotiating off of that figure.
- bigyellow 5y agoThe best thing you can do for your personal and our collective compensation right now is to quit and seek a higher, more equity-based employment offer elsewhere.
- mctaylor 5y agoInflation is just the beginning - I've been trying to ramp up on the relevant economics and I'm developing a picture of what's happening. Focusing on prices I think is a mistake, the issue is beliefs/trust/future expectations. Inflationary fears create a dearth of trust, driving people to demand "more" for "less" (i.e. >1.0 return on the dollar). This creates inflation, which exarcebates inequality, and ultimately prices most people out of the market. Once this occurs, demand implodes and the real pain is the ensuing deflation. Basically what we're seeing is the inevitable collapse of 50 years of supply-side economics (or "Reagonomics" or "Trickle Down Economics", as it's often referred to as). The inevitable result of this is wealth stratification and ultimately demand implosion. The next 10 years should be interesting.
- spot5010 5y agoI am interested in understanding this better. Any references that you can share?
- tonyvu98 5y agoThey announced 6.2% inflation, but I believe the actual number is bigger than that. I found the solution six months ago: Bitcoin. Before that, I was a value investor, and I thought Bitcoin was a scam, a hype. But after I read "The Bitcoin Standard" by Saifedean and went down the rabbit hole, I truly believed Bitcoin is the best store of value. The easiest strategy is dollar-cost averaging Bitcoin. You can learn more about it here: https://dollarcostbitcoin.com/ https://dollarcostbitcoin.com/
- randomopining 5y agoI’m due for a good raise. Been doing senior level work, even better than random seniors on our team. I asked today for a 22-23% raise, plus I believe they’ve already put me in for a promotion. We shall see. I feel like at big corps they want to nickle and dime you. All while there’s people at my rank who do absolutely nothing and submit a PR a month or so.
- kccqzy 5y ago> Have you broached this subject with your company/ boss? Yes. The answer from the company is that they believe in mainstream economists (including those at the Fed) who are saying the inflation is transitory. So compensation will not change beyond the usual salary raises / bonuses / equity refreshes etc.