5 ms·

In my experience HR are never receptive to those types of arguments. If you want a raise the best thing you can do is find a new job.

by tjpnz 5y ago

kelseyfrog 5y ago
The best thing you can do is organize your workplace. Job hopping allows businesses to eat the market at the edges and eventually squeeze those demands out of the labor pool.
- roenxi 5y ago
  Inflation doesn't - fundamentally - change the power balance between employers and employees. Market forces will cause the situation to find a fair market price. If job hopping can't get you better wages, then you probably don't have enough market power to resist if an employer flat-out cuts your pay. Though to try and prevent misunderstandings - I do think inflation is bad for people who are paid wages. Market forces aren't perfect and "market price" is really a band of prices. Inflation pushes all workers to the low end of the band and means if anyone doesn't feel like negotiating they will be pushed in to a bad deal by default.
  - pabs3 5y ago
    Late last century inflation and then wages keeping up with that inflation enabled a generation of folks to pay off their first mortgages quite quickly.
    - skywal_l 5y ago
      Absolutely but this also assumes a fairly "elastic" housing market able to absorb the demand. I am not sure the market is still able to do that with the NYMBYsm and malthusianism around new housing. In high tension area, the price could quickly increase faster than general inflation. I believe CPI does not include house prices.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - mellavora 5y ago
        Risk is that rising inflation raises mortgage rates which makes housing unaffordable. You might be able to continue paying your mortgage because you locked in a low rate, so not see this as a problem (free house!)-- but if for some reason you want or need to sell you might find it more financially challenging than anticipated.
    - refurb 5y ago
      It allowed a very small slice of the population to do that. You basically had to take on a loan prior to the run up in interest rates. If you were born in 1950 you were fucked since rates had skyrocketed by the time you were 20. Just like millennials love to claim boomers had it easy, it was a small slice of the pie that benefited.
    - jnwatson 5y ago
      If you timed it right. Several of my friends’ parents had 18% APR mortgages.
    - roenxi 5y ago
      That is saying a lot less than you might think. Again, consider that the banks employ actuaries - they understand inflation a lot better than the people borrowing the money. They didn't let themselves be the losers here. Inflation doesn't change the actual power balance between different actors, it does make the situation more complex and harder to keep up with. It doesn't create real wealth and it is not responsible for a wealth transfer to wage earners. The idea just lacks a mechanism - for the wealth to come from employers or businesses they have to be ignorant, altruistic and disinterested in money. That seems unlikely. Ditto most other actors. Changing value of money favours people who can continuously adjust to it which isn't a typical wage earner. If a generation gets something for free, they got it from somewhere else. Who lost out here? Why did it need to be inflation to make that happen? If they didn't get it for free, it is unclear why inflation would be necessary in the story instead of incidental.
- Kiro 5y ago
  Look at Sweden. The collectively bargained pay increase was below inflation in all sectors. You should unionize for many reasons but I wouldn't trust it as an efficient tool for pay negotiations.
  - tapland 5y ago
    I've never seen a pay increase above ~2% here in Sweden. Some union agreements allow larger (and lower) changes if the average increase is still the decided upon percentage.
    - the-alt-one 5y ago
      Eh, I'm unionized and had a 13% pay raise. To be fair, they motivated that by saying that I should get up to speed with other engineer's raises instead of staying at a junior level (yes, I'm bragging).
      - MrPatan 5y ago
        What I'm reading here is the union kept your initial wages 13% below market
        skinkestek 5y ago
        Not unionized[1], but this is something I'd accuse unions of. [1]: because no uninon ever manages to not try to meddle in international politics. Gandalf in LOTR had it right: he did not want power because he knew he would be tempted to try to do a lot of good things.
        Jochim 5y ago
        This sounds like you're arguing workers should leave things to their "betters"...
        skinkestek 5y ago
- willcipriano 5y ago
  I've never gotten a raise from organizing my workforce but I've gotten many by hopping jobs. Can you tell me more about the workplaces you've organized? How did you start to go about it?
- engineer_22 5y ago
  Unions dont help new employees or high achievers. Unions help the ones with "the most time in".
- 0xy 5y ago
  Unions are overwhelmingly unpopular in tech, for good reason. Nobody wants to work with that incompetent unfireable employee who's protected, or getting paid the same as someone who produces half the results you do at the same level. Unfortunately unions protect the incompetent and punish the successful (by refusing them the ability to negotiate). It's most pronounced in the heavy unionized industries like teaching and auto manufacturing. There will always be developers who produce the results of 10, 100 or 500 developers single-handedly. Unions kneecap them, like they kneecap outstanding teachers by paying them the same as the teachers phoning it in every day.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> If you want a raise the best thing you can do is find a new job. Note that this doesn't always even involve taking it. Go get a job offer that pays better and bring it to your boss. If they want to match it, great. If they don't, bye.
- erfgh 5y ago
  That won't work unless you're a soccer/basketball/whatever star and probably not even then.
  - spideymans 5y ago
    Of course, anecdotes are anecdotal, but it worked for a coworker of mine. He announced he was leaving our company for Amazon (which paid substantially more), and we even had a whole Friday goodbye party with cake and balloons. The next Monday we came into the office, surprised to see him still working for us. It turns out that over the weekend he somehow convinced management to match and exceed Amazon's offer. His "trick" for getting a raise is that our whole dev-ops setup was unworkable without him. Management hadn't come up with contingencies for his inevitable departure, and thus he held all the leverage in salary negotiations.
- onion2k 5y ago
  From the other side, whenever a member of my team has come to me asking to match an offer I've always refused and wished them well in their new role. If someone is unhappy enough to start job hunting rather than talking to me then it's a clear sign that they'll leave soon regardless of any pay rise. Psychologically, every pay increase makes someone happy for a short time, and then they get used to it and they start to wonder if they should have asked for more, or they focus on other reasons why they don't like the role they're in and wonder if the other one would have been more fulfilling. If you match an offer, or even beat it, the person is likely to have left in a year anyway.
  - skywal_l 5y ago
    And when someone come to you asking for a raise, how often do you give it?
mission_failed 5y ago
The best thing you can do is form a union
- golemiprague 5y ago
  Unions are mainly good in monopolies and government companies which sucks money out of trapped tax payers. It is not so good when it is a private fast paced company that need to compete against the world and where the employees themselves need to compete against people from all over the world. A software company is not a port.
alkonaut 5y ago
The question can be asked from the management too. "Since inflation is 6%, isn't the 2% raises going to mean our employees leave us?".
mytailorisrich 5y ago
HR does not decide pay raises. HR is in charge of anything. At most they collect data from market surveys to advise management and they advise management on ways to reduce attrition.
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
> If you want a raise the best thing you can do is find a new job. It is true, but i am not sure it is a good long term strategy, i suspect that too much job hopping doesn't look good on the resume. Also changing jobs becomes harder with age, i am fifty one years old, and last time around, when forced to look for a new job, I found that it was quite a bit of a challenge (being said that, i need to feed my family, so that i really need a raise :-( )

