I was born into a family run company. Gave them 10 years of my life. The first few years I worked really hard and got a 2-3 dollar raise. Shortly after, minimim wage went up to 50 cents below what I was making. I did not get another raise until 2-3 years down the line. Regardless who your employer is, get treated fairly or leave for somewhere that will treat you fairly.
And if you left based on that stagnant wage, I bet they gave you the guilt trip about loyalty, and how hard it is to operate a small business, as if that somehow makes it okay to underpay you.
They weren’t too bad when I left and even pitched in for some of my schooling. I still don’t feel bad taking a couple cans of soup whenever I visit though. And the work did teach me a lot of skills and a great work ethic.
Sad, but true. First 7 years of my software career were split between two companies and despite 3 promotions and exceeding expectations in reviews regularly, salary growth was between 2-5% YoY.
Most recent 5 years of my career I’ve changed jobs every 6ish months and am now averaging about 40% YoY salary growth.
Insane that a company will pay you a 20% premium to hire someone that they’ll spend 6-months training just to watch said person fly off to another firm.
Contracting is even worse. Bring someone on to do menial piecework at 2x-5x the median company salary, then kick them out so you can bring on another person who has no idea how your company operates to do the same entry-level jobs. All so you don’t have to tell investors how many people are actually on your payroll.
No wonder the business failure rate is so fucking high.
Contracting is even worse. Bring someone on to do menial piecework at 2x-5x the median company salary
Lol, as a contractor, I bring in value the current team can’t deliver, and when I leave the team has gained skills and delivers better work. You sound like somebody with very limited, bad experience and decided to hate something you don’t understand.
Well no, ideally contractors should do everything this person says they do. They should provide expertise that teams don’t have, and by the time they leave the team shouldn’t need them anymore.
The problem is less the contractors and more the people handling the contracts. Sometimes it’s between client and contractor, sometimes contracting company. You can’t blame the contractor for being hired to do a job, blame the person claiming there’s a need for contractors.
I’ve been on both sides of the contracting game. While I certainly have broad skills and a speedy comprehension, I’ve never been on a job site where the guy handling the software for the last 10 years understood it worse than I did after the first six months.
I also can’t help notice the deplorable state of documentation, at least in my corner of the O&G accounting software field. So there are plenty of instances in which a contractor will roll in, throw something patchwork together, dump it on the client, and then leave me to support the rickety piece of crap for the next five years. I get to play Inspector Gadget as I parse through miles of spagetti code, trying to run down why some obscure command has decided to produce a vague error.
Did the contractors know more about some niche javascript package than I did when the project started? Absolutely. Do the contractors care that I’m going to be the one shoring up this antiquated, sloppily implemented code injection until we retire the system? They do not. Would the $300/hr for a year of fussy support been more valuable if applied to a $40-$80/hr on-site tech who stays with the firm for the next five years? Yes.
Sounds like organizational failures all over the place, not the fault of contractors.
I’ve never been on a job site where the guy handling the software for the last 10 years understood it worse than I did after the first six months.
Bring in contractors for a codebase 10+ years old? Yeah, the current team is not working properly from management perspective. So either the manager doesn’t understand what they do, or the team is incapable of communicating to management what they do, or the team is shit.
So there are plenty of instances in which a contractor will roll in, throw something patchwork together, dump it on the client, and then leave me to support the rickety piece of crap for the next five years
So management and current team let in garbage code, that means there is no working review process. If the team didn’t establish a review process they don’t know how to work with modern methods, if management prevented it they are just incompetent.
Would the $300/hr for a year of fussy support been more valuable if applied to a $40-$80/hr on-site tech who stays with the firm for the next five years?
I don’t think adding another employee to an environment with broken communication and no code reviews will improve anything. And contractors can’t magically fix your broken org.
Sounds like organizational failures all over the place, not the fault of contractors.
You’re not wrong. This falls on the managers heads as much as it falls anywhere.
