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by tshaddox 1730 days ago
Aren’t you missing the fact that the demand can change while you’re still at your job because of the fact that you can leave at any time? I see no good reason why people need to switch jobs to get significant pay increases, other than apparently there is psychological or bureaucratic “stickiness” of compensation.
2 comments
fiddlerwoaroof 1730 days ago
I’ve occasionally wondered if a policy of giving a 10-30% total raise over the first 3-ish years of an employees tenure would pay off: the value of the domain knowledge of someone who walks + the cost of recruiting and training a new hire is probably about $50k+ and, so, it might be less expensive in the long run to just match the raise someone could get by switching jobs.
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bradleyjg 1730 days ago
You need to be careful with lockstep compensation plans. Your high, and even mid, employees will resent that low performers are getting the same as they are.
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fiddlerwoaroof 1729 days ago
Most places I’ve worked had some concept of an “expected raise”: 1-3% a year. What I’m suggesting is making that a bit steeper and still paying performance-based raises on top of that. (I’m not sure what exact numbers make sense here: maybe a total of 10-20% expected raise over the salary offer + up to 10% based on performance?): the goal here is to save money by reducing the amount of domain and operational knowledge that just walks out the door.
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quickthrower2 1730 days ago
When you look for another job, there may be way 10k companies recruiting.

Most will pay less than your current job. You only need to find one that pays more.

They might do that because they lack of engineers is what is holding them back from growth.

Or they desperately need a certain skill set.

There is a lot of money sloshing around and opportunities to get paid more elsewhere.

Now if you are underpaid it might be you are in the 30-percentile and 70% pay more so you can walk into a pay raise with eyes closed.

Logically you are right that the current company should pay more. I think there are too many companies whose business model can’t support all staff being paid what they can get on the market. They rely on people being loyal.

(They could survive if they became more efficient but few companies seem interested in really doing that)

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