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For any company loyalists, this should be crystal clear - by and large, your sticking with a single company is costing you some serious salary increases. For al

For any company loyalists, this should be crystal clear - by and large, your sticking with a single company is costing you some serious salary increases. For all the talk, and verbal recognition, there's nothing that compares to an increase in the bottom line. I started out with a start-up, the pay was poor and any benefits or 401k were very very minimal. I put up with it because the work was "interesting". Then I got a call from a recruiter in a FAANG company, and their salary range for the exact same role, started at an 80% increase in baseline salary, with nearly the same again in RSU's and benefits. Then I went into a managerial role with a non-tech company, which was a small increase again, and more lately back into another tech company which has me getting an increase yet again. In ten years I've probably tripled my baseline salary, and total compensation is probably 5 to 10 times what it was for a similar level of effort.

autosharp 4y ago
> Then I went into a managerial role with a non-tech company, which was a small increase again How did you do this? I think it would be hard for me to make the same outside of tech. Tech to managerial role outside of tech doesn't sound like an obvious or easy move.
- jameshush 4y ago
  I made a move like this in the past through a recruiting agency. I was very specific about what I was looking for, and about 4 months later they sent me an oppertunity that looked like a fit, I interviewed then took the job. Doesn’t hurt to be friendly with a few recruiters
- toyg 4y ago
  You get into a para-managerial role in tech first, then leverage the new job title to get a more purely-managerial role elsewhere, emphasizing the organizational elements of your experience. I recently switched from tech to education by emphasizing the educational parts of my previous jobs, which were otherwise very technical.
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  It was surprisingly simple, even though they were non tech (utility company) they still needed data processing, scripting, and some basic ML work, especially in their marketing team. Same kind of work, however to a more credulous senior management team. Their main problem was they didn't know what could be done, let alone how to do it.
izacus 4y ago
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  Nice one - rather than attack the argument that changing jobs increases your salary, an appeal to the masses of what "a massive amount of people" may or may not care to do. Any argument without evidence can be summarily dismissed without evidence. So I argue that a vast majority, a massive amount if you will, of working people do want to increase their salary, basing this on my own goals and those of people I know and worked with over the last decade.
- myownpetard 4y ago
  I wonder what the net effect is on worker wages in our economy as a whole given the seemingly large portion of workers that take this stance? You are essentially relinquishing all negotiating power to the share holders of the company who are more than happy to pocket the salary that you are leaving on the table by giving them an uncompetitive monopoly on your labor. Another poster in here bragging about giving his employer a 50% discount on his labor. Why would I give the shareholders of the company a work for a huge coupon on my life? That is just crazy to me.
  - broast 4y ago
    I personally find it hard to ask for more or job hop because I think we tech workers overpaid. It feels greedy or unethical especially when i compare myself to similarly hard working or top performing peers in other engineering fields and other industries, who do seemingly more important work than me, but get paid less than half of what i get already.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      I understand that it feels uneasy, even guilty, to be paid more compared to those outside of software engineering, or even to swe peers who are in different specializations or at different organizations. But that is an individualistic response to a systemic phenomenon. The tech industry as a whole is overpaid, not just its workers. It’s the greatest beneficiary of the near-zero percent interest rates since the Great Recession, which incentivized capital to chase ever-greater yields, funneling massive amounts of money into tech, creating jobs and raising salaries. Not to mention, tech is a massive lever (software eating the world) that leads to greater business cost savings and higher margins, driving up demand for tech workers, and their salaries. You cannot reverse that trend by simply choosing not to participate in getting paid more. By all means, don’t be motivated in your career solely for higher compensation. But also don’t feel bad for getting paid more. The money you leave on the table will just get taken by some other overpaid engineer, manager, or VC shaving pennies off of their costs anyway. Take the money for the sake of your loved ones, donate it, pay higher taxes if you want to. There’s nothing inherently unethical about it. I would hazard to say, the more problematic situation about the ease of job-hopping in this industry is that it deprioritizes grit and perseverance. There’s always a better-managed organization, more feasible business model, higher quality engineering team for one to jump to when the going gets rough. That’s just as important as the promise of higher pay and title- why bother toiling if there’s always a slightly less dysfunctional org on the other side? So you end up with very transitory, evanescent companies because personnel keep disappearing every couple years. But, I’m not sure if that’s really on the individual contributor to solve either. The question of retention and of building employee loyalty is really the responsibility of management. And with all of the dumb money that’s flowed into the tech industry thanks to interest rates and software being the primer economic lever of the times, companies have less incentive to make necessary changes. They themselves benefit from a very fluid workforce. If you job hop away your boss will just swap in someone who job hopped from another company. So maybe that’s just how it’s going to be until the next recession hits.

