14 ms·

Step One: Go find a job at a competing firm, because that's the only way you'll get a meaningful raise.

by s73v3r 11y ago

lambdasquirrel 11y ago
I can't agree with this more. As much as I sympathize with entrepreneurs and managers having trouble hiring engineers in this current environment, I feel like "they" brought it on themselves because wages were probably below what they should've been for years, and because of that, supply became depressed. Now that a lot more infrastructure and tooling is in place, we're seeing the effects of that prolonged depressed supply. It's easy (relatively) to hire junior devs, and much harder to hire senior devs. And even still, I talk to senior devs who have trouble getting a raise. I'm like... ok... well I hear X is hiring.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > I can't agree with this more. As much as I sympathize with entrepreneurs and managers having trouble hiring engineers in this current environment, I feel like "they" brought it on themselves because wages were probably below what they should've been for years, and because of that, supply became depressed. Correction: they are below what people of the quality they want are willing to work for. There are plenty of engineers willing to work for those salaries; the vast majority get rejected. Whether these entrepreneurs and managers actually need the level of quality they are seeking is a subject for a different religious debate.
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    > Whether these entrepreneurs and managers actually need the level of quality they are seeking is a subject for a different religious debate. I'd say its more accurate to say "The quality of engineers isn't effectively determined in most hiring processes."
- sanderjd 11y ago
  What I don't understand is that the X that is hiring likely also has a bunch of senior devs who are having trouble getting a raise. It would be far more efficient to give raises to current employees who already have expertise at the company than to hire externally.
  - hayksaakian 11y ago
    But that's the difference between N and N+1 devs.
  - Swizec 11y ago
    Company valuations are based on N(engineers). It is said that hiring a full-time engineer increases your valuation by $1M. And it only costs about 10% of that per year to pay the engineer. Winning. Basically, there's no incentive to give raises to current engineers because when your company doesn't care about profits or expenses, but about getting and maintaining investment and stock value, it doesn't matter how expensive it is to train new people and how ineffective they are. As long as they are just effective enough to maintain a N(user) growth, you're good.
    - tallerholler 11y ago
      yes but when we're talking about the real world where maintaining N(user) growth translates into designing, implementing, and maintaining complex systems, it can be fatal to simply view engineers as a commodity that can be discarded or replaced on a whim...
      - seiji 11y ago
        Your argument failed once you said "yes but" — when valuation is a function of number of employees, adding fine-grained nuance and deeper levels of consideration just won't happen. If companies want the best, yes they should do all you said. If companies are just trying to grow grow grow, they can probably do better with an approach of 1,000 coder monkeys instead of 10 expert systems builders. Plus, no reasonable company is going to pay the 10 expert people the equivalent of the 100 coder monkey duties they are actually performing. That would be what... a salary of $10 million to $20 million per expert employee per year. Yes, you are worth that much, but the market finds true-value untenable. We'd rather let companies keep hundreds of billions in spare cash than paying it out to employees who are allowing such hoards of wealth to be, well, hoarded.
- beambot 11y ago
  > wages were probably below what they should've been for years... Not only that... tech companies like Apple, Adobe, Pixar, Google, Intel, eBay, Lucasfilm, and Intuit all illegally colluded to keep them low. The settlement for the affected workers was appallingly low! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
  - 0x5f3759df-i 11y ago
    >On September 8, 2014, Judge Koh set April 9, 2015 as the actual trial date for the remaining defendants, with a pre-trial conference scheduled for December 19, 2014. Also, as of early September 2014, the defendants had re-entered mediation to determine whether a new settlement could be reached. Wikipedia seems out of date, what was the final result?
    - jmorrow977 11y ago
      Apparently the payment is increased to $415M, which in my opinion is still too low. https://pando.com/2015/04/14/apple-wage-fixing-plaintiff-accuses-execs-of-hypocrisy-over-discriminatory-labor-policy/ https://pando.com/2015/04/14/apple-wage-fixing-plaintiff-acc...
  - AnkhMorporkian 11y ago
    I agree that the settlement was definitely low, but I really disagree that the settlement was absurdly low on aggregate. I've always done freelance/contract work, so I'm not 100% sure what 'significantly' better means in the normal software world, but I'm going to assume 5k/year would be a really significant raise. I know the national average is somewhere around 3%, so 5k seems like it would be absurdly more than average. Please do correct me if I'm wrong. So, just going on $5,000 lost for a year for the 64,000 litigants, that's $320,000,000. They settled for $324,000,000. I swear I didn't presuppose any of those numbers, they just worked out like that.
