[bambataa]

I’m going to go out on a limb and claim that the large majority of big tech workers would be perfectly happy with a few promotions over a career and annual inflation-matching pay rises.

Except you rarely get inflation-matching pay rises, so the only way to prevent the annual erosion of your situation is the constant team growth and never-ending promotions.

[hashtag-til]

True. Those who never complain about salary and are perceived as “happy” are in the bottom of salary increase priorities.

I learned that the hard way a few years back, then got my act together and made sure I’m always perceived unhappy with salary - to pull that off, you need to be backed by delivering stuff and being seen. Do your homework, and ask for the recognition, that’s my tip.

[Spivak]

I just got told by my company this year that they can’t afford to keep up with inflation. I really don’t see how they expect this to go.

[gtop3]

All but the most naive (or small) companies will do market analysis on the market rate of labor and have internal churn targets. I'm sure the accountants did the math and upper management decided the expected bump in churn is worth the savings. They probably noticed a recent decrease in churn at the company, and a recent stagnation of tech wage growth and thought this was a fantastic opportunity to manage labor costs. Not giving labor a 5% wage increase now will have an impact on their labor costs for years, as wage growth compounds.

The prevailing engineer perspective is that this behavior causes the smartest engineers with options and ambitions will move on. Other top engineers will leave simply because they prefer working with other great engineers. Three years of small plays like this from management is enough to cause complete brain drain, as even those waiting for more vesting will lose optimism. It's one thing to have 6% churn from engineering/product in a year. It's another if you lose the most qualified and respected 6%.

[Aeolun]

> It's another if you lose the most qualified and respected 6%.

I doubt that’s the case. The people deciding to lay off are just getting rid of 6% of their ‘resources’, they don’t consider that those 6% might be doing 50% of the work.

So 3 years on they’re just wondering why their engineering team is so useless, and thinking back to the good old times.

[gtop3]

1. My comment was on managing churn rate, not layoffs.

2. My comment described a process in which talented engineers self select to leave companies, and management only had indirect input on which engineers leave.

[nr2x]

I think you’re spot on. Elves and whatnot.

[no_wizard]

To kick inflation though, it'd need to be more than 5%. In this year, we're probably looking at 8-10% to keep up with inflation.

[gtop3]

1. Inflation numbers are hyper local to both individuals and region.

2. If we wanted to use a number with authority we would probably use 6.5%, which is the US Buerau of Labor Static's number for 2022 CPI.

3. My level of precision (one digit) should have been an informal indicator that I was using a rough estimate.

[doktorhladnjak]

They expect that the competition will do the same--raise wages below inflation. Then you've got nowhere to go to make more. Even if it doesn't work out that way, most employees complain a bit but don't leave.

[oxfordmale]

Competition will do the same initially, until the growth curves reverses. At that point, when you really need your experienced staff to drive growth, moat of them will be busy finding new positions.

[ryanbrunner]

Except that making lateral moves has almost always resulted in higher salaries regardless of macroeconomic trends. The competition may be giving current employees sub-inflation raises as well, but odds are that they're willing to pay more than your current company on an initial offer.

[Spivak]

I think the dynamic I would be most afraid of is employees who have enough years experience to get a more senior position using this as catalyst to move on.

[whateveracct]

I think they'll be surprised.

I have noticed that recruiter outreach to me has picked back up. I'm pretty senior and they're offering me senior roles that could pay more. My current employer has benefitted from current events though so I'm staying put. But if I ever want to fuck off, I easily can.

I have a friend who is very junior. He got promoted but still fucked off to a new better job because his current employer treated him poorly.

I think people are gonna start remembering they can fuck off again, and we're gonna end up somewhere between here and where we were when the job market was on fire pandemic and pre-pandemic.

[pc86]

We got raises across the board this year that are about 2/3 of the current annual inflation rate, which is not a lot of money month-to-month but is more than I expected tbh.

It's also important to note that wage inflation and the inflation of goods and services are separate and not always correlated. Just because milk and bread and cars cost more doesn't mean that the value provided to a company by an hour of an employee's time has risen by the same amount (or at all). I'd love raises that beat inflation every year, and for most of my career I've gotten them, but now that I'm not it doesn't necessarily mean the company is just trying to screw its employees.

[CapstanRoller]

The correlation between "value provided to the company" and "salary paid to retain a worker" is much lower than you might believe.

Also, critical parts of employee retention include "keep the worker alive" and "keep the worker satisfied". If housing goes up 20%, the wage better increase by 20% as well. Homeless or unstably housed engineers are not productive engineers.

[pc86]

It's important to keep in mind we're talking about engineers, who make good money. Unless you're already making very bad financial decisions, nobody on HN is getting evicted because your raise is 4% instead of 6%.

These are all very good arguments for why people making $15/hr should get regular raises to keep pace with inflation as a matter of course, not a very good argument for why someone making $200k copy-pasting JavaScript from StackOverflow should.

[CapstanRoller]

>nobody on HN is getting evicted because your raise is 4% instead of 6%

That's an unfounded assertion. I know plenty of software devs & other tech industry folks who cannot afford a house and are being squeezed by relentless rent increases (myself included). Many on the lower end of the pay range are a layoff away from homelessness.

[coldtea]

Well, they hope other companies will do the same, or even fire people, so that there will be no hirings, and so people wont have a chance to jump ship...