Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 240 posts

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#11

Post by deburo »

figmert wrote: post #3

There's no reward for loyalty any more, and it's caused everyone to job hop (at least while that was possible), including me. At the time, employees complained about it, and in the same breath refused to give out any promotions and/or reward employees. Or they'd reward them with some shitty voucher. The world has literally become the people vs corporations. There is no soul in working any more.

When was it different? I never saw that in big corporations, only SMBs when the founders were still at the helm.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#14

Post by Frieren »

Big tech owns a big chunk of the job market. So, the job market is not a market but a centralized system were big-tech has all the power to shape it.

Unionizing is just part of the fighting back. Only splitting the big monopolies can bring back competition and healthy salaries and promotions.

Monopolies are bad for consumers, but they are also bad for employees when that monopolies control most of the jobs of the industry.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#15

Post by Lord_Zero »

bluGill wrote: post #8
mystraline wrote: post #4

This has been true for at least since 2008. The only times Ive gotten promotions was to get hired elsewhere. Better title, more money. Its well known that retention budgets are laughable or nonexistant, and new hire budgets are well stocked. That means that if you want to grow from what youre doing, you gotta leave.

Every few years companies give a large raise to everyone when they notice they can't hire people and the ones they have are leaving. So if you don't manage to find a new job it isn't hopeless, so long as enough people are leaving. Of course if you don't leave they may lay you off at any time. However assuming that doesn't happen they will eventually give you a large raise.

There is no guarantee that will happen.

"Just hold out until they are desperate enough that they HAVE to give you a large raise!" is laughable.

Every single day you don't quit and get paid what you are worth, is a day you are leaving money on the table. Imagine waiting years for that big raise when you could have left and made tens to hundreds of thousands more in that time.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#16

Post by neversupervised »

Years of experience don’t correlate to output in all careers. Surgeons and engineers get better over time. This might not be true for all jobs. Meanwhile, management is naturally capped because every manager necessarily needs people to manage under them, so there’ll be 1/N^y managers at the yth level of the org. Unless loyalty ought to be reward for its own sake, it’s not clear why 100% of workers should get promoted indefinitely.

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#18

Post by irishcoffee »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #5

This has been the case for most of Gen X's career: there was very little mentoring, very little succession planning and career shaping. Instead Boomers (who came into an economy where these things, along with pensions, etc. still existed) took over early and have stayed in leadership roles longer than previous generations. A look at congress provides a template.

I read a few articles about this yesterday actually. Read them in order, the second is commentary on the first:

https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/pig-python-baby-b...

https://fortune.com/2026/05/31/boomer-reaction-economy-feel-...

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#19

Post by sjhatfield »

neversupervised wrote: post #16

Years of experience don’t correlate to output in all careers. Surgeons and engineers get better over time. This might not be true for all jobs. Meanwhile, management is naturally capped because every manager necessarily needs people to manage under them, so there’ll be 1/N^y managers at the yth level of the org. Unless loyalty ought to be reward for its own sake, it’s not clear why 100% of workers should get promoted…

It's not that promotions should be given out indefinitely but I think a pay raise in line with inflation should be the minimum, unless you are under performing. It's funny when a company excitedly shares a pay raise with you are it's below inflation...

Re: Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers

#20

Post by smallmancontrov »

NoLinkToMe wrote: post #9

I was at my previous company for almost 10 years, I had annual promotions and I roughly 4x'd my annual income in this period, which averages to about 15% of year-on-year pay increases. Part inflation, part growth in skills. Virtually all of that happened in the first 8 years. In the last 2 years I also stalled and saw minor inflation corrections of 2% a year, so I quit. In my experience it had everything to do with m…

"Work hard and it will be recognized" is terrible, horrible, no good, very bad advice. "Tit for tat" is the most generous to the company anyone should ever be: try working hard, if it's recognized then continue, if it isn't see if you can politic until it is, and in the very likely circumstance that it continues to not be recognized either jump for a pay bump or work like you're paid.
Post reply on HN