    - slewis 11y ago
      The period in question is 4 years so multiply by 4 (although not all litigants were present during all 4 years so you can back it off a little). And 5k is too low. Google gave a 10% raise across the board around the time this information came out. So assume 150k salary * 10% = 15k. Salaries also continued to rise more rapidly after the 10% raise, but it's hard to say by how much without having access to the internal data.
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  My career has basically gone this way: 60k shitty entry level job (< 3 years)... quit for a 90k slightly less shitty job (1 year) ... quit for a 140k + $350k bonus/equity (< 2 years) ... quit for a 160k + much more equity, nearly certain IPO (hopefully for the full 4 years to vest 100%) Don't hate the mercenary, hate the employer who won't pay you what you are worth!
  - Chinjut 11y ago
    That was some jump from $90k to $490k! (How'd you pull that off?)
  - rev_bird 11y ago
    Echoing Chinjut's question – I've never seen a jump like that, unless it was equity that turned out to be worth $350k, but looked like less when it was offered. How did that happen?!
    - meatysnapper 11y ago
      Mostly equity; I joined a company the week of the IPO but accepted the offer before that. I basically got very lucky, but the base salary + equity any relatively big name post-IPO company would also be $200k-ish. Keep in mind that I stayed at none of these companies for more than 2.5 years! There were 2 brief interludes 1) Non-technical grad school, but that actually netted me a very slick summer internship one year that paid way better than my previous job too. 2) Failed startup, that paid nothing Unfortunately, I think I've maxed out on the software engineer pay scale now unless I get even luckier.
      - ranit 11y ago
        Maxing out is not considered "unfortunate" by most definitions of luckiness. :-)
        s73v3r 11y ago
        Depends. If he gets bored/unhappy at his current positing, then his options for leaving might be narrowed.
CapitalistCartr 11y ago
Staying at one firm is less scary, but is a career killer. You owe it to yourself and your career to move every few years. I aim for 5 years tops at one firm, unless I happen to get lucky and move within the firm to a substantially different job. That's happened to me once. A different company offers you broader experience, if its well chosen, and of course, a better raise. I don't use a job offer as leverage at the old firm; I think that's a bad career mistake. Of course, jumping is scary, and the new firm might suck, but that's why networking is essential, whether you like it or not.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  One of the theoretical advantages of a large, diversified firm is the plethora of internal opportunities for job and even career changes with less friction than trying to put yourself on the open market. In practice, unfortunately, it seems all too easy to get pigeonholed, hit a political snare, or some other roadblock that makes your career there a trap rather than an opportunity.
  - pacaro 11y ago
    This. I worked at Microsoft for nearly 14 years. I had the privilege of working on 4 very different teams (microBrowser, Palladium/Bitlocker, Robotics, Midori) So in many respects it was like working at 4 different companies, in that respect I avoided the pigeonhole trap (which certainly also applies when you do move companies) but over time I accumulated corporate cruft which ended up dragging me down. Moving to a new company allows you to reset that.
    - donut 11y ago
      What do you mean by corporate cruft?
      - wting 11y ago
        You become the goto guy / domain expert over enough things that most of your time is spent being interrupted or in meetings instead of building stuff.
rbritton 11y ago
I definitely agree with this. A previous employer of mine had a policy of never matching any competing offers -- you stuck with what you had or took the offer. Combined with very infrequent raises this led to a fairly low morale. I stuck around as long as I did only because it was convenient enough while I was building up my own things.
jrs235 11y ago
This is not always true. There are some rare gems like my current place of employment who's managing partners, with a little persuading, allowed me to give raises up to 20% for some individuals. EDIT: But yes, for most people and most companies, you'll need to jump ship to jump up a rung or two on the salary ladder.
- mcshicks 11y ago
  This is exactly my experience (jumping ship and changing titles). I didn't see much discussion in the article about "what do I need to do to get to the next level" as a point of discussion when asking for more money. This is an easier discussion for your manager in many cases, and in theory at least should come with an increase when it happens. For many larger companies, in the long run the key to increasing your salary is getting promoted a lot. The other factor to consider is how is the company doing. Are they doing well financially and expanding their business, starting new projects? Or are they cutting corners on expenses? If they are cutting corners on expenses, not replacing people who leave, etc, you really are probably better off looking somewhere else in many cases than trying to negotiate a higher salary.
  - jrs235 11y ago