I’m not blaming contractors for being contractors. A lot of these folks are straight out of college and new to their respective fields. It isn’t there fault that Deloitte or Accenture or whomever spent six weeks teaching them to make power point presentations rather than giving them a proper six month seasoning in proper standard business practices. Even less so when the folks running my own company never bothered to learn how to do things properly themselves and don’t appear to know who to ask.
But the consequences of the practice of hiring a flood of pricey contractors to do implementation and then leaving the maintenance to a bare-bones staff is misery for everyone involved.
So management and current team let in garbage code
Management doesn’t know shit for shit about coding. The current team doesn’t get to vet and approve the code that’s released (as if we’ve got the time given our existing maintenance roles). They only get to handle the final product that’s delivered. That is a central problem with the business model. Trust is invested in contractors that isn’t earned or deserved. Meanwhile, the expectations of functionality are transferred to the skeleton crew staff once they leave.
I don’t think adding another employee to an environment with broken communication and no code reviews will improve anything.
I think you can’t get to an environment of effective communication and consistent code dev/review standards if half your workforce evaporates at the end of the contract period. As it stands, we’ve got managers stacked six roles high while the actual applications have maybe 1-1.5 employees assigned to each. So who knows the systems well enough to review the other guy’s code?
Having a mentor-mentee relationship on each app would be much preferable to a contractor-for-a-year/single-support-specialist-for-a-lifetime situation we’re dealing with now.
And then they act like it’s the employees who are wrong. I bet every single one of the job hoppers enjoying these huge salary benefits would prefer to just chill in the same job forever if it achieved the same thing.
I can only speak for myself, but that’s exactly why I left my last job. I loved it and the people I worked with, but I couldn’t afford that pay rate with such poor benefits.
On my way out, they told me that they wished they had 10 more employees like me.
They didn’t want it bad enough to pay even one employee a little more, though. I am not the only person who left recently lmao
Absolutely! I had a job some 3 years back that said if I continue to perform well, I could probably be promoted in 2 years.
This was on the heels of no bonuses or raises that year (well, for the team I was on).
2 years? Also that was the team’s reward after a year of work? This was a Fortune 500 company with over $10B in revenue.
The next month…layoffs. We spent the month figuring out all the tribal knowledge that went out the door.
The next month after that…contractors must take 2 unpaid days off every month and holiday closures don’t count towards that.
The next month they said, “Good news! We’re renewing your contract.” - Nope. I’m out.
Last I heard everyone on my team also left in the following 3 months, the director of the department also left, and the VP got forced out and replaced.
Its nice to be both secure in your job and confident in your work. Changing positions is exhausting, both in the job-hunting process and the re-training process once you land a new gig. Then you’re back at the bottom of the “knows what I’m doing here” totem pole.
One big reason I’m at 6 years and counting in my current gig is the enjoyment I’ve had in building a system and maintaining it consistently. Its nice to know the folks in the business appreciate my work. And if I have to wave another company’s job offer under my boss’s nose from time to time in order to keep my salary competitive, I think that’s more just a disconnect between management and staff I’m obligated to make for them every couple of years. At least they’re receptive and responsive to my demands, which is more than I can say of prior employers.
There are also a second hand caste of contractors, it’s the ones that work as ordinary employees but employed by another company so that they don’t get benefits
It’s an absolute cluster. It’s also led to me just not caring about the job or company anymore (not like I should).
I love supporting the team and my immediate coworkers, but I’m not there to make friends. For all we know our entire project gets canned one day anyway.
It’s a sad state of affairs to basically take advantage of this situation, but like…company loyalty doesn’t pay my bills.
Or some more sage advice: keep interviewing and an eye on salaries and compare that to your realistic prospectives at your job. Employers aren’t dumb, and if they see that you move around a lot they might not even bother hiring you.
My manager does this. If he sees that a job candidate hops jobs a lot he won’t give them an interview. That being said, our yearly raises meet/exceed inflation and he’s a pretty good manager
If someone’s spent less than 2 years at their 3 most recent jobs, there’s a high chance they’re job hopping. Especially if they’re engineers in a discipline that can take months to a year to be fully capable of the tasks needed.
