161–170 of 196 posts
Basically all the suggestions are low level grass roots value proposals. This article has much better advice (IMHO)
https://www.fastcompany.com/3064513/lessons-learned/im-a-ceo...
In my experience you'll be much better off just quitting and joining other companies, then going onto contracting. Here's my own person experience in just a few years: 1. Start off as a Grad on 30k GBP 2. One and half years later quit, onto another company at 48k GBP (>50% pay rise) 3. One and half years later quit. Do own thing for a year. Then go onto contracting at equivalent of 75k GBP (>50% pay rise) So in summa…
Contracting for startups at 75k GBP? Is this in London? What industry is the startup targeting?
Good contractors can hit 100k+
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What position did he come in as? Seems awfully odd to have a new-hire making such a decision. From the sounds of it, he effectively tied up resources for almost a year before being pushed out? There are two problems there, from what I can ascertain: 1. The guy wanting to rewrite your product. 2. Management that allowed him to do so without proper motivation and/or cost-benefit analysis.
I was a noob at the time and had assumed he was a minimum of 1 year experience better than me and really knew what he was talking about. He used great business terms and convinced the non-techies, too. In retrospect, it's a very obvious mistake. He convinced us the open source project that we based our business on for the 6 months before hiring him had limitations, but it turns out that the open source project was pa…
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As director of engineering, I gladly gave generous raises to retain people, because it cost way more in lost productivity to read resumes, interview candidates, and onboard new devs, not to mention the $30k check you have to write to the recruiter. And you're right, one bad hire can be disastrous...apparently the guy that replaced me wanted to prove his value by rewriting the whole architecture. So they spent a whole…
> apparently the guy that replaced me wanted to prove his value by rewriting the whole architecture. So they spent a whole year doing that which I'm sure is much cleaner than the original under the hood, but to the end user, it is not apparent Anecdote: We had a guy show up, he claimed that we had to do a rewrite. We spent 2 years catching up to the base product. Complete waste of time, had to fire him 1 year into th…
They decided to rewrite the code from scratch."
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I've never seen it happen successfully. I've done it at least half a dozen times in my career. I was told "the maximum we can give is a $7k raise since there is a fixed pool for raises in the department." I said if I quit and you have to replace me, not only will you have to hire 2 devs to replace me (as I pulled dev and sysops duty) and pay them market salaries, you will have to pay a recruiter 20-30%. They still wo…
Same here. If you're somewhat good, getting a new developer will always be expensive and it is a risk for the company. The new developer needs to familiarise himself with everything and what happens if he's actually worse than you? Of course no sane boss will ever tell you this. Just nag them and don't accept "no" for an answer.
From the employer point of view, keeping someone aboard who is willing to jump on every opportunity for leverage is also a risk. You might want to have the fiercest of negotiators in sales, but the same thing is not a trait you want to see in developers. Bad for their earnings, but that's how it is. The most capable developer in the world would not be a someone you want as an employee if you suspect that he could use his powers for extortion tactics. (It's bad enough already that the worst developers become "irreplaceable" without even trying)
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In a large HR department, chances are you're dealing with somebody for whom you're just a number instead of somebody has a personal grudge. Nothing personal, just business is the attitude you want when handling something as trivial as a salary negotiation.
Being a psychopath isn't about holding a grudge, it's about acting in pure self-interest with no regard for the effect on others. So psychopathy is a good way to describe an HR dept that does its intended job.
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I can assure you as a (reluctant) manager I definitely care. Its literally the only reason I'm management. I'm also constantly having discussions with the people who generally make these kind of broad decisions about how unrealistic their decision making processes are. I tend to start those conversations with some variant on "it doesn't matter what you say the raise limits are for a person, the market sets those thin…
> it doesn't matter what you say the raise limits are for a person, the market sets those things and the market right now says you're wrong This is very common. They often justify it with "In this company we're not paying as much, but we have greater freedom/cooler tech/ ". Well good for you. We have already established that we're a good fit, but I'm not working for 20% less than I can across the street.
The problematic behavior is when the people setting the pay bands get the value proposition wrong or they think they are paying market when they are not.
If only things were so easy. Our department gets allocated $XX,XXX each year for raises. My boss has to split that among eight people. If I were to get a 5% bump like OP recommends, other people would get nothing. Sounds like typical D-grade manager motivation. "Everyone work yourself to death and I might throw you a bone after one year!" I'd rather give up that 5% to have a sane work-life balance. It's common knowle…