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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

#361

Post by scaryclam »

fullstackhuman wrote: post #317
scaryclam wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Most line managers worth working for, value their teams and will fight for them if they are unhappy, without the threats. Most good line managers will recognise their employees contributions to the company and suggest a raise/additional compensation without needing to be prompted.

Which is what the sentence you quoted means. Line managers aren't mind readers though so sometimes you'll need to talk to them about things.

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

#362

Post by TallGuyShort »

marvelous wrote: post #315
ohyes wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a terrible analogy. A better analogy is you're a prostitute and you tell your client that you looked around and the going rate for this type of work is more than he's been paying you, so you're gonna go fuck other guys for money. You don't fire your girlfriend in tough times, but your boss will fire you if he had to. It's a stricylty pay to play relationship.

We use the prostitute analogy a lot with my techie friends. Just don't tell my parents that I write software. I pretend to work at Starbucks.

This is why customers can never give you specific requirements for a project. Deep down they know you write software, but they can't say, "write this specific software for this much money". They have to use vague, hand-wavy terms so that they can always step back and claim it was just collaboration between consenting adults. They were just paying you for your time.

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

#363

Post by shados »

LostCharacter wrote: post #346
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might work somewhere else. I always felt blackmailed in a situation like this and wished the employee all the best with his new job. [Edit] To clarify the blackmail note: It's better to talk in the weekly 1:1 about salary expectations, changing markets or during people development focus, than to pull up a competing offer out of your hat while not talking about your dissatisfaction with pay during weekly 1:1s. 1. If t…

If an employee is coming to you with those offers instead of just leaving for the other job, shouldn't that indicate to you that they WANT to stay, but they also want to keep their career moving forward and earn more money? Why is that unreasonable? You're sending people out the door that want to continue working for your company just because they're telling you they have better opportunities and giving you a chance…

All numbers I've seen show that people who take counter offers from their current employers generally leave anyway.

There are exceptions: when salary is the ONLY problem, and usually that topic will have come up. So if the employee came to talk salary, was denied, then got some offers, came back with them, and asked again, then sure. But any company worth its salt will have done something before the other offers were ever in play.

If someone gets offers right off the bat and never talk salary first, then they'll be gone in 6 months unless you give them way above market rate.

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

#364

Post by [deleted] »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #351
LostCharacter wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an employee is coming to you with those offers instead of just leaving for the other job, shouldn't that indicate to you that they WANT to stay, but they also want to keep their career moving forward and earn more money? Why is that unreasonable? You're sending people out the door that want to continue working for your company just because they're telling you they have better opportunities and giving you a chance…

For the reasons stated, I would not give in. This is a slippery slope. Raising the pay of one employee out of band will usually lead to group behavior, meaning others do the same for the same reasons. I was also mostly budget constrained in the past and could not raise budget to significantly (say 20%) pay raise several employees. If the employee for whatever reasons earns say 10% below average of the other employees…

[deleted]

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

#365

Post by magnetic »

coldtea wrote: post #328
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might work somewhere else. I always felt blackmailed in a situation like this and wished the employee all the best with his new job. [Edit] To clarify the blackmail note: It's better to talk in the weekly 1:1 about salary expectations, changing markets or during people development focus, than to pull up a competing offer out of your hat while not talking about your dissatisfaction with pay during weekly 1:1s. 1. If t…

> 1. If the employee is only motivated by money, he will be gone rather sooner than later as there is always a higher offer around. What else would they be motivated by? It's not their hobby. This doesn't mean they are also not into programming and coding challenges -- but those are constants that they can find in another employer too. if they like the programming, it's not that they can't find a programming job else…

> What else would they be motivated by?

The actual work (what is being done), the mission of the company (are you helping kids send pictures that disappear after 10 seconds or are you working on finding a cure to hearing loss?), the team, the location (do I have to spend 2h commuting?), the opportunities to learn, the opportunities to grow, etc. We each value different things, but if money is your only consideration, you will be treated as a "disposable mercenary" because that's exactly what you are. You will never be trusted, because your loyalty is directed at whoever shows more $$ to you.

