Employees != IT Employees
Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less
71–80 of 560 posts
Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less
#72There 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…
I do the same :)
Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less
#73There 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…
[deleted]
Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less
#74There 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…
> Two year tenures isn't job hopping. It's a reflection of how this industry works. Very few companies offer sufficient breadth and depth of product complexity, career advancement, or other similar things to make it worthwhile. I'd say the sweet spot is 2-4 years, except at very large companies (e.g. Google) (EDIT:) or companies which are developing complicated products with physical engineering or regulatory factors complicating development. 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. Anything less, especially if more than one project per job exists, indicates an inability to see a project through to maintenance or someone who is easily bored.
I don't work for a large company, my job title hasn't changed, and my salary has doubled from the starting salary over 5 years.
Sometimes stasis exists because valuable people are paid extremely well not to leave. So well they can't actually find a job that will compensate them comparably despite repeated attempts to find one.
Why exactly should people like me leave when even places like want to pay me 10% less than I make now?
Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less
#75There 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…
I'm trying to figure out when to switch myself, due to a changed situation on my team (doesn't fit the focus I want for my career, etc.)..
The problem is I've only been full-time 7 months and before that I was an "intern" for basically 10 months, though I worked on the exact same tasks pretty much as everyone else except for being on the PagerDuty schedule.
Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less
#76I just hit my two year mark. Guess it's time to start job hunting.
My current employer 401k contributions vest at 3.5 years- would I be out of line insisting that my 'next' employer make a one time contribution equal to what I sacrifice?
Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less
#77My 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 wantin…
[deleted]
Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less
#78I just hit my two year mark. Guess it's time to start job hunting. My current employer 401k contributions vest at 3.5 years- would I be out of line insisting that my 'next' employer make a one time contribution equal to what I sacrifice?
Absolutely not, and I think you should. They may still say no, but it can be a valuable tool in your salary negotiation. I've done this before when switching jobs -- "you want me to start in March, but I have $X in options that vest in July; to switch I would need you to add $X to my signing bonus". Both times they've agreed to do so. Recruiters seem to generally have more leeway with signing bonuses than salaries. (And of course on top of this you should be aggressively negotiating your salary etc.)
Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less
#79Earlier 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 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.
It sounds like you have far too few developers to cover those systems. My company is similar, although with much fewer individual systems. The biggest problem we have is that we expect developers to be familiar with all of them and it's simply too much ground to cover, especially when you add in decades of technical debt. I've been there over a year now and picked up almost no domain-specific knowledge because the cognitive load of all the projects and their intricacies and the constantly switching between them is just to high to learn anything in detail.
The second you aren't working on something your knowledge begins to fade. If I have to pick up something I haven't touched in three months then it's pretty close to being a new product to me.
Re: Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less
#80I think it's important to understand that there's a significant amount of selection bias possible here. In general, folks who switch jobs every two years are the folks who are not getting offered big raises by their current companies. The ones who are getting offered big raises may still choose to leave due to other reasons, but they often will choose to stay instead. And they won't be making a big fuss about it online.
There's another phenomenon here. Almost by definition, average developers are not going to get big raises. They'll get average raises. The average developer raise is probably 3-5%, which is not big but it's more than the average raise across all professions, at least in the US.
This leads to an interesting question: why can the average developer get a big raise by switching jobs? I think at least part of the answer is that companies simply have more information about employees who've been around for at least a few years than they do about potential hires still on the market. It's a lot easier for a company to realize an employee is about average once that person has been on the job for 12+ months than it is during the interview phase, where the questions are heavily sandboxed and generally focused on basic problem solving ability rather than the candidate's ability to convert that into business value.
Finally, in general people who are average but think they're above average really do not like to confront the fact that they're average. So average developers with big egos being offered average raises will often very vehemently argue that the problem is all with the companies they've worked at and never with themselves.
---
Another point worth focusing on here is that raises are really determined by the business value that you're producing, not your raw intelligence or passion for coding. Very smart coders may or may not be any good at converting that talent into lots of value for the company. It may even be that sometimes a less talented coder gets offered a much bigger raise because other skills allowed them to create significant value.
I think this explains why so many folks are average but think they're above average. It's because they might indeed be above average in some metrics, but not the metrics that matter to their employer.