6 ms·

It could be that I’m getting old, became a parent and working remotely from the middle of nowhere, but do I need to get to the next level? I really wouldn’t mi

It could be that I’m getting old, became a parent and working remotely from the middle of nowhere, but do I need to get to the next level? I really wouldn’t mind keeping my current salary, adjust it for inflation and I’m good. I don’t care about my title, I don’t want to manage people, I don’t want to work harder than I need to. I just want to pay off my mortgage, have some leftover money for vacations, have time for my family. I really don’t care “what my impact could look like at the next level”.

SirHound 2y ago
That’s because “impact” is generally code for making other people rich. If you’re in a small enough company for your impact to matter, chances are your stock options are still chips, which you might never get to cash in. If the company is post IPO then chances are your impact will never move the needle materially for yourself. Income is really the only thing that matters. When you do the same job and aren’t getting inflationary bumps then there’s a serious issue.
- zooweemama 2y ago
  > “impact” is generally code for making other people rich I love this and am going to reuse it!
- sabellito 2y ago
  I don't understand the shallow cynicism. Isn't everything we do at a company in order to make the owner and shareholders richer?
  - jerrygenser 2y ago
    In capitalism, that's how it's designed, yes. Everything else is "religion" to distract from this fact.
  - bdndndndbve 2y ago
    There's nothing shallow about it. Companies don't make "levelling up" worthwhile unless you have your ego invested in your title in an unhealthy way. If you hang out at senior+/staff level you can just plug away until retirement.
    - kyawzazaw 2y ago
      i want to shorten that
  - jameshart 2y ago
    Wait a minute… are you telling me the company isn’t just paying me to code because they believe in sponsoring the creation of technological beauty?
LittleTimothy 2y ago
These frameworks serve 3 purposes. The first purpose is to have something concrete to point at so your employees don't sue you over unfair practices - they create a paper trail for management to operate and build evidence that what they are doing follows a meritocratic process (whether that's true or not is irrelevant, it's purely a legal concern). The second purpose is to motivate employees who want progression by setting up a goal posts for them to shoot for so that they try harder and don't leave, but vague and subjective enough to deny you the promotion for a least a cycle or two. The third is that there's all these bloody HR and middle management people hanging around and they need something to do. So the only way this process is relevant to you is that your manager might want to look good to their manager by demonstrating that they're "developing" your "talent". It's a nice favour to your boss to let them pretend their job isn't totally meaningless in this respect, but I'm in the same boat as you, I couldn't care less about progression.
- sabellito 2y ago
  I've worked in companies with similar frameworks both as a dev and as manager, and it was great. Everything has issues, but the framework gave useful guidance. Sorry you've worked for such terrible companies.
  - LittleTimothy 2y ago
    I'm not saying it doesn't work. Especially for early careers people, it works absolutely fine because the requirements are reasonable and the scope is largely within the employees control. For later stage employees, it's usefulness tales off massively. When you get to senior levels your ability to fulfil the requirements gets further and further out of your hands and often if you want to pursue the promotional criteria you're actually going to have to deprioritize delivering value to the business to prioritize engineering situations where you can meet the criteria. A lot of the senior goals are basically politics.
- 0xEF 2y ago
  I'm also in the same boat as both of you, but I'm not sure I agree with the idea that I need to do a bunch of extra work to prove some nebulous concept like "impact at the next level" or whatever buzzwoo we want to say in place of that. If the manager wants to develop my talent, then they need to get off their over-priced rear ends and do so. I feel like making everyone at the lower levels shoulder all of the accountability is the exact opposite of what we need to do when it comes to improving operations across the board.
tikkabhuna 2y ago
I'm in the UK and since buying a house, I really feel no need to keep going higher. Property pricing in the UK is extremely damaging. If I found a job at a higher level that I thought I'd really enjoy and that I'd be good at, I'll be interested, but otherwise I'm content.
- mk89 2y ago
  Well, you could think about making more money for retirement. Not saying you need to get crazy about it, though. I am not sure how the hell we will be able to manage that (retirement) with the lifestyle we got today. Not that I am rich, far from it, but I am not sure I want to ask my kids for help... and that seems more and more the direction we're moving in.
  - jokab 2y ago
    ..not sure I want to ask my kids for help... I shiver at the thought. Culturally, as a Filipino kid, everyone knows that kids are indebted to the parents for them being born. Wtf. I do help my parents because I love them, they dont ask but they don't need to. But I will not ask help from my kids, they dont owe me anything. We live in the UK now, but my wife and I will just have to retire to the Philippines where everything is a whole lot cheaper.
  - tikkabhuna 2y ago