    Joel Spolsky, I believe, use to say this "Be a revenue producer, not a cost center." Get a developer job working on the product or services your company sells for revenue. Don't get a job working on internal systems designed to save on costs (looking at all the developers working for insurance companies and retailers developing back ends and internal applications designed to cut costs rather than increase sales and revenue). Here's a prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85843
thirdtruck 11y ago
Exactly my same experience.
toephu2 11y ago
does not need to be a competing firm. Any tech company will do, just have an offer on the table.
lquist 11y ago
This is what Ben Horowitz has to say about matching competing offers: An excellent engineer decides to leave the company because she gets a better offer. For various reasons, you were undercompensating her, but the offer from the other company pays more than any engineer in your company and the engineer in question is not your best engineer. Still, she is working on a critical project and you cannot afford to lose her. So you match the offer. You save the project, but you pile on the debt. Here’s how the payment will come due. You probably think that your counteroffer was confidential because you’d sworn her to secrecy. Let me explain why it was not. She has friends in the company. When she got the offer from the other company, she consulted with her friends. One of her best friends advised her to take the offer. When she decided to stay, she had to explain to him why she disregarded his advice or lose personal credibility. So she told him and swore him to secrecy. He agreed to honor the secret, but was incensed that she had to threaten to quit in order to get a proper raise. Furthermore, he was furious that you overcompensated her. So, he told the story, but kept her name confidential to preserve the secret. And now everyone in engineering knows that the best way to get a raise is to generate an offer from another company then threaten to quit. It’s going to take awhile to pay off that debt. For what it's worth, most competent managers I know agree with this idea. Edit: I should mention that I am NOT advocating paying people less than market wage, but as managers know, sometimes you end up in this position with some employees for periods of time without meaning to. http://www.bhorowitz.com/management_debt http://www.bhorowitz.com/management_debt
- famousactress 11y ago
  "...but the offer from the other company pays more than any engineer in your company and the engineer in question is not your best engineer. Still, she is working on a critical project and you cannot afford to lose her. So you match the offer." Jesus that all sounds so ridiculous to me. That's a funny shell game around admitting that someone was more valuable than you were paying them, and then guess what - lots of other people are. If the argument is "But she isn't always this valuable.. she's just this valuable on this project" then attach a financial incentive to the project. Sadly, I don't get the sense that Ben is suggesting that there's a problem with not compensating commensurate with value here or with depending on the employer-preferential taboo of the secret salary. He seems to just argue you should let this engineer walk and the project die.
serve_yay 11y ago
Bingo. Not much else to say really.
mmanfrin 11y ago
At my last job, the "one review a year" was held just shy of 6 months after I joined -- and the "only time you could be eligible for a raise" was during that review. I had missed the cutoff for first day by 4 days. My boss told me he yelled and fought for me to get the review, but that they said no. A year later when I told them I was leaving for a better paying job (with much better incentives and work/life balance), he said "is it about the money? we can pay you more why didn't you just ask".
- hawkice 11y ago
  All simplicity is a lie. If I could give a professional hint to my former self it would be: the best employers are the ones who are comfortable making a deal -- paying what they need to pay to get it done, and trying to strike the best deal they can. Any hiccup on that road (notably: not paying / checks bouncing / salary negotiations where the numbers decrease at any point, even if it is due to a technical or paperwork error on their end) is a _very_ bad sign.
  - boomzilla 11y ago
    It depends on the size of the company. Once past a certain size, there is not much a manager, even at director level can do to give an employee a raise out of review time. The HR "partner" have a big rule book on compensation and the poor manager can only "slot" his/her reports into a predefined range. A startup does have more flexibility to adjust compensation.
    - nikatwork 11y ago
      I've found that's often a BS management excuse to shift blame. If they really want to keep you, they'll find the money.
    - droopyEyelids 11y ago
      HR doesn't actually run the business- they're actually there to serve the business needs. You were 'let down easy' by whoever told you that. It's human civilization on planet Earth, everything actually is negotiable, and "my hands are tied" is just a negotiation strategy.
ljk 11y ago
Isn't it advised against negotiating with current company with another offer? Since they'll just get rid of you later because they know you'll jump ship?
- jmorrow977 11y ago
  Ask for a contract in the counter.
up_and_up 11y ago
Step Two: Never accept a counter offer since your loyalty will be in question forever going forward. Only fish for another offer if you are ready to jump ship. My `raise` has always been 20-40% by jumping.
hackerboos 11y ago
I doubled my salary in three years by moving jobs twice. I bet I could have done it in 2 if I didn't want to move home for the second job.

