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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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Work Reform
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Clickbait.
Article is nearly 10 years old.
Article contains no studies or surveys showing this result.
The 50% figure is calculated by assuming a paltry annual raise and consistent large pay bumps by switching companies.
That being said, word is that in the tech industry at least, hiring budgets are clearly higher than promotion budgets and that moving every 2 years or so is clearly the best strategy for career advancement.
Just one industry, of course, but the pattern certainly seems to have settled in there, and it may not be a stretch to speculate it will spread to other industries perhaps under the shitty influence of AI.
Backing up "word is" by an article that says "word is" is kinda meager though. There are many things widely believed to be true that are not, or only mildly so our in specific circumstances.
Well I'm relaying what is basically common knowledge in the industry shared by people in the industry. The thing about promotion/hiring budgets is something I know directly or through people at their companies.
Sure, it may not be industry wide, of course, but I've not seen any hint of a countervailing trend or pattern. What's more, in the tech industry, it makes sense. There's a fair amount of pivoting which is often deemed to be done best by hiring (at least some) new staff with the required expertise/experience. And maintaining existing/legacy systems is often de-prioritised such that those who've been at the company for a while who understand the existing systems well are not as valued as those who may help the company "grow". Which is why I bring up the possibility that these patterns may spread to other industries.
The countervailing trend in the tech industry is layoffs.
I'm not sure what you're saying. The size of the labour force and the way salary "growth" relates to employer movement rate seem to me relatively independent dynamics. Moreover, I'd imagine increased layoffs positively correlate with the advantage that regularly moving employers can provide.
Am I missing something?
Some of the companies that pay the most are the same ones doing the layoffs, like Google.
Trading up for money could add extra risk exposure to layoffs.
But if every job change is seen as a pay raise opportunity, I guess layoffs are speeding the process along for you.
AFAICT, lay-offs are pretty widespread. Sometimes the bigger employers just give the smaller ones “permission” first.
I haven’t heard of any smaller companies in my network doing layoffs, but I’m sure there are some out there.
Yea interesting. I have no numbers and I'm not really "plugged in" at all ... but I've certainly heard of smaller places doing layoffs after Google etc. No idea how widespread that is though.
Every single time I see this type of conversation come up it's always about the more privileged higher paying white collar work.
In my shit experience, blue collar work is "get shit raises or take massive pay cuts." There is no "change job and also make more." I've been stuck in the same cycle for 15 years now... Every time I leave a job I get knocked back to the wage I made when I first started the job I left regardless of the new position.
But that's because only white collar workers are seen as people. Us blue collar workers are just meat machines that never deserve more than we were "bought" for and any new employee is automatically assumed to be as intelligent and skilled as a dead cockroach.
Oh I hear you. I’m in no way celebrating any of these dynamics or the white collar focus of “how to run your career advice”.
How does this work out with all in value when it comes to stock options or other vesting based non salary compensation? Aren't you leaving a lot on the table if you switch every 2 years? Does salary alone make up for that?
My company gives up to an extra 2 weeks of PTO based on years of service. Stock Options/RSU have like a 3 to 5 year pay out vesting timeline with a % of it vesting every year. but you get new grants every year. So after you've been working for 3 or more years, you basically have a "full" grant value vesting every year. throw in 6 percent 401k match at 100 percent match my on paper below market value salary actually returns a pretty good total comp package. I'm not sure if switching every 2 or 3 years would provide me any significant benefit because of how my long term tenure at the company has paid off with these incentives for staying. I imagine there's a probably something about jumping around early vs mid vs late career that factors into this equation too.
Don’t know! AFAIK, some stock options do partially vest before two years. But this isn’t just salary, it’s career advancement, which means seniority and arguably experience, all of which tend to stay locked in for the rest of your career and lead to more stock options should you arrive somewhere you’re willing to stay longer at.
Idk about it being locked in. I have seen people with Sr and Lead titles interviewing for a lower position these days. Those things don't always stay with you the rest of your life. But titles are cheap. Salary, bonuses, and stock are money.
For me, I had considered job offers with higher salary. But then when I looked at the salary and reduced PTO I realized my hourly wage didn't change that much. When I factored in the stock package and downgrade in 401k match these 10%+ percent salary increases put me behind near term (near term being about 3 years until the new company started to vest and become regular earnings).
I've averaged about a 4 year tenure at my previous employers -- some a bit more, some a bit less -- but usually with a competing offer or two in that time period that I've used as a lever for a pay raise. Nobody's complained about me being a job-hopper or short-timer.
I have noticed that my two last employers, both large national firms, have moved towards a model of career-tracking with a defined pay structure, similar to government work where different positions and experience levels have a pay range attached to them and you're not able to negotiate out of that range. This has been framed as a protective move against wage inequality suits, but I suspect it's more about preventing employees from negotiating especially high compensation packages. I haven't had it cut against me yet -- in both cases I got a very minor pay bump when my employers actually went out and compared their pay scales to what the market was demanding -- but if enough employers start benchmarking against each other and using that to cap pay, it will functionally become like a wage-fixing cartel similar to what's happened to rent in the last 5-10 years.
Well, it does match my own experience and observations (in Software Development in a couple of countries in Europe) going back to the 90s.
The shift to "no loyalty to employees and hence for employees being loyal is a net negative" was around the point when companies started refering to employees as "human resources" and IMHO, resulted from the increased use of MBAs in Management, which in Tech happenned aound the early to mid-90s (though it dependend on country and the actual Industry making heavy use of IT).
Mind you, at least in IT and even all the way back then, it was already a good idea to move places at least once in one's career because people who worked all their life in one place don't really know any other way of working than the one of their place, which is limiting for one's professional growth (though plenty of people did manage to just keep ticking up on salary purelly on age-seniority even well after they stopped improving as professionals) because no one company has "the right processes" for everything.
Personally I actually think it's healthy to move companies at least a few times in one's career, but my point here is more about one's career and income growth stalling (and pretty early on, too) if you don't move companies.
That said, I'm talking about expert and in high demand career tracks: I don't really know if in the kind of jobs were the bean counters basically see employees as commodities there is any significant benefit from job-hopping, unless it's job-hopping into a different kind of job.
That said, it would interesting to see what the actual numbers are, although I'm sure it will vary a lot between industries and jobs and other factors. Anecdotally it sounds correct but that could just be true for some trait of my social circle, or some other bias about mentioning pay or something. Or just that people tend to be more likely to change jobs when they are underpaid, so the pay jumps from changing jobs seem bigger since the job they're changing to will be closer to the market, whereas well paid employees will stick around and maybe not notice the gradual pay increases as much.
I'm glad forbes put the date in the URL otherwise I probably wouldn't have noticed and come back to the comments.