    You're right. My post was mainly focusing on expenses and living standards. I'm already contributing above average to my pension and I'm hoping that any above inflation payrises I do get go towards retiring early.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    > I am not sure how the hell we will be able to manage that (retirement) with the lifestyle we got today Then don’t. I’m 50 and my wife (48) spent the last four years “decontenting” our lives. I started working remotely in 2020 and we sold our big house in the burbs (for twice what we had it built for in 2016) after our youngest graduated and downsized to a condo in state tax free Florida. We are now down to one car and our fixed expenses are a nothing burger. She also “retired” at 44 and spends time on her passion projects. We travel a lot and have done the digital nomad thing for a year flying one way trips across the country. In other words, when I do retire, we will already have cleared most of our bucket list.
rockyj 2y ago
I am in the same boat. Specially after delivering multiple high impact systems and still getting the talk - "This is great, but not enough for the next promotion". So after a while I just realized that these levels are artificial and meaningless to a large extent.
- brightball 2y ago
  Yep. Corporate speak can rationalize anything no matter what you’ve done.
- LtWorf 2y ago
  If they just don't promote it can be ok (if they give inflation raises), if they promote every other slacker but you I'd start being resentful.
- jameshart 2y ago
  Doesn’t sound like you are ‘in the same boat’. The OP said they don’t care about promotion to the next level they just want to keep getting paid to do the same job. You seem to want to be recognized for your contribution with increased responsibility. Those aren’t the same thing, even if the way both of you are reacting is with a similar kind of cynical dismissal of the idea that a ‘career framework’ can help you with your needs. Which is weird because it honestly sounds like both of you are looking for a clear career framework. Either one in OP’s case where it’s clear what ‘coasting’ looks like - meeting expectations for a level year after year and not striving for promotion; or one in your case where it’s very clear to you what you need to do to reach the next level. You can object to the implementation of the promotion policy under a framework, but your problem is not with the concept of a career framework - if there were no guidance for job levels you would be in an even worse position when it comes to complaining about your promotion prospects.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    > You seem to want to be recognized for your contribution with increased responsibility. But you don’t need a “promotion” for that. Even when I was at BigTech, there was nothing stopping me from volunteering for a more impactful project. No one was going to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to do it because of my level. I had a junior consultant/returning intern that I mentored as an intern and then when they came back over a smaller project that usually would not have gone to someone at their level. They had proven to the department that we could trust them to both do the work and be in front of the customer. I was there as a backstop if needed. But when we flew fk the customers site, I intentionally stayed in the background and deferred to them.
ravenstine 2y ago
Career frameworks at corporations should be mostly ignored. They are thinly veiled attempts to extract more work from the same employees. This is why "there's always room for improvement" is seemingly infinite. Your performance reviews can be stellar, BUT you surely must want to sacrifice more of your time and mental health to move to the next rung, right?
- scarface_74 2y ago
  If as you are moving up in you career and you are doing “more” work and not “different” work, you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re failing at some combination of knowing how to delegate, how to communicate trade offs between time, cost and requirements and how to prioritize
- ebiester 2y ago
  So, yes and no. It takes effort to become better than you are at your current level. To get past junior, that should happen by osmosis. For some people, talent alone will take them to senior. For others, they will need to put in the time to learn how do work more efficiently. Consider that it will take a senior developer 20 hours to do a job a junior might take 80 and the quality will be better for the senior. In turn, the senior may only code 20 hours a week and spend the other 20 in something that might take a staff engineer 5 hours. The problem is that skill acquisition takes time.
  - wiseowise 2y ago
    I have a guy at work that is senior in everything but title. His manager uses "framework" to extort him. This has been going on for at least a year.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      I have never gotten a “promotion” in 28 years of working across 10 jobs. I’ve always changed jobs. It’s a lot easier to get a “promotion” as part of an interview when you control the narrative than going through the promo process. Besides because of salary compression and inversion, even if you do get an internal promotion, you will probably make less than someone coming in at your level.
martythemaniak 2y ago
Because you're expected to get to the next level in good time, otherwise you're not good enough and will be fired. The level you can stay at is typically the level below Staff.
lcedp 2y ago
> do I need to get to the next level? It depends on the company. A few companies have a terminal level that is approximately equivalent to Dropbox's IC3/IC4. This level does not involve managing people, but it does require owning projects that can span across several teams.
