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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

#51

Post by josephjrobison »

usmannk wrote: post #12
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.

> I'm surprised Forbes would publish it Unfortunately much of Forbes has become nothing but a fancy blog, very much akin to Business Insider. With the amount of "contributors" posting to the site nowadays the Forbes name in the URL isn't exactly a positive indicator, if not a warning sign.

Was Forbes ever a respectable publication though? I ask with all sincerity. It seems their volume is super high and that's about it, so they get name recognition from repetition, not sure what else from.

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

#52

Post by manicdee »

My contrary opinion is that people who job hop every two years are the ones who come in, make enough progress that management thinknthey are pretty nifty, then leave before they have to domany maintenance on the technical debt they left behind.

Sure, it is good to be highly paid, but the situation just reinforces the idea that people who wear suits are paid far too much.

Though I find myself i the situation of wanting to earn more, so I am seriously considering switching to SAP. Sell my soul, buy a house, live with my conscience formthe rest of my life?

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

needlessly wrote: post #21

I don't get people who say, "Well I would never hire someone who has never worked more than 5 years at a single place!!!" I would never have increased my from $68k to $115k in 5 years.I probably would've been somewhere at like $80k right now at best if I was didn't switch jobs twice. If it means some hiring manager is going say some snarky opinion, then yes I'll take my extra money.

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by mikekchar »

needlessly wrote: post #21

I don't get people who say, "Well I would never hire someone who has never worked more than 5 years at a single place!!!" I would never have increased my from $68k to $115k in 5 years.I probably would've been somewhere at like $80k right now at best if I was didn't switch jobs twice. If it means some hiring manager is going say some snarky opinion, then yes I'll take my extra money.

On the other hand, look at it from a hiring manager's perspective: people who have stayed in a job long enough to see how things go wrong are also less expensive. I'll be honest, if I'm looking at a CV for someone with 10 years of experience and they have changed jobs every year or two, I will suspect that they are missing some pretty important experience as a senior developer.

Everybody makes serious mistakes that don't show themselves for years. Those who don't stick around usually assume that any mistakes they find in their new company were due to incompetence. Similarly, people who have not stuck around for years have never been instrumental in doing difficult culture transformations, or fixing long term architectural problems.

It's truly unfortunate that the industry rewards those who don't tackle these kinds of difficult problems. The legacy is an industry where the problems are ubiquitous: flavour of the month architecture, my way or the highway bullying, either process of the month or "pragmatic" (aka ad hoc) processes, absolute disrespect for coworkers (I'm the only one with an ounce of sense).

Yep, I'm happy to take the discount on the developer who is humble, knows how to navigate political mine fields, knows how to recover from mistakes, knows how to refine techniques and processes, etc, etc. I'm also happy to take the odd "rock star" if they are actually good enough, but I'd never build an entire team of them (willingly).

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

#56

Post by lovich »

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…

If you could have made more money by job hopping, and your other programmers left for more money presumably, is your company really valuing experience?

It's very easy to say you value experience, but if you wont allocate resources towards employees with experience then your company is signalling that they don't actually value it.

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

#57

Post by vacri »

cakedoggie wrote: post #45
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."??

The hostility is because it's ridiculously obvious that moving from a minimum-wage job to a run-of-the-mill professional job is going to net you an incredible percentage increase in salary, especially in the US where the minimum wage is a joke.

And where is the 'events happening now' in what I said? Job-hopping? Not exactly a new thing.

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

So... I can't be rhetorical to call out bad behaviour, but it's okay for you to do so. Nice work.

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

#58

Post by netheril96 »

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…

Your company does not pay more or enough more for people with more experience in its code base and domain knowledge, such that you and your coworkers will have better compensation when job-hop. That is the exact opposite of valuing experience.

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

#59

Post by sergers »

Depending on size of company, there may be some distinct departments.

I stayed on the same team, 6 years, but multiple promotions. Only 20+k in salary different. Jumped teams twice in next 3 years, +20k.

Now I have doubled my salary I started with. Been with company 10 years. The only thing I regret is not jumping teams earliar.. a few years max. Great learning experience through different roles on my original department... But didn't help me financially

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

#60

Post by djloche »

dsacco wrote: post #32
needlessly wrote: post #21

I don't get people who say, "Well I would never hire someone who has never worked more than 5 years at a single place!!!" I would never have increased my from $68k to $115k in 5 years.I probably would've been somewhere at like $80k right now at best if I was didn't switch jobs twice. If it means some hiring manager is going say some snarky opinion, then yes I'll take my extra money.

Do you mind sharing what region you're in? You may have found it was easy to significantly increase your compensation because you were significantly underpaid , instead of just because you were frequently changing jobs.

I think in the past 5 years there's been a ton of realization from non SF/NYC/VC-tech companies in the fact that they are competing from the same pool of talent and thus have to offer competitive salaries on a national basis, not just competitive for their area/city. There is still a ton of progress to be made in this regard, but it is changing. for example, a hypothetical newly graduated programmer with some skills and experience should be able to land a starting position for at least ~$80k+. companies that would have previously been trying to pay ~$40k in their area are now realizing that by offering a competitive dollar amount, the actual cost of living makes their offer the most compelling one. Whereas before, they'd offer the $40k and say, well, our offer is lower because it's cheaper to live here. The right attitude is matching the ballpark competition in dollar amounts, and saying, you should accept our offer because your money goes further here.
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