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Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

forbes.com

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Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

#41

Post by thedarkginger »

fizl wrote: post #10

This is a really poor article, and I'm surprised Forbes would publish it. As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no data behind any of the assertions in the article, and the title is just conjecture by the author based on a whole lot of assumptions.

For anyone interested (I was...), here's a good recap of Forbes' "contributor" model which is based in 'entrepreneurial journalism.'

Non-professional writers get paid based on unique visitors (like presumably with this piece). So you get what you incentivize.

http://www.poynter.org/2012/what-the-forbes-model-of-contrib...

Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

#42

Post by jschwartzi »

methodover wrote: post #38
sidlls wrote: post #34

There is a plateau as one reaches senior positions. As I went from "no" experience to my current position my job switches (every ~2 years) always were for 10%-25% (in one case, 100%, but that was Midwest to Bay Area so other factors are at play). I never got more than 5% merit increases otherwise. Most of my friends who have been at the same place for >10 years in engineering (not software) are just now reaching pari…

> Anything longer, especially if there is a lot of long-term stasis on a resume (e.g. "tech lead on product X" for more than a year or two), is an indication to me of someone who either isn't capable of stretching himself or doesn't want to. That's insane. Someone who is the technical leader of a project for more than two years doesn't "stretch himself"? I see no reason to believe that's true. If anything, it takes y…

Yeah, it's taken us more than two years to bring our product to market. It is a medical device. 2 years seems specific to web apps or something, where there isn't any hardware to support and there aren't any other engineering disciplines changing their stuff. After the first year of development we had a prototype. After the first year of verification testing we learned a lot about how the product needs to work to meet standards. After the second year we've learned about most of the edge cases.

Now that we have a working product we're marketing it, and we'll finally get feedback from the field rather than product-market fit data. That's easily two more years of data.

I hope GP isn't really throwing out candidates that have more than two years in the same position.

Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

#43

Post by jryan49 »

If the article was even based on actual facts and figures, wouldn't survivorship bias be a huge factor here? Maybe the bottom of the barrel are bringing the average down because they are stuck with jobs with no mobility and aren't valuable enough to get the raises.

Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

#44

Post by sidlls »

methodover wrote: post #38
sidlls wrote: post #34

There is a plateau as one reaches senior positions. As I went from "no" experience to my current position my job switches (every ~2 years) always were for 10%-25% (in one case, 100%, but that was Midwest to Bay Area so other factors are at play). I never got more than 5% merit increases otherwise. Most of my friends who have been at the same place for >10 years in engineering (not software) are just now reaching pari…

> Anything longer, especially if there is a lot of long-term stasis on a resume (e.g. "tech lead on product X" for more than a year or two), is an indication to me of someone who either isn't capable of stretching himself or doesn't want to. That's insane. Someone who is the technical leader of a project for more than two years doesn't "stretch himself"? I see no reason to believe that's true. If anything, it takes y…

> If anything, it takes years for you to realize design flaws in components of the earliest-developed systems.

This is more a symptom of the lack of engineering that occurs in this industry than it is an indication of deep technical knowledge gained over years of study.

I'd agree with what you say if I thought there were anything like engineering happening. I've worked on code bases and systems that are quite large. I never saw the learning you suggest. I saw lots of fighting the last battle and the accumulation of years of poor engineering decisions, usually by people who had been a lead for years.

Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

#45

Post by cakedoggie »

vacri wrote: post #11

> Jessica Derkis started her career earning $8 per hour ($16,640 annual salary) as the YMCA’s marketing manager. Over 10 years, she’s changed employers five times to ultimately earn $72,000 per year at her most recent marketing position. Amazing, thanks Forbes. I never knew that if you started out on minimum wage and then moved into a mundane professional role, you'd earn considerably more!

Why the hostility? Are people not allowed to talk about events happening now?

I mean, do you make a similar comment on all the articles you read?

"Oh thanks a lot ENCODE for telling us that 80 percent of the genome had a biochemical function. I didn't know we were going to repeat stuff that everybody new in 2012."??

Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

#46

Post by angersock »

usmannk wrote: post #7

I'm reluctant to apply this mindset to the tech, or at least SV tech, industry. While it's common practice to hop jobs every 2-5 years, it seems to be more for new or different opportunities (Different sized company, a new domain, new technical challenges, etc.) than it is for a more competitive offer. Internal promotion, both in compensation and position, seems to be the relative norm.

> Internal promotion, both in compensation and position, seems to be the relative norm.

My experience and observation suggests exactly the opposite. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

#47

Post by cgio »

maxxxxx wrote: post #33
johan_larson wrote: post #4

It's a bit strange that this sort of job-hopping isn't a red flag to employers. You'd think managers would be reluctant to hire an employee who has jumped ship many times before, just as they were becoming useful.

When I talk to my director he seems to actually dislike people who have worked under him for more than 5 years. He likes "fresh blood". If you stay around you are a loser.

For how long has he stayed around? Or does he not report to anyone? Director sounds like an employee role too...

Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

#48

Post by ThrustVectoring »

jaredklewis wrote: post #15
johan_larson wrote: post #4

It's a bit strange that this sort of job-hopping isn't a red flag to employers. You'd think managers would be reluctant to hire an employee who has jumped ship many times before, just as they were becoming useful.

Well I'm sure all other things being equal (which they never are), managers would prefer someone with a less chaotic job history. However, employers seems to have a never ending list of wants including that prospective employees be highly educated, very experienced, self motivated, hard working, good at whiteboard coding, prolific blog post writer, conference speaker, active open source contributor, willing to accept…

It's a symptom of how hot the job market is, IMO. The traditional view is that employees had to compete to get regular raises and stay employed. It's flipped a bit, and now there's more effort that employers have to make to keep high-value employees from leaving for better pastures.

Someone who job hopped five times in ten years has convinced five different employers to give them a significant pay raise to poach them. Someone with one job in ten years is likely in the "I'm just lucky to be employed" category and is less of a hotshot.

Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

#49

Post by grogenaut »

pinewurst wrote: post #35
santaclaus wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple, Amazon I was under the impression that Apple and Amazon tended to fall lower on the compensation scales.

Amazon has a fairly low cash salary cap if you're not upper management. They make it up (nominally anyway) with an initial cash bonus and stock options. Don't count on any raise after getting hired though. Plus the average stay there is far less than the vest period for either bonus or stock, because Amazon is pretty much the hellmouth.

Bonus is amortized over the non stock first 2 years paid per paycheck so there's basically ko vesting on it now. Hasn't been for several years. Eg if you get 30 stock over yet 3&4.. you'll get 30k / 24 (Amazon is monthly pay) for the first 24 paychecks for 60k non salary pay.

Source: offers.

Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less

#50

Post by chris11 »

mikegerwitz wrote: post #36
foobarian wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With how thin the job market is, any time I interview a good candidate the situation is that they have competing offers and the hiring team/our whole company is the one applying to have the candidate. In my experience, good candidates ramp up very quickly (<1 month) and having them on board for 2 years is plenty of time.

Certain places place high value on domain-specific knowledge and trained employees. I work at a wholesale insurance company (middleman); we have over a hundred individual systems, some simple, some quite complex. Some of those systems can be maintained by any programmer that comes in. Others really shouldn't be maintained by someone who doesn't have good experience in writing maintainable code. But many projects requ…

I'm curious, how much more do you think you could get by leaving, or if you had been job hopping? Companies say they value loyalty, but that can seem fake if loyalty ends up costing the employee money.
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