Step One: Go find a job at a competing firm, because that's the only way you'll get a meaningful raise.

by s73v3r 11y ago

Step One: Go find a job at a competing firm, because that's the only way you'll get a meaningful raise.

I can't agree with this more. As much as I sympathize with entrepreneurs and managers having trouble hiring engineers in this current environment, I feel like "they" brought it on themselves because wages were probably below what they should've been for years, and because of that, supply became depressed. Now that a lot more infrastructure and tooling is in place, we're seeing the effects of that prolonged depressed supply. It's easy (relatively) to hire junior devs, and much harder to hire senior devs. And even still, I talk to senior devs who have trouble getting a raise. I'm like... ok... well I hear X is hiring.

vonmoltke 11y ago
> I can't agree with this more. As much as I sympathize with entrepreneurs and managers having trouble hiring engineers in this current environment, I feel like "they" brought it on themselves because wages were probably below what they should've been for years, and because of that, supply became depressed. Correction: they are below what people of the quality they want are willing to work for. There are plenty of engineers willing to work for those salaries; the vast majority get rejected. Whether these entrepreneurs and managers actually need the level of quality they are seeking is a subject for a different religious debate.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  > Whether these entrepreneurs and managers actually need the level of quality they are seeking is a subject for a different religious debate. I'd say its more accurate to say "The quality of engineers isn't effectively determined in most hiring processes."
sanderjd 11y ago
What I don't understand is that the X that is hiring likely also has a bunch of senior devs who are having trouble getting a raise. It would be far more efficient to give raises to current employees who already have expertise at the company than to hire externally.
- hayksaakian 11y ago
  But that's the difference between N and N+1 devs.
- Swizec 11y ago
  Company valuations are based on N(engineers). It is said that hiring a full-time engineer increases your valuation by $1M. And it only costs about 10% of that per year to pay the engineer. Winning. Basically, there's no incentive to give raises to current engineers because when your company doesn't care about profits or expenses, but about getting and maintaining investment and stock value, it doesn't matter how expensive it is to train new people and how ineffective they are. As long as they are just effective enough to maintain a N(user) growth, you're good.
  - tallerholler 11y ago
    yes but when we're talking about the real world where maintaining N(user) growth translates into designing, implementing, and maintaining complex systems, it can be fatal to simply view engineers as a commodity that can be discarded or replaced on a whim...
    - seiji 11y ago
      Your argument failed once you said "yes but" — when valuation is a function of number of employees, adding fine-grained nuance and deeper levels of consideration just won't happen. If companies want the best, yes they should do all you said. If companies are just trying to grow grow grow, they can probably do better with an approach of 1,000 coder monkeys instead of 10 expert systems builders. Plus, no reasonable company is going to pay the 10 expert people the equivalent of the 100 coder monkey duties they are actually performing. That would be what... a salary of $10 million to $20 million per expert employee per year. Yes, you are worth that much, but the market finds true-value untenable. We'd rather let companies keep hundreds of billions in spare cash than paying it out to employees who are allowing such hoards of wealth to be, well, hoarded.
beambot 11y ago
> wages were probably below what they should've been for years... Not only that... tech companies like Apple, Adobe, Pixar, Google, Intel, eBay, Lucasfilm, and Intuit all illegally colluded to keep them low. The settlement for the affected workers was appallingly low! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- 0x5f3759df-i 11y ago
  >On September 8, 2014, Judge Koh set April 9, 2015 as the actual trial date for the remaining defendants, with a pre-trial conference scheduled for December 19, 2014. Also, as of early September 2014, the defendants had re-entered mediation to determine whether a new settlement could be reached. Wikipedia seems out of date, what was the final result?
  - jmorrow977 11y ago
    Apparently the payment is increased to $415M, which in my opinion is still too low. https://pando.com/2015/04/14/apple-wage-fixing-plaintiff-accuses-execs-of-hypocrisy-over-discriminatory-labor-policy/ https://pando.com/2015/04/14/apple-wage-fixing-plaintiff-acc...
- AnkhMorporkian 11y ago
  I agree that the settlement was definitely low, but I really disagree that the settlement was absurdly low on aggregate. I've always done freelance/contract work, so I'm not 100% sure what 'significantly' better means in the normal software world, but I'm going to assume 5k/year would be a really significant raise. I know the national average is somewhere around 3%, so 5k seems like it would be absurdly more than average. Please do correct me if I'm wrong. So, just going on $5,000 lost for a year for the 64,000 litigants, that's $320,000,000. They settled for $324,000,000. I swear I didn't presuppose any of those numbers, they just worked out like that.
  - slewis 11y ago
    The period in question is 4 years so multiply by 4 (although not all litigants were present during all 4 years so you can back it off a little). And 5k is too low. Google gave a 10% raise across the board around the time this information came out. So assume 150k salary * 10% = 15k. Salaries also continued to rise more rapidly after the 10% raise, but it's hard to say by how much without having access to the internal data.
meatysnapper 11y ago
My career has basically gone this way: 60k shitty entry level job (< 3 years)... quit for a 90k slightly less shitty job (1 year) ... quit for a 140k + $350k bonus/equity (< 2 years) ... quit for a 160k + much more equity, nearly certain IPO (hopefully for the full 4 years to vest 100%) Don't hate the mercenary, hate the employer who won't pay you what you are worth!
- Chinjut 11y ago
  That was some jump from $90k to $490k! (How'd you pull that off?)
- rev_bird 11y ago
  Echoing Chinjut's question – I've never seen a jump like that, unless it was equity that turned out to be worth $350k, but looked like less when it was offered. How did that happen?!
  - meatysnapper 11y ago
    Mostly equity; I joined a company the week of the IPO but accepted the offer before that. I basically got very lucky, but the base salary + equity any relatively big name post-IPO company would also be $200k-ish. Keep in mind that I stayed at none of these companies for more than 2.5 years! There were 2 brief interludes 1) Non-technical grad school, but that actually netted me a very slick summer internship one year that paid way better than my previous job too. 2) Failed startup, that paid nothing Unfortunately, I think I've maxed out on the software engineer pay scale now unless I get even luckier.
    - ranit 11y ago
      Maxing out is not considered "unfortunate" by most definitions of luckiness. :-)
      - s73v3r 11y ago
        Depends. If he gets bored/unhappy at his current positing, then his options for leaving might be narrowed.

