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

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

#301
post #271
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that in a purely rational system, there would be no pay gap (controlling for ability and impact). But guess what...

Corporations are rational. They care about one thing, dollars. If you are making them money, they will keep you no matter what. If you are not making them money, they will get rid of you. Pretty rational I think.

That's just ludicrous. Corporations routinely do astoundingly stupid, financially damaging things for all sorts of reasons.

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

#302
How much does this apply to senior employees? I have a PhD, started out at the "Senior" level as a new grad, and I just recently got my first promotion to "Staff" Engineer, which represents roughly the 85th-90th percentile for pay in my company.

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

#303
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your conclusion is, then, that all people are rational?

No. Rationality has very little to do with it. How rational the participants are doesn't itself change the fact that there is a competitive labor market and that salary offers thus must be competitive. If women choose to forgo higher salaries in favor of something else, that's a different issue and it doesn't immediately mean that they are being "irrational", it just means they favor different things than men do.

The rationality of the players is central to any argument you make in the line of "there is a competitive labor market and that salary offers thus must be competitive".

If the hiring managers (of any gender) have an irrational bias towards thinking that women are not as effective as their male counterparts, this will affect the respective pay scales even within a competitive market.

Note that I'm not providing evidence or making a claim about the gender pay gap. I'm just saying that the claims you've made have many possible consistent explanations, including irrational bias against women.

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

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, at least in tech, the whole "get a 10% raise by switching jobs" thing works great early on, but pretty much ends once you're 10-20 years into your career. There's a ceiling that you asymptotically approach. Here's an example, adjusted for cost of living but not inflation (sample size = 1). This spans about 20 years, switching roughly every 3-4 years: Job 2: 33% raise over Job 1 Job 3: 15% raise over Job 2 Job 4:…

Base + signing pay for me over the past ten years: Job 2: +14.29% Job 3: -18.75% / 23.08% / 25.00% (Motionloft... let's just say Mills and Garrison were full of shit and it took a while for me to get what had been promised initially) Job 4: 25.00% Job 5: 8.00% Job 6: 31.11% Job 7: 2.64% (back to employer #5, so about 35% over that) I know everyone likes to look at total comp, but especially if you're looking at small…

Are you in Bay Area/Seattle/NY? 200k total is not much for somebody with 10 years experience. Picking right employer and sticking with it could have netted you better pay.

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

#305
I wonder how strongly this holds after you're into the higher end of the salary range?

My best increase ever was going from my highschool/college web dev job to freelance, where I more than tripped my hourly rate from $12.50/hr to $45/hr. (It probably wasn't quite 3x after accounting for taxes and healthcare and such, but it was still a good jump, and brought more flexible hours too.)

Since then, I've gotten 20-25% increases a couple of times, topping out at $120k.

I was switching more like every 3-5 years, so a 5%/year raise actually ends up being in the same ballpark, if not slightly better. Every two years might be better from a pure cash perspective, but I didn't feel like I was "done" with my roles until the 3-5 year mark - I think I learned more delivered more value, and achieved a better sense of accomplishment doing it my way.

I also live in Ohio, with the exception of one year I spent in SF. I imagine I could double my current salary moving back to SF or over to NYC, but I'm happier here. (And $100k+ goes a bit farther here...)

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

#306
This article flies in the face of what I have been reading for years. This article is taking some simple data "employees that change jobs get X% raise" and extrapolating it to a whole lot of wrong. It does vary by organization.

For example if you are at an organization where you are basically the most senior employee already and you can take on a new role at a larger organization with new responsibilities or skill growth a job change can make sense. If you are just bouncing around between say Amazon, Google, and Facebook this can often be a dud strategy in the long term.

Take this with a grain of salt, since I don't have time to dig up citations, but I have read that the long term compensation is actually higher for individuals that don't switch jobs so often. I guess the career employee is a bit of a legend in IT these days so we could have a lively discussion about the selection and difference in a big tech firm and a more traditional F500, but I think in the long run these things will normalize because they are basic human nature and organizational structure problems and nothing is intrinsically special about technology companies. They are the special darlings of the era, so they get to break the rules a bit. Maybe it really will foment a long term change in "the rules" or always be a bit of a bubble in terms of how the organizations operate.

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

#307
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it doesn't add anything of value to the thread, but that's a really good analogy.

Not really. Business is business and personal is personal. If you look at them both the same you'll end up stuck in a job you hate for 8 years thinking you're being super loyal and that raise is just around the corner. Spouses are loyal back, businesses are not.

This. Its so important for workers to realize just what predicament they're in. So while it was possible for lifelong jobs to be possible in the past, its not so much the case today. No job is really secure, and one does have to stay on ones toes.

Not saying that you should be concerned about getting fired everyday. But if you don't create demonstrable value to your company over a longer period of time (a couple of years perhaps) don't expect to keep the job. Things are moving wayy too fast today.

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

#308
Never understood why companies will refuse to give valuable employees reasonable raises but when turn around and pay an unproven new hire even more money to replace them. So you refuse to give me a 10% increase because "never negotiate with terrorists" but will gladly pay the 20% increase that I'm getting at my new job to my replacement (because that's the market). Just seems so short sighted.

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

#309

Best way to increase salary at current workplace? Get offers from other companies & ask for a meeting with your boss (or whoever decides your pay, so HR etc.). Bring up the offers, discuss what you'd get from there and also go through the potential career you could build at those companies. For example: Consultancy X would pay me $k/mo and every 6months it will go up the ladder if I perform well. With this kind of di…

I imagine this is good advice in some places, but as a line manager, if you pull this on me I'm more than likely to shake your hand and wish you luck in your new job. In a lot of places, having a talk with your manager about your salary before going off and actively looking for other offers is going to go down a lot better. Most line managers worth working for, value their teams and will fight for them if they are un…

Yea this has been my experience. I usually don't mention that I have an offer but just ask for a meeting and explicitly ask for more money. I never get it and just hand in my 2 weeks about a week after the meeting. Maybe if I revealed that I had an offer I may have gotten a raise but I don't want to work somewhere where I need to "have leverage" to get what I deserve and what's fair.
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