autosharp 4y ago

> Then I went into a managerial role with a non-tech company, which was a small increase again How did you do this? I think it would be hard for me to make the same outside of tech. Tech to managerial role outside of tech doesn't sound like an obvious or easy move.

jameshush 4y ago
I made a move like this in the past through a recruiting agency. I was very specific about what I was looking for, and about 4 months later they sent me an oppertunity that looked like a fit, I interviewed then took the job. Doesn’t hurt to be friendly with a few recruiters
toyg 4y ago
You get into a para-managerial role in tech first, then leverage the new job title to get a more purely-managerial role elsewhere, emphasizing the organizational elements of your experience. I recently switched from tech to education by emphasizing the educational parts of my previous jobs, which were otherwise very technical.
Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
It was surprisingly simple, even though they were non tech (utility company) they still needed data processing, scripting, and some basic ML work, especially in their marketing team. Same kind of work, however to a more credulous senior management team. Their main problem was they didn't know what could be done, let alone how to do it.

izacus 4y ago

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
Nice one - rather than attack the argument that changing jobs increases your salary, an appeal to the masses of what "a massive amount of people" may or may not care to do. Any argument without evidence can be summarily dismissed without evidence. So I argue that a vast majority, a massive amount if you will, of working people do want to increase their salary, basing this on my own goals and those of people I know and worked with over the last decade.
myownpetard 4y ago
I wonder what the net effect is on worker wages in our economy as a whole given the seemingly large portion of workers that take this stance? You are essentially relinquishing all negotiating power to the share holders of the company who are more than happy to pocket the salary that you are leaving on the table by giving them an uncompetitive monopoly on your labor. Another poster in here bragging about giving his employer a 50% discount on his labor. Why would I give the shareholders of the company a work for a huge coupon on my life? That is just crazy to me.
- broast 4y ago
  I personally find it hard to ask for more or job hop because I think we tech workers overpaid. It feels greedy or unethical especially when i compare myself to similarly hard working or top performing peers in other engineering fields and other industries, who do seemingly more important work than me, but get paid less than half of what i get already.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    I understand that it feels uneasy, even guilty, to be paid more compared to those outside of software engineering, or even to swe peers who are in different specializations or at different organizations. But that is an individualistic response to a systemic phenomenon. The tech industry as a whole is overpaid, not just its workers. It’s the greatest beneficiary of the near-zero percent interest rates since the Great Recession, which incentivized capital to chase ever-greater yields, funneling massive amounts of money into tech, creating jobs and raising salaries. Not to mention, tech is a massive lever (software eating the world) that leads to greater business cost savings and higher margins, driving up demand for tech workers, and their salaries. You cannot reverse that trend by simply choosing not to participate in getting paid more. By all means, don’t be motivated in your career solely for higher compensation. But also don’t feel bad for getting paid more. The money you leave on the table will just get taken by some other overpaid engineer, manager, or VC shaving pennies off of their costs anyway. Take the money for the sake of your loved ones, donate it, pay higher taxes if you want to. There’s nothing inherently unethical about it. I would hazard to say, the more problematic situation about the ease of job-hopping in this industry is that it deprioritizes grit and perseverance. There’s always a better-managed organization, more feasible business model, higher quality engineering team for one to jump to when the going gets rough. That’s just as important as the promise of higher pay and title- why bother toiling if there’s always a slightly less dysfunctional org on the other side? So you end up with very transitory, evanescent companies because personnel keep disappearing every couple years. But, I’m not sure if that’s really on the individual contributor to solve either. The question of retention and of building employee loyalty is really the responsibility of management. And with all of the dumb money that’s flowed into the tech industry thanks to interest rates and software being the primer economic lever of the times, companies have less incentive to make necessary changes. They themselves benefit from a very fluid workforce. If you job hop away your boss will just swap in someone who job hopped from another company. So maybe that’s just how it’s going to be until the next recession hits.