Im pretty senior now, you’d pass me by and the most valuable thing I’d do is to reduce that learning time.
I don’t know what you do, but in my IT jobs I’ve seen long onboarding times are due companies not focusing on their product, eg: a finance company writing their own authentication system, or maintaining someone’s vanity project who has long since departed. Get rid of that and you can bring people in off the street.
Get rid of that and you can bring people in off the street.
Yeah, you can’t do that with engineering. Especially when you’re building models to support multiple product lines and have physical testing you have to match to
My position required at least a year to learn everything, and I’m a pretty fast learner. My coworkers jobs require a similar level of training, even with experience. If a candidate spent less than 2 years at their 3 most recent jobs then I agree with my manager that they weren’t worth potentially wasting time on.
For junior positions maybe. For senior and especially principals there is a ton of value to continuity. When a senior engineer leaves it’s almost like replacing the entire team in terms of overhead if there isn’t a natural successor. And when principals leave you end up losing vision as well as that leadership. This can kill entire projects of it happens unexpectedly.
That’s about as logical and as loaded as an assumption as being fickle. It could also mean the person isn’t qualified and other employers figured that out. But again these are assumptions. In their shoes they are right to be wary and probably have some experiences backing up that caution.
It does work for a while but eventually higher end stuff they will pass you on. Training a new employee is about 6 months worth of work, so spinning someone up just on new projects/ history takes a good chunk of time.
This depends on the job and role, I know plenty people who tend to be flung at a project for 6-8 months, then pivoted to another, ad infinitum. For them, changing company etc is only slightly more inconvenient for them and the employer than shifting internally.
2ish years is the Goldilocks zone of job hoping. Less then that and you look more trouble than you are worth. More than that and you miss out on real pay raises. Though of course if you have it good then you don’t have to jump.
This is pretty dumb advice, because someone who’s hopping every 2 years and getting passed on interviews is still getting more interviews than someone who’s not applying at all.
How much is moving around a lot? Because 2-3 years turn over is pretty common in IT and it doesn’t seem to prevent being hired. It may even be considered as better experience than the one of an engineer that worked on a single system for 10 years.
I jump jobs something like every 2-3 years and frankly have never found that to be an impediment to finding new employment. And every time it’s been for more money. I’m sure that some hiring managers see this as a problem but I also think that most of them understand the realities of today’s job market.
I’m not saying you’re wrong…and as I age, I’m asked more and more about my job hopping history…but I am starting to feel like the negatives of a long history of job hopping are in many ways balanced out by the long history itself.
I’m a CAD drafter with 17 years of experience in 5 different jobs. In interviews it’s more and more common to get questions about my plans for the future and how long I plan to stay with (company that is interviewing me). Each time, I tell them that I’m prepared to retire from their company in a few decades as long as they take care of me and keep a good working environment and competitive compensation.
Whether I’m just in a good market for my skills, or job hopping isn’t the deterrent some people seem to think it is, I have been getting a constant stream of recruiters filling my inbox for the past decade, whether I’ve been looking or not, and I’ve honestly never not gotten an offer for any position I was actually interested in.
If I felt it was a good fit and was interested in talking to them, it has always led to an interview, and if I was still interested after that, an offer. Every time. Granted, often the offer was way less than I was currently making or in the interview we realize it’s not a good fit…but never once has my job history been an issue that comes between a position that’s a good fit and a job offer.
From one person’s experience (mine): They don’t read CVs that closely. I’ve got a couple of 1 year jobs (not contracts) and they’re more interested in what I did rather than why so short. If they ask I tell them it’s because I didn’t like the position but gave it a go for a year. I also have a 2 year gap in employment none of them are interested in for 4 jobs now, they don’t even spot the missing years and I’ve had to point it out in interviews because it’s a story of how I deal with big tasks.
If they are that petty that they’ll pass me over because of something like that then that employers policies would raise more flags than I’d want to deal with anyway.
When hiring you have hundreds of CVs pass by, I’m looking for experience, we’ll sort out these other details in the interview.
Caveat: I am older now, more senior but never had issues finding work.