chris222 2y ago
Dropbox does have a terminal level which I think was IC4 when I was there. On the other hand they have recently done a layoff round every 1-2 years and if you are not a growing employee with a higher salary you could be at risk.
deergomoo 2y ago
Same for me. I enjoy what I do, but if I didn’t need the money, I sure as wouldn’t be doing it for someone else. I’d just be working on whatever projects I found interesting. Career goals? Keep things as they are. Work is only something I have to do to have a decent life the rest of the time. Unfortunately it feels very difficult to say that in earshot of one’s employer without being branded some sort of burnout slacker, even though I do work hard and to a high standard.
jordanmorgan10 2y ago
I CAN'T tell you how much I felt your comment. This about drove me wild in my career - dealing with the "need to level up" and having different rotating Ems who each get differing pictures of what that should look like. I just wanted to be left alone (career/rank up wise) to do great work.
devjab 2y ago
These tools and many other from the HR handbook are mainly meant as communication tools. For some employees it's easy to talk about their motivations and goals within your company. With other employees you'll have to pull an answer out of them and it'll be a "yes" or a "no", I mean, it's obviously not that bad but some employees are really bad at talking about these things. Some managers are also very bad at it. The tools help frame the context for 1-on-1's where you need to talk about what sort of path an employee wants to go on over the next year. Sometimes these tools are misused, for some people here on HN, that will probably even be the only way they have interacted with them. As far as your personal motivation goes. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be an engineer. That doesn't mean you have to be stagnant though. A career path could be there to make sure you don't get bored, and then revisited to keep up. That is if it's done right. I'm not sure this dropbox engineering career framework is really very good. I glossed over the SWE part and it's so ridicilously vague that it will likely depend completely on the manager applying it. So in some cases it'll probably be a good communications tool and in others it'll be used as for employee metrics. A good manager would allow you to do what you want to do, while keeping you on course with what the company wants. If that means leaving you to do whatever you do for a while, then that is fine. Bad managers will not do this, but at least managers tend to change often enough that you can mostly just tell them what they want to hear and then wait for them to be replaced. I personally wouldn't pick a company like Dropbox to "just do" engineering though. Too many hot-shots, too much bullshit, it's much easier to get some real work done in boring industries like banking or energy.
pfooti 2y ago
I'm a line manager and tech lead at a big company. I have both direct reports and mentees that don't report to me but I'm helping with their trajectory who have that attitude ("I'm fine where I am") and it's mostly fine with some caveats. One: you may actually be doing really well and deserve a promotion (or it would be relatively easy to get) but your imposter syndrome is blocking you from realizing this. Two: you may not even be doing that well at your current level- promotion is out of reach, but we actually need to make sure you don't get out on a PIP or something. Not everyone is good at recognizing this in themselves. (Similar problem of metacognition, I suspect to point one). Three: there is usually not enough L+1 work to go around on any given team, especially one in big companies that have been slowing down hiring juniors (if all the level 1 get promoted to 2 and not replaced, eventually the system will be too heavy). So this is mostly good, but if you don't communicate active interest in promotion to your manager, you're likely to get the least interesting (for some value of interesting, let's say at a minimum least promotable) work. You may be fine with this, and as a manager I'm okay with it- someone has to do it and if I have some reports who aren't striving but are still solid, I can give them stuff to do and worry about the promotability of the reports who are likely to leave if they feel their trajectory is slowing down. EDIT: the fourth caveat is, I'm just a line manager at some place. I don't speak for leadership (they may want to lay off all the non strivers, who knows) or even other managers.
pknomad 2y ago
You do not but I feel like many places have the element of getting "pushed up or pushed out". I'm in a similar boat but I haven't seen any place keep up with inflation without some kind of promotion or bonuses.
SomeHacker44 2y ago
As an entrepreneur, 25 year manager and now mid level IC employee of a big tech firm... Good for you. As a manager I always told people I would kill for a team of people mostly composed of folks happy with what they are doing. It is sooo hard to manage a team of people where most are striving for advancement, especially when that cannot come soon enough for them (and especially when they do not believe they are not there yet). I am trying to be this way, as I do personally love the work, but I would like one and maybe two promotions for the improved earnings and additional autonomy it would provide.
igleria 2y ago
> adjust it for inflation and I’m good If an employer offers this they are up there in employee retention for sure.
insaneisnotfree 2y ago
Totally agree. Working as an employee you won't ever get the money they get as directors and even as owners

