Employees That Stay In Companies Longer Get Paid Less

It's also a culture thing.

In the USA, selling yourself like you're the absolute King is ok, but in Germany many people would consider you an arrogant snob that's full of it, if you pretend too hard. They'd also consider someone who job-hops every year to apparently not be able to take responsibility and do their job well, and maybe to be problematic to work with (or they'd not need to run so often).

Switching jobs after 3-4 years is pretty normal, though. It shows that you can keep a job, and if you can show that you also learned something, that's good.

You can retain 80% of your talent. You will be able to retain approximately 0% of your top talent, which is certainly a number less than 20% of your total talent pool.

This is absolutely true. The best opportunity to set your pay is when you get the offer letter, after that it's all nickel and dime increases. The next best time to adjust your pay is when you announce you're leaving for a better role somewhere else. You have to be your own agent and demand the market rate for your role, skill set, and number of roles you're being asked to cover. The only time your,manager might jump your pay without asking is when they realize you are drastically underpaid and could leave any time.

Why not consider freelancing? When I'm hiring full time positions I don't normally see anything wrong with someone who's going to a new job every couple of years - but I'd definitely have some big, red flags for someone who was jumping ships every nine months.

This is because hiring takes time, and is expensive. If the person I'm hiring is only going to be staying around for nine months, I'd be better off hiring a freelancer. To put it another way: what changed in those nine months for you? You must have felt at month 1 the compensation was reasonable?

Whereas with freelancing you a) are always getting the market rate, and b) can move around with impunity.

your right, been the case since I started in the 80's. Still the case, best way to get payrise to to show a offer and then they will struggle matching and then say you can expect a substantial payrise over the next few years, or some other excuse.

But what I have seen in the 80's, 90's, 00 and today are people who leave for a new job, then come back a few years later and in that process get paid more than there last job of which the company would not match the offer or come close.

This is why the only real way in many companies to get a pay-rise is a job change/promotion and this and as true work is often not valued and gauged by management tier then we end up with lots of managers. Sounds familiar too many in large companies.

But then in contrast in the 80's older people got paid more and younger people got paid less and personally experienced that in many situations when I would of got much more if I was just older, no more experience, just age. Now I'm older, that situation has changed and more bias towards younger people in many situations, experience ignored. But young people will burn 80 hours learning and doing work which the older person could of probably done in half the time if not less. But we all go thru that learning curve.

Not all companies still this bad, some better, but at the same time introduce new issues and with that the price of some free food to entrap employee's into doing extra free hours that far out-way they food investment is an area most overlook in a young industry like IT. Acting, accountants and other longer established trades have much more solid practice and rewards and protection. Heck who wouldn't want a repeat-fee like actors every time your code was run.