Companies value more than just pure technical skills: loyalty, teamwork, communication skills, attitude, ethics, drive, independence, etc... If you only play in that one dimension, the game becomes very rough for both sides. I've never seen that work well, except for very short term assignments.

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

#366

Post by skj »

PixelB wrote: post #271
skj wrote: 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.

As my sibling post states, you're being silly here.

Corporations are run by people, and they draw on a huge variety of sources to make their decisions. Including, obviously, some that are not rational.

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

#367

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #349
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might work somewhere else. I always felt blackmailed in a situation like this and wished the employee all the best with his new job. [Edit] To clarify the blackmail note: It's better to talk in the weekly 1:1 about salary expectations, changing markets or during people development focus, than to pull up a competing offer out of your hat while not talking about your dissatisfaction with pay during weekly 1:1s. 1. If t…

Blackmailed by what? The market? Some of those points are excuses for doing nothing. #2 especially - what, they'll find a better and better job every six months? Not likely. If somebody can show you how they'd be paid better somewhere else, deal with it. Denial gets you nowhere. #3 is exactly what the above remark addresses. If I can show my boss I'd be treated properly elsewhere, the boss sure better get on board an…

> #3 is exactly what the above remark addresses. If I can show my boss I'd be treated properly elsewhere, the boss sure better get on board and start doing those things.

If you feel you are treated better elsewhere, as a manager I'd help you transition to that elsewhere. If that is what you really want and think is best for you, I would make it as easy for you as possible. If you think money is most important to your current situation (house, wife, kids, debt, ...) and you're skill set is beyond my budget, than this is fine with me.

I'm more interested in people-relationships than job-relationships as I have met many of my employees in other companies and we're still friends - and most of them left for a different job with probably more money. Some of them told me years later they should not have left because I usually invest a lot into people development and money is only one parameter to job satisfaction.

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

#368

Post by sokoloff »

tcfunk wrote: post #276
sokoloff wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I call this the "one year of experience, ten times" phenomenon.

I don't think that's really accurate or fair. In my experience, you learn very different things in every workplace. Could be a different language or framework. Could even just be a different team arrangement or workflow. Bottom line is this: if you feel like you're not learning and growing in your current environment, why stay? Better yet, why would anyone expect you to stay?

I agree (that it's more funny than perfectly descriptively fair). The point is that a lot of people with 10 years' experience aren't necessarily more valuable than those with 3 years' experience.

There's a steep initial ramp of learning that can readily plateau out if someone is complacent or actively disinterested in learning new things.

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

#369

Post by jakobegger »

thehardsphere wrote: post #159
lostboys67 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol I don't mean to sound mean but this is not how the world works

Actually, it is how the world works. If there was really a gender pay gap for women who are doing the exact same work as men with the exact same experience as men, then it would be trivial for employers to reduce their costs by only hiring women. Yet, nobody ever does this.

Your argument hinges on the assumption that (a) employers can easily determine the relative "value" of an employee and (b) that employers then make rational decisions based on that data.

I don't think either is likely.

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

#370

Post by daemin »

dustinmoris wrote: post #272
justadeveloper2 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs get ping-pong tables because they can be bought off in other ways besides money because they are naive. I loved your comment about "max out wealth" because that is the underlying truth to all of this--you get maybe 30 years to make as much money as possible and that's it!

Agreed, this is really the best summary "you get maybe 30 years to make as much money as possible and that's it"

And if you think about it, moving every 2 years is 15 different companies. If you stay a bit longer at the ones you like, say 5 years, then that's 6 companies in your employable lifetime. To put it another way you have 5-10 big projects that you can do in your (employable) life. (I think Jeff Atwood said something like that before).

This is of course for people that value what they do at work and want to make meaningful impact professionally in their lives. For other people family is much more important so it doesn't matter if they don't min/max the projects they work on.

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