SirHound 2y ago

That’s because “impact” is generally code for making other people rich. If you’re in a small enough company for your impact to matter, chances are your stock options are still chips, which you might never get to cash in. If the company is post IPO then chances are your impact will never move the needle materially for yourself. Income is really the only thing that matters. When you do the same job and aren’t getting inflationary bumps then there’s a serious issue.

zooweemama 2y ago
> “impact” is generally code for making other people rich I love this and am going to reuse it!
sabellito 2y ago
I don't understand the shallow cynicism. Isn't everything we do at a company in order to make the owner and shareholders richer?
- jerrygenser 2y ago
  In capitalism, that's how it's designed, yes. Everything else is "religion" to distract from this fact.
- bdndndndbve 2y ago
  There's nothing shallow about it. Companies don't make "levelling up" worthwhile unless you have your ego invested in your title in an unhealthy way. If you hang out at senior+/staff level you can just plug away until retirement.
  - kyawzazaw 2y ago
    i want to shorten that
- jameshart 2y ago
  Wait a minute… are you telling me the company isn’t just paying me to code because they believe in sponsoring the creation of technological beauty?

LittleTimothy 2y ago

These frameworks serve 3 purposes. The first purpose is to have something concrete to point at so your employees don't sue you over unfair practices - they create a paper trail for management to operate and build evidence that what they are doing follows a meritocratic process (whether that's true or not is irrelevant, it's purely a legal concern). The second purpose is to motivate employees who want progression by setting up a goal posts for them to shoot for so that they try harder and don't leave, but vague and subjective enough to deny you the promotion for a least a cycle or two. The third is that there's all these bloody HR and middle management people hanging around and they need something to do. So the only way this process is relevant to you is that your manager might want to look good to their manager by demonstrating that they're "developing" your "talent". It's a nice favour to your boss to let them pretend their job isn't totally meaningless in this respect, but I'm in the same boat as you, I couldn't care less about progression.

sabellito 2y ago
I've worked in companies with similar frameworks both as a dev and as manager, and it was great. Everything has issues, but the framework gave useful guidance. Sorry you've worked for such terrible companies.
- LittleTimothy 2y ago
  I'm not saying it doesn't work. Especially for early careers people, it works absolutely fine because the requirements are reasonable and the scope is largely within the employees control. For later stage employees, it's usefulness tales off massively. When you get to senior levels your ability to fulfil the requirements gets further and further out of your hands and often if you want to pursue the promotional criteria you're actually going to have to deprioritize delivering value to the business to prioritize engineering situations where you can meet the criteria. A lot of the senior goals are basically politics.
0xEF 2y ago
I'm also in the same boat as both of you, but I'm not sure I agree with the idea that I need to do a bunch of extra work to prove some nebulous concept like "impact at the next level" or whatever buzzwoo we want to say in place of that. If the manager wants to develop my talent, then they need to get off their over-priced rear ends and do so. I feel like making everyone at the lower levels shoulder all of the accountability is the exact opposite of what we need to do when it comes to improving operations across the board.

tikkabhuna 2y ago

I'm in the UK and since buying a house, I really feel no need to keep going higher. Property pricing in the UK is extremely damaging. If I found a job at a higher level that I thought I'd really enjoy and that I'd be good at, I'll be interested, but otherwise I'm content.

mk89 2y ago
Well, you could think about making more money for retirement. Not saying you need to get crazy about it, though. I am not sure how the hell we will be able to manage that (retirement) with the lifestyle we got today. Not that I am rich, far from it, but I am not sure I want to ask my kids for help... and that seems more and more the direction we're moving in.
- jokab 2y ago
  ..not sure I want to ask my kids for help... I shiver at the thought. Culturally, as a Filipino kid, everyone knows that kids are indebted to the parents for them being born. Wtf. I do help my parents because I love them, they dont ask but they don't need to. But I will not ask help from my kids, they dont owe me anything. We live in the UK now, but my wife and I will just have to retire to the Philippines where everything is a whole lot cheaper.
- tikkabhuna 2y ago
  You're right. My post was mainly focusing on expenses and living standards. I'm already contributing above average to my pension and I'm hoping that any above inflation payrises I do get go towards retiring early.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  > I am not sure how the hell we will be able to manage that (retirement) with the lifestyle we got today Then don’t. I’m 50 and my wife (48) spent the last four years “decontenting” our lives. I started working remotely in 2020 and we sold our big house in the burbs (for twice what we had it built for in 2016) after our youngest graduated and downsized to a condo in state tax free Florida. We are now down to one car and our fixed expenses are a nothing burger. She also “retired” at 44 and spends time on her passion projects. We travel a lot and have done the digital nomad thing for a year flying one way trips across the country. In other words, when I do retire, we will already have cleared most of our bucket list.