In my experience HR are never receptive to those types of arguments. If you want a raise the best thing you can do is find a new job.

by tjpnz 5y ago

In my experience HR are never receptive to those types of arguments. If you want a raise the best thing you can do is find a new job.

kelseyfrog 5y ago

The best thing you can do is organize your workplace. Job hopping allows businesses to eat the market at the edges and eventually squeeze those demands out of the labor pool.

roenxi 5y ago
Inflation doesn't - fundamentally - change the power balance between employers and employees. Market forces will cause the situation to find a fair market price. If job hopping can't get you better wages, then you probably don't have enough market power to resist if an employer flat-out cuts your pay. Though to try and prevent misunderstandings - I do think inflation is bad for people who are paid wages. Market forces aren't perfect and "market price" is really a band of prices. Inflation pushes all workers to the low end of the band and means if anyone doesn't feel like negotiating they will be pushed in to a bad deal by default.
- pabs3 5y ago
  Late last century inflation and then wages keeping up with that inflation enabled a generation of folks to pay off their first mortgages quite quickly.
  - skywal_l 5y ago
    Absolutely but this also assumes a fairly "elastic" housing market able to absorb the demand. I am not sure the market is still able to do that with the NYMBYsm and malthusianism around new housing. In high tension area, the price could quickly increase faster than general inflation. I believe CPI does not include house prices.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - mellavora 5y ago
      Risk is that rising inflation raises mortgage rates which makes housing unaffordable. You might be able to continue paying your mortgage because you locked in a low rate, so not see this as a problem (free house!)-- but if for some reason you want or need to sell you might find it more financially challenging than anticipated.
  - refurb 5y ago
    It allowed a very small slice of the population to do that. You basically had to take on a loan prior to the run up in interest rates. If you were born in 1950 you were fucked since rates had skyrocketed by the time you were 20. Just like millennials love to claim boomers had it easy, it was a small slice of the pie that benefited.
  - jnwatson 5y ago
    If you timed it right. Several of my friends’ parents had 18% APR mortgages.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    That is saying a lot less than you might think. Again, consider that the banks employ actuaries - they understand inflation a lot better than the people borrowing the money. They didn't let themselves be the losers here. Inflation doesn't change the actual power balance between different actors, it does make the situation more complex and harder to keep up with. It doesn't create real wealth and it is not responsible for a wealth transfer to wage earners. The idea just lacks a mechanism - for the wealth to come from employers or businesses they have to be ignorant, altruistic and disinterested in money. That seems unlikely. Ditto most other actors. Changing value of money favours people who can continuously adjust to it which isn't a typical wage earner. If a generation gets something for free, they got it from somewhere else. Who lost out here? Why did it need to be inflation to make that happen? If they didn't get it for free, it is unclear why inflation would be necessary in the story instead of incidental.
Kiro 5y ago
Look at Sweden. The collectively bargained pay increase was below inflation in all sectors. You should unionize for many reasons but I wouldn't trust it as an efficient tool for pay negotiations.
- tapland 5y ago
  I've never seen a pay increase above ~2% here in Sweden. Some union agreements allow larger (and lower) changes if the average increase is still the decided upon percentage.
  - the-alt-one 5y ago
    Eh, I'm unionized and had a 13% pay raise. To be fair, they motivated that by saying that I should get up to speed with other engineer's raises instead of staying at a junior level (yes, I'm bragging).
    - MrPatan 5y ago
      What I'm reading here is the union kept your initial wages 13% below market
