[mmcconnell1618]

HR departments are constantly looking at "market rates" for jobs which is a fancy way of saying they share salary data or get it from ADP and have much more information about what people are willing to accept.

At hiring time, they are willing to pay market rate (or some percentage of market rate) to get people in the door. Once you are employed, they don't care anymore and will let excellent people slowly fall behind market compensation with 1% to 2% raises.

When those employees get frustrated and leave for 20% bump in comp, the companies seem fine replacing them with a new hire at market rate. So now, they have a new employee making market rate, they have to train the new employee for months before they are productive and they've taken on the risk of an unknown vs. just giving the existing employee a raise to market rate. It doesn't make sense unless you want to telegraph the message that employees are fungible and you don't really care about people.

[Muromec]

> It doesn't make sense unless you want to telegraph the message that employees are fungible and you don't really care about people.

I actually makes total sense and a lot of it. I see the take that management doesn't know about knowledge being lost, they don't understand this, they don't understand that. I believed this was case until I started to work for a company that is literally 200 years old.

At some point between joining that company and deciding to leave the previous, I got it -- nobody is actually that stupid, neither people are evil or anything.

Employee being a row in an excel sheet is an important goal that every big company strives to achieve and all the functions, processes and products that are contrary to that dogma are actively rejected by the system as dangerous.

For the company to be the company it must never depend on this particular employee being very smart. Every bit of knowledge that is not written down and confirmed to be in accordance to The Policy is a risk and should be forgotten. That's the intended way.

And of course the only way to discover the market price for real is to spend the money. The cost of losing mister special employee is negative anyway, and for the offchance it's positive, it's worth it.

The evil thing is not this, the evil thing is not being upfront about it. Get a union, negotiate yourself a nice row in the excel sheet and be happy about it or make your own company.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Well I worked for almost 27 years, for a company that made top-shelf optical equipment, for 100 years. They were able to mix heavy process and exceptional employees. It can be done, but is not easy (which is why it’s so rare).

It had lots of frustration and flaws, but consistently, repeatedly, delivered equipment, costing tens of thousands of dollars, that people based their entire careers on.

The trouble came, when they tried to change to a more modern model.

They made a lot of money, for a few years, but ended up crashing and burning. Their brand suffered extinction-level damage.

I’m really hoping that they get their mojo back. There’s a better than even chance they will.

[Muromec]

>They made a lot of money, for a few years, but ended up crashing and burning.

I'm not sure whether it proves my point or yours, or both.

>I’m really hoping that they get their mojo back. There’s a better than even chance they will.

Regression to the mean and entropy will eat us all. There is no hope.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

In a way, both.

Their structure works really well, for the specialized (smallish) market they occupied for decades, but sucked, in the new market.

I think they may get their groove back, because their core is true, and they are tough. They are a Japanese company that has gone through world wars, depressions, recessions, etc. They are also very conservative, fiscally. That helps you to get past the rough patches.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> you want to telegraph the message that employees are fungible and you don't really care about people.

From my experience, that’s exactly what is going on.

HR was obsessed (and that’s not hyperbole) with constantly telling us that we could be ejected, at any time.

I suspect that it had something to do with legal stuff. Our HR was run by lawyers.