rockyj 2y ago

I am in the same boat. Specially after delivering multiple high impact systems and still getting the talk - "This is great, but not enough for the next promotion". So after a while I just realized that these levels are artificial and meaningless to a large extent.

brightball 2y ago
Yep. Corporate speak can rationalize anything no matter what you’ve done.
LtWorf 2y ago
If they just don't promote it can be ok (if they give inflation raises), if they promote every other slacker but you I'd start being resentful.
jameshart 2y ago
Doesn’t sound like you are ‘in the same boat’. The OP said they don’t care about promotion to the next level they just want to keep getting paid to do the same job. You seem to want to be recognized for your contribution with increased responsibility. Those aren’t the same thing, even if the way both of you are reacting is with a similar kind of cynical dismissal of the idea that a ‘career framework’ can help you with your needs. Which is weird because it honestly sounds like both of you are looking for a clear career framework. Either one in OP’s case where it’s clear what ‘coasting’ looks like - meeting expectations for a level year after year and not striving for promotion; or one in your case where it’s very clear to you what you need to do to reach the next level. You can object to the implementation of the promotion policy under a framework, but your problem is not with the concept of a career framework - if there were no guidance for job levels you would be in an even worse position when it comes to complaining about your promotion prospects.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  > You seem to want to be recognized for your contribution with increased responsibility. But you don’t need a “promotion” for that. Even when I was at BigTech, there was nothing stopping me from volunteering for a more impactful project. No one was going to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to do it because of my level. I had a junior consultant/returning intern that I mentored as an intern and then when they came back over a smaller project that usually would not have gone to someone at their level. They had proven to the department that we could trust them to both do the work and be in front of the customer. I was there as a backstop if needed. But when we flew fk the customers site, I intentionally stayed in the background and deferred to them.

ravenstine 2y ago

Career frameworks at corporations should be mostly ignored. They are thinly veiled attempts to extract more work from the same employees. This is why "there's always room for improvement" is seemingly infinite. Your performance reviews can be stellar, BUT you surely must want to sacrifice more of your time and mental health to move to the next rung, right?

scarface_74 2y ago
If as you are moving up in you career and you are doing “more” work and not “different” work, you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re failing at some combination of knowing how to delegate, how to communicate trade offs between time, cost and requirements and how to prioritize
ebiester 2y ago
So, yes and no. It takes effort to become better than you are at your current level. To get past junior, that should happen by osmosis. For some people, talent alone will take them to senior. For others, they will need to put in the time to learn how do work more efficiently. Consider that it will take a senior developer 20 hours to do a job a junior might take 80 and the quality will be better for the senior. In turn, the senior may only code 20 hours a week and spend the other 20 in something that might take a staff engineer 5 hours. The problem is that skill acquisition takes time.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  I have a guy at work that is senior in everything but title. His manager uses "framework" to extort him. This has been going on for at least a year.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    I have never gotten a “promotion” in 28 years of working across 10 jobs. I’ve always changed jobs. It’s a lot easier to get a “promotion” as part of an interview when you control the narrative than going through the promo process. Besides because of salary compression and inversion, even if you do get an internal promotion, you will probably make less than someone coming in at your level.

martythemaniak 2y ago

Because you're expected to get to the next level in good time, otherwise you're not good enough and will be fired. The level you can stay at is typically the level below Staff.

lcedp 2y ago

> do I need to get to the next level? It depends on the company. A few companies have a terminal level that is approximately equivalent to Dropbox's IC3/IC4. This level does not involve managing people, but it does require owning projects that can span across several teams.