I guess there are parts of it that are kinda contemplative. When you get done blasting everyone who attacked you in a spaceship you boarded, or some space facility on an alien planet…and then you’re just alone in space? That’s kinda contemplative.
I suppose you could say the same thing about the Elder Scrolls or Fallout games. Action-RPG action, punctuated by walking around fairly atmospheric scenery.
Basically, if you don’t like relatively simplistic first-person-action-roleplaying game content, then you won’t like any of Bethesda’s games. As for the people who are bitching and moaning so much, I just don’t understand their perspective. It’s like they played a game of air hockey, then they were like “WELL, I THOUGHT THE PART WHERE THE PLASTIC PUCK FLOATED ON A CUSHION OF AIR WAS REALLY STUPID, I DIDN’T LIKE IT, I WANT MY MONEY BACK.”
In that case, motherfucker, there is NO WAY you could have gone into the situation, not expecting exactly what you got. Which is why I think a lot of these people are using games as a substitute for prescription drugs to treat their crippling chemical imbalance problems.
And don’t get me wrong: entertainment can boost your mood, if you’re not as far gone as these people are. Keeping people sane is indeed one of the main reasons for entertainment existing. But if you are in a mental state where you’re legitimately experiencing anhedonia, it’s not fair to blame the game developers for that shit.
Fun fact: When I briefly worked in a funeral home, I learned that dead people just chilling on a table will sometimes look like they’re breathing. I’m not talking about actual movement, like fluids settling in the body or anything like that. It’s a sort of optical illusion. I guess the brain is used to seeing people breathing so it fills in the blanks. I experienced this illusion myself and so did others working there.
Doesn’t hurt to check out your options. And almost any job will welcome you back (usually at your new pay rate) if you change your mind down the road.
Over my career, lateral moves have netted me +80%, +30%, and 20%. Not to mention quality of work/life improvements.
Most companies basically offer a < 5% raise every year, which is just around inflation. Maybe a 10% bump if you get promoted. The wider world values your skills much more.
It doesn’t cost you a dime to keep your resume up to date and to check Indeed and Linked In one every few weeks for jobs like yours in your area.
Worst case, you look around and find there’s nothing in your area paying much better than you are currently earning. Congrats. You’re in as good a position as you can reasonably expect.
More likely though, you’ll see one or more of a few other trends in your search:
Employers are all looking for a specific skill adjacent to your skill set that you don’t have. Might be time to look into a class or something to pick this skill up and increase your potential.
Employers around you are all willing to pay more than you’re making but want more experience. In this case you can sit tight…or throw your hat into the ring even with less experience. They may take a flier on you, especially in this tight labor market.
Employers around you are willing to pay more for your skills and experience. This is most likely but you now need to check out why, and decide if you’re interested.
Even if you’re not really interested (maybe the specific opening is too far away or not a big pay increase or something) it may still be worth reaching out, even if just for interview practice. Lots of people really struggle with interviews, and being able to do one where you’re not really intent on landing the job may be a valuable experience.
Also…like…I never questioned that he was a girl until I learned this factoid as an adult. So often when they put a man in drag for comedic effect you instantly know you are looking at a man but this kid passes yo.
sometimes I do look at women - even attractive women - and see a man’s face in a moment of contextual disassociation. And vice versa. And I think about how maybe men and women don’t really look facially that dissimilar, there’s just a lot of context that affects our perception.
I am terminally bisexual though so maybe thats part of it.
Because drag is an exaggeration and not really trying to pass. If it’s for “comedic effect” they don’t want them to pass anyways, because “man dressed as woman haha funny” gets confusing for cisheteros when he actually looks good.
My new favorite is looking for a pulse. Some movie I watched recently panned to the dead guy, clear pulse on neck, but checks pulse says no pulse he’s dead then it cuts back to him with his jugular still pulsing. Pretty funny to see
Jugular is a vein. Pulse visible on the neck would be from the carotid artery. Unless the dead guy actor has visible JVP. Which would be a serious medical problem and not pretty funny to see.
They can be