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        Not unionized[1], but this is something I'd accuse unions of. [1]: because no uninon ever manages to not try to meddle in international politics. Gandalf in LOTR had it right: he did not want power because he knew he would be tempted to try to do a lot of good things.
        Jochim 5y ago
        This sounds like you're arguing workers should leave things to their "betters"...
        skinkestek 5y ago
willcipriano 5y ago
I've never gotten a raise from organizing my workforce but I've gotten many by hopping jobs. Can you tell me more about the workplaces you've organized? How did you start to go about it?
engineer_22 5y ago
Unions dont help new employees or high achievers. Unions help the ones with "the most time in".
0xy 5y ago
Unions are overwhelmingly unpopular in tech, for good reason. Nobody wants to work with that incompetent unfireable employee who's protected, or getting paid the same as someone who produces half the results you do at the same level. Unfortunately unions protect the incompetent and punish the successful (by refusing them the ability to negotiate). It's most pronounced in the heavy unionized industries like teaching and auto manufacturing. There will always be developers who produce the results of 10, 100 or 500 developers single-handedly. Unions kneecap them, like they kneecap outstanding teachers by paying them the same as the teachers phoning it in every day.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> If you want a raise the best thing you can do is find a new job. Note that this doesn't always even involve taking it. Go get a job offer that pays better and bring it to your boss. If they want to match it, great. If they don't, bye.

erfgh 5y ago
That won't work unless you're a soccer/basketball/whatever star and probably not even then.
- spideymans 5y ago
  Of course, anecdotes are anecdotal, but it worked for a coworker of mine. He announced he was leaving our company for Amazon (which paid substantially more), and we even had a whole Friday goodbye party with cake and balloons. The next Monday we came into the office, surprised to see him still working for us. It turns out that over the weekend he somehow convinced management to match and exceed Amazon's offer. His "trick" for getting a raise is that our whole dev-ops setup was unworkable without him. Management hadn't come up with contingencies for his inevitable departure, and thus he held all the leverage in salary negotiations.
onion2k 5y ago
From the other side, whenever a member of my team has come to me asking to match an offer I've always refused and wished them well in their new role. If someone is unhappy enough to start job hunting rather than talking to me then it's a clear sign that they'll leave soon regardless of any pay rise. Psychologically, every pay increase makes someone happy for a short time, and then they get used to it and they start to wonder if they should have asked for more, or they focus on other reasons why they don't like the role they're in and wonder if the other one would have been more fulfilling. If you match an offer, or even beat it, the person is likely to have left in a year anyway.
- skywal_l 5y ago
  And when someone come to you asking for a raise, how often do you give it?

mission_failed 5y ago

The best thing you can do is form a union

golemiprague 5y ago
Unions are mainly good in monopolies and government companies which sucks money out of trapped tax payers. It is not so good when it is a private fast paced company that need to compete against the world and where the employees themselves need to compete against people from all over the world. A software company is not a port.

alkonaut 5y ago

The question can be asked from the management too. "Since inflation is 6%, isn't the 2% raises going to mean our employees leave us?".

mytailorisrich 5y ago

HR does not decide pay raises. HR is in charge of anything. At most they collect data from market surveys to advise management and they advise management on ways to reduce attrition.

MichaelMoser123 5y ago

> If you want a raise the best thing you can do is find a new job. It is true, but i am not sure it is a good long term strategy, i suspect that too much job hopping doesn't look good on the resume. Also changing jobs becomes harder with age, i am fifty one years old, and last time around, when forced to look for a new job, I found that it was quite a bit of a challenge (being said that, i need to feed my family, so that i really need a raise :-( )