CapitalistCartr 11y ago

Staying at one firm is less scary, but is a career killer. You owe it to yourself and your career to move every few years. I aim for 5 years tops at one firm, unless I happen to get lucky and move within the firm to a substantially different job. That's happened to me once. A different company offers you broader experience, if its well chosen, and of course, a better raise. I don't use a job offer as leverage at the old firm; I think that's a bad career mistake. Of course, jumping is scary, and the new firm might suck, but that's why networking is essential, whether you like it or not.

vonmoltke 11y ago
One of the theoretical advantages of a large, diversified firm is the plethora of internal opportunities for job and even career changes with less friction than trying to put yourself on the open market. In practice, unfortunately, it seems all too easy to get pigeonholed, hit a political snare, or some other roadblock that makes your career there a trap rather than an opportunity.
- pacaro 11y ago
  This. I worked at Microsoft for nearly 14 years. I had the privilege of working on 4 very different teams (microBrowser, Palladium/Bitlocker, Robotics, Midori) So in many respects it was like working at 4 different companies, in that respect I avoided the pigeonhole trap (which certainly also applies when you do move companies) but over time I accumulated corporate cruft which ended up dragging me down. Moving to a new company allows you to reset that.
  - donut 11y ago
    What do you mean by corporate cruft?
    - wting 11y ago
      You become the goto guy / domain expert over enough things that most of your time is spent being interrupted or in meetings instead of building stuff.

rbritton 11y ago

I definitely agree with this. A previous employer of mine had a policy of never matching any competing offers -- you stuck with what you had or took the offer. Combined with very infrequent raises this led to a fairly low morale. I stuck around as long as I did only because it was convenient enough while I was building up my own things.

jrs235 11y ago

This is not always true. There are some rare gems like my current place of employment who's managing partners, with a little persuading, allowed me to give raises up to 20% for some individuals. EDIT: But yes, for most people and most companies, you'll need to jump ship to jump up a rung or two on the salary ladder.

mcshicks 11y ago
This is exactly my experience (jumping ship and changing titles). I didn't see much discussion in the article about "what do I need to do to get to the next level" as a point of discussion when asking for more money. This is an easier discussion for your manager in many cases, and in theory at least should come with an increase when it happens. For many larger companies, in the long run the key to increasing your salary is getting promoted a lot. The other factor to consider is how is the company doing. Are they doing well financially and expanding their business, starting new projects? Or are they cutting corners on expenses? If they are cutting corners on expenses, not replacing people who leave, etc, you really are probably better off looking somewhere else in many cases than trying to negotiate a higher salary.
- jrs235 11y ago
  Joel Spolsky, I believe, use to say this "Be a revenue producer, not a cost center." Get a developer job working on the product or services your company sells for revenue. Don't get a job working on internal systems designed to save on costs (looking at all the developers working for insurance companies and retailers developing back ends and internal applications designed to cut costs rather than increase sales and revenue). Here's a prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85843

thirdtruck 11y ago

Exactly my same experience.