chris222 2y ago

Dropbox does have a terminal level which I think was IC4 when I was there. On the other hand they have recently done a layoff round every 1-2 years and if you are not a growing employee with a higher salary you could be at risk.

deergomoo 2y ago

Same for me. I enjoy what I do, but if I didn’t need the money, I sure as wouldn’t be doing it for someone else. I’d just be working on whatever projects I found interesting. Career goals? Keep things as they are. Work is only something I have to do to have a decent life the rest of the time. Unfortunately it feels very difficult to say that in earshot of one’s employer without being branded some sort of burnout slacker, even though I do work hard and to a high standard.

jordanmorgan10 2y ago

I CAN'T tell you how much I felt your comment. This about drove me wild in my career - dealing with the "need to level up" and having different rotating Ems who each get differing pictures of what that should look like. I just wanted to be left alone (career/rank up wise) to do great work.

devjab 2y ago

These tools and many other from the HR handbook are mainly meant as communication tools. For some employees it's easy to talk about their motivations and goals within your company. With other employees you'll have to pull an answer out of them and it'll be a "yes" or a "no", I mean, it's obviously not that bad but some employees are really bad at talking about these things. Some managers are also very bad at it. The tools help frame the context for 1-on-1's where you need to talk about what sort of path an employee wants to go on over the next year. Sometimes these tools are misused, for some people here on HN, that will probably even be the only way they have interacted with them. As far as your personal motivation goes. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be an engineer. That doesn't mean you have to be stagnant though. A career path could be there to make sure you don't get bored, and then revisited to keep up. That is if it's done right. I'm not sure this dropbox engineering career framework is really very good. I glossed over the SWE part and it's so ridicilously vague that it will likely depend completely on the manager applying it. So in some cases it'll probably be a good communications tool and in others it'll be used as for employee metrics. A good manager would allow you to do what you want to do, while keeping you on course with what the company wants. If that means leaving you to do whatever you do for a while, then that is fine. Bad managers will not do this, but at least managers tend to change often enough that you can mostly just tell them what they want to hear and then wait for them to be replaced. I personally wouldn't pick a company like Dropbox to "just do" engineering though. Too many hot-shots, too much bullshit, it's much easier to get some real work done in boring industries like banking or energy.

pfooti 2y ago

I'm a line manager and tech lead at a big company. I have both direct reports and mentees that don't report to me but I'm helping with their trajectory who have that attitude ("I'm fine where I am") and it's mostly fine with some caveats. One: you may actually be doing really well and deserve a promotion (or it would be relatively easy to get) but your imposter syndrome is blocking you from realizing this. Two: you may not even be doing that well at your current level- promotion is out of reach, but we actually need to make sure you don't get out on a PIP or something. Not everyone is good at recognizing this in themselves. (Similar problem of metacognition, I suspect to point one). Three: there is usually not enough L+1 work to go around on any given team, especially one in big companies that have been slowing down hiring juniors (if all the level 1 get promoted to 2 and not replaced, eventually the system will be too heavy). So this is mostly good, but if you don't communicate active interest in promotion to your manager, you're likely to get the least interesting (for some value of interesting, let's say at a minimum least promotable) work. You may be fine with this, and as a manager I'm okay with it- someone has to do it and if I have some reports who aren't striving but are still solid, I can give them stuff to do and worry about the promotability of the reports who are likely to leave if they feel their trajectory is slowing down. EDIT: the fourth caveat is, I'm just a line manager at some place. I don't speak for leadership (they may want to lay off all the non strivers, who knows) or even other managers.

pknomad 2y ago

You do not but I feel like many places have the element of getting "pushed up or pushed out". I'm in a similar boat but I haven't seen any place keep up with inflation without some kind of promotion or bonuses.

SomeHacker44 2y ago

As an entrepreneur, 25 year manager and now mid level IC employee of a big tech firm... Good for you. As a manager I always told people I would kill for a team of people mostly composed of folks happy with what they are doing. It is sooo hard to manage a team of people where most are striving for advancement, especially when that cannot come soon enough for them (and especially when they do not believe they are not there yet). I am trying to be this way, as I do personally love the work, but I would like one and maybe two promotions for the improved earnings and additional autonomy it would provide.

igleria 2y ago

> adjust it for inflation and I’m good If an employer offers this they are up there in employee retention for sure.

insaneisnotfree 2y ago

Totally agree. Working as an employee you won't ever get the money they get as directors and even as owners