[CydeWeys]

"Going above and beyond" at a big company, if done in a smart strategic way, is the best way to get promoted, and getting promoted results in significantly higher pay. I've gotten promoted twice at my current employer over the years, which has roughly doubled my total compensation, and none of that would have happened had I just did my previous level's responsibilities and nothing beyond.

[bryanlarsen]

That's the exception rather than the rule. Most people have to switch employers to get a significant pay raise.

[627467]

Most people who think they deserve a significant pay raise probably don't (or maybe not enough relative to others competing for limited promotional budget).

[johnnyanmac]

I've seen enough people extremely qualified being denied promotions because they were "too good" at their current role. Meanwhile I've also seen as of late "promotions" that are just a title change while only adding to your workload with no extra pay. There's no winning with many companies.

If it's not your dream job or it truly is the best comp in your area, you need to be very careful with promotion tracks and have a plan to keep poking the people involved. But all that already means it may not be a good fit of a company who cares about growth anyway, so...

[tcbawo]

Many people also confuse how hard they work for how much business value they create. Staying late, working long hours is only beneficial if it creates value. Is that work something that anyone else could do? Does it reduce costs or increase revenue? Reducing costs has a limited upside. For a lot of work, the difference in productivity between two workers might be 10%, 50%, even 100% you can still be a commodity. From my experience, doing something that only you can do that results in enduring, increased revenue is the best way to make real money. Learning the business, becoming indispensable, and help to grow the business takes time and experience, but will be rewarded. And if it isn’t, move on!

[munksbeer]

> Many people also confuse how hard they work for how much business value they create. Staying late, working long hours is only beneficial if it creates value.

Ok.

> Is that work something that anyone else could do?

Maybe not anyone else, but someone else, sure.

But here is the real point. In order to get promoted you have to be selfish. You have to shirk doing the work that isn't perceived as creating the highest value, and leave it to some other sucker. If no-one did that work, what then? It's not like plumbing fields around SBE messages is difficult, or writing some additional business logic is difficult. And the same goes for running some performance tuning, and shaving a few micros here and there. Any developer on our teams can do either task. But the person who can prove that they shaved a few micros off tick to trade latency and made us a bunch of money is going to get noticed a lot more than the poor sucker who plumbed in a few fields to allow risk team to monitor things more carefully.

Almost all work that moves the company forward is valuable. Some just has greater perceivable value, and results in the higher reward.

We've all been through this, we know how it works.

[tcbawo]

I don’t think your point disagrees with my point. The better aligned your perception is with management on where/how value is getting delivered, the better you will judge how to invest your time. You might be right and they might be wrong. But if you know the business better than your bosses, then you might be working for the wrong people.

[munksbeer]

And I think you're missing my point. If everyone is perfectly aligned and recognised what will be rewarded, no-one wants to do any other task.

I work in finance. We have a lot of regulatory requirements. Assume some boring regulatory requirement comes in that all of your agorithmic trading on electronic venues needs to stamp an algorithm id on each message to the venue (this was a real thing). Someone has to do a huge amount of boring work aligning everything to do this, and in the end, there is little visible value creation from this work, and you're not going to be rewarded for doing it (people weren't). But without it, your business will cease to function entirely.

The problem is the stakeholders controlling reward are far from perfect. They will judge this project against a project that tweaked the algorithms for better performance (as I already alluded to) and reward the latter, because it made dollar sign go up.

So basically you end up in a shark tank where developers are acting selfishly, desperately trying to get their name attached to the correct projects, and the loudest voices win.

The value of a quiet, but excellent developer, who writes correct code, doesn't introduce stupid complexity, makes the right decisions for the future, even if it takes longer, is very high. But that value isn't easily visible and I'd argue this is rife across the every industry that employs developers, not just big finance.

[nitwit005]

It doesn't matter if you "deserve" the raise or not. If someone else will pay you more, the raise is yours.

[dingnuts]

over the last ten years the tech industry has 10x'd the value it has created, which is obvious if you look at the accrued wealth of the leaders in the industry.

you know what has NOT gone up 10x in the decade I've been working in this industry? MY SALARY

we all deserve a significant pay raise you scab

[Akarnani]

Are employees at google not being paid for what they're risking?

An investor risks their post tax capital, and then when it works like google gets the upside and when it fails they get...shares in blackberry or IBM.

An employee risks their time, which they are guaranteed by law at least for the time they risk, to be compensated in cash and benefits.

An employee also risks their reputation and career opportunity cost for which they get...checks notes...options that go up/down the same as an investor.

An employee is participating in both value buckets, and one might argue at Google specifically, in the most compensatory bucket proportion in the history of all people ever.

[CrimsonRain]

Why don't you start your own company, make a lot of money and hire people with 10x salary? Who's stoping you? Show us how you pay 1M to each of your SWE.

[l0t0b0r0s]

It doesnt have to be 10x. Working in "Mid Tech" should at least guarantee you a raise that beats inflation. Sadly, it seems the only way to guarantee a raise that is proportional to the companies increased productivity is to shop offers around.

[CrimsonRain]

Either you're too bad (at best average; same thing I guess?) or the company management is shit. Either way you should not be in that company. So what's the problem?

[westmeal]

He cant start one because he doesn't have enough money lol

[immibis]

Pay isn't about "deserve". It's about the intersection of supply and demand curves and the amount of friction.

Companies have low friction firing you to get someone cheaper. Will you have low friction firing your company to get more expensive?

[scarface_74]

If I can find someone to pay me more, whether I deserve it or not is irrelevant.

[consteval]

There's virtually no relationship between who gets a raise and who deserves it.