toephu2 11y ago

does not need to be a competing firm. Any tech company will do, just have an offer on the table.

lquist 11y ago

This is what Ben Horowitz has to say about matching competing offers: An excellent engineer decides to leave the company because she gets a better offer. For various reasons, you were undercompensating her, but the offer from the other company pays more than any engineer in your company and the engineer in question is not your best engineer. Still, she is working on a critical project and you cannot afford to lose her. So you match the offer. You save the project, but you pile on the debt. Here’s how the payment will come due. You probably think that your counteroffer was confidential because you’d sworn her to secrecy. Let me explain why it was not. She has friends in the company. When she got the offer from the other company, she consulted with her friends. One of her best friends advised her to take the offer. When she decided to stay, she had to explain to him why she disregarded his advice or lose personal credibility. So she told him and swore him to secrecy. He agreed to honor the secret, but was incensed that she had to threaten to quit in order to get a proper raise. Furthermore, he was furious that you overcompensated her. So, he told the story, but kept her name confidential to preserve the secret. And now everyone in engineering knows that the best way to get a raise is to generate an offer from another company then threaten to quit. It’s going to take awhile to pay off that debt. For what it's worth, most competent managers I know agree with this idea. Edit: I should mention that I am NOT advocating paying people less than market wage, but as managers know, sometimes you end up in this position with some employees for periods of time without meaning to. http://www.bhorowitz.com/management_debt http://www.bhorowitz.com/management_debt

famousactress 11y ago
"...but the offer from the other company pays more than any engineer in your company and the engineer in question is not your best engineer. Still, she is working on a critical project and you cannot afford to lose her. So you match the offer." Jesus that all sounds so ridiculous to me. That's a funny shell game around admitting that someone was more valuable than you were paying them, and then guess what - lots of other people are. If the argument is "But she isn't always this valuable.. she's just this valuable on this project" then attach a financial incentive to the project. Sadly, I don't get the sense that Ben is suggesting that there's a problem with not compensating commensurate with value here or with depending on the employer-preferential taboo of the secret salary. He seems to just argue you should let this engineer walk and the project die.

serve_yay 11y ago

Bingo. Not much else to say really.

mmanfrin 11y ago

At my last job, the "one review a year" was held just shy of 6 months after I joined -- and the "only time you could be eligible for a raise" was during that review. I had missed the cutoff for first day by 4 days. My boss told me he yelled and fought for me to get the review, but that they said no. A year later when I told them I was leaving for a better paying job (with much better incentives and work/life balance), he said "is it about the money? we can pay you more why didn't you just ask".

hawkice 11y ago
All simplicity is a lie. If I could give a professional hint to my former self it would be: the best employers are the ones who are comfortable making a deal -- paying what they need to pay to get it done, and trying to strike the best deal they can. Any hiccup on that road (notably: not paying / checks bouncing / salary negotiations where the numbers decrease at any point, even if it is due to a technical or paperwork error on their end) is a _very_ bad sign.
- boomzilla 11y ago
  It depends on the size of the company. Once past a certain size, there is not much a manager, even at director level can do to give an employee a raise out of review time. The HR "partner" have a big rule book on compensation and the poor manager can only "slot" his/her reports into a predefined range. A startup does have more flexibility to adjust compensation.
  - nikatwork 11y ago
    I've found that's often a BS management excuse to shift blame. If they really want to keep you, they'll find the money.
  - droopyEyelids 11y ago
    HR doesn't actually run the business- they're actually there to serve the business needs. You were 'let down easy' by whoever told you that. It's human civilization on planet Earth, everything actually is negotiable, and "my hands are tied" is just a negotiation strategy.

ljk 11y ago

Isn't it advised against negotiating with current company with another offer? Since they'll just get rid of you later because they know you'll jump ship?

jmorrow977 11y ago
Ask for a contract in the counter.

up_and_up 11y ago

Step Two: Never accept a counter offer since your loyalty will be in question forever going forward. Only fish for another offer if you are ready to jump ship. My `raise` has always been 20-40% by jumping.

hackerboos 11y ago

I doubled my salary in three years by moving jobs twice. I bet I could have done it in 2 if I didn't want to move home for the second job.