The people who get raises take active steps to obtain them. Typically that means pushing, or getting a new job. The reality is that life is not fair and corporate America is not a meritocracy.

[cudgy]

You’re hired! /s

[edmundsauto]

As with all things, it depends where you are. It’s not the case for big tech employers, who tend to have very clear “levels” and (from what I can tell on levels.fyi) it’s often a 25%+ jump in total comp.

And these are the biggest employers of talent. It may not be most people in a startup forum, but it’s a lot of people.

For all others, I think it’s because tech isn’t seen as such an important revenue driver. Lots of places we are still seen as a cost center.

[Aqua_Geek]

Anecdata, for sure, but my experience working at several big companies in tech is that they won’t significantly bump your pay (and especially not your stock grant!) when they promote you. If anything, they will move you to the minimum of the salary band for the new level.

In my experience, you’re better off getting the promo and looking for the next job at your leisure. It sucks that that is what the system rewards, but I certainly don’t fault people for playing the game that is given.

[9rx]

> that is what the system rewards

Commensurate to the risk, of course. If you ignore the risk component then your best bet is to forget having a job and spend your days playing Powerball. The system offers much, much, much greater reward there.

If you keep risk in mind then it's not so clear cut. Staying at the job you have, even with lower pay on paper, may end up being the most profitable option in the end. But sometimes you just have to make the gamble and find out! There are winning opportunities for sure.

[johnnyanmac]

Risk depends on the market strength. In good times, you could easily jump to a new job with a raise in weeks and there's little risk as long as you're not outing youself at work.

In bad times like this, probably not worth it. The search takes months not, if not over a year, and there's a non-zero chance you're laid off anyway.

[9rx]

Weeks can be a long time if it doesn't work out. And that is, by your own comment, in the good times. The good times don't last forever. Upon some dice roll it is going to turn, and when that one doesn't work out now you could be looking at months or years.

Staying put isn't risk-free either. Not by any stretch. But is comparatively less risky. It is the devil you know, hence the lower risk premium.

[delroth]

> It’s not the case for big tech employers, who tend to have very clear “levels” and (from what I can tell on levels.fyi) it’s often a 25%+ jump in total comp.

You're misinterpreting the data, because you can't see for data points on levels.fyi whether they obtained their reported salary by being promoted within the company or by doing the very common "side-promotion" of getting hired at a higher level at a competitor.

I was young and naive and unwilling to play the company hopping game, I got promoted from L3 to L6 at Google, after a year and a half at L6 I was paid in base salary less than some of my colleagues who got recently hired at L5 and negotiated well, plus they got significantly higher stock grants as part of their signing bonus (like, around 2x what I was getting through standard yearly grant refreshes).

[somanyphotons]

Managers who are handing our perf-review changes in comp are often very constrained when handling those who negotiated well. They'll typically get inflation level raises for a long time until they're lower in their band

[compiler-guy]

I've always called that a "diagonal promotion" because it's over-and-up.

It's also the only way I have ever gotten a significant increase in compensation, responsibility, and title.

[scarface_74]

Over the past 7 years, it wasn’t comp I was optimizing for over a certain amount it was increasing in scope and impact and autonomy when it came to managing projects and getting closer to the “business”.

I realized that it would be my competitive advantage as everything else got commoditized and outsourced.

I went from the second highest tech IC at a 100 person startup setting the direction of the overall architecture, to a mid level cloud consultant at BigTech (full time, direct hire), to a “staff” level at a smaller company (same responsibilities as a senior at BigTech).

Funny enough, the company that acquired the startup pre-BigTech offered me a staff position responsible for strategy over all of their acquisitions 3 years later.

My next play if I cared about comp, would be to go back to BigTech as a senior or a smaller company as a director/CTO.

[vkou]

Those L5s negotiated a good hiring wage, but would see stagnant growth until they hit the median of wages for level + performance rating in their location.

Also since COVID, they've been very aggressively squishing the pay bands.

[Rebelgecko]

They also have the advantage of getting L5 pay immediately, while for someone who got promoted internally it can take 4-5 years for all the equity to catch up

[ctrlw]

The signing bonus stock grants may also have compensated them for giving up the stock grants of their previous employer, so they probably still received less than you had accumulated.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Pay bands for different levels are typically pretty broad, and typically overlap between levels. Just because median pay at level N+1 is significantly higher than at level N, doesn't mean that you will get that being promoted from level N.

[CydeWeys]

It's not an exception at all. People get promoted all the time. Most people I work with have been promoted at least once since joining the company, some multiple times like I have.

[__loam]

Based on my anecdotal experience and the people I've known in industry, job hopping is way way way easier than getting a promo if you're trying to maximize salary. Mine has doubled after a few job hops.

[4m1rk]

Even better is working for yourself.

[scarface_74]

Right because “working for yourself” is likely to lead you to the same profit as even the comp of a mid level employee at any of the BigTech companies.

[4m1rk]

At least your performance has 100% impact, so it's all up to you rather than someone else.

[theoreticalmal]

CydeWays post is very similar to my experience as well

[creer]

> if done in a smart strategic way, is the best way to get promoted

This alludes to the other bit that's not taught enough: Working effectively, efficiently is not about how many problem reports you close, or lines of code you ship or number of hours at your desk. It's about recognition. Pay attention and work toward the stuff that will get you recognized. Pay attention and measure how much effort you put in the day to day stuff and the stuff that will be seen. This work is not "for your company", it's "for your career".

Watch out also for what kind of recognition you get. If you become known as the expert in day to day operation of tool XYZ, you might be parked doing that for the rest of your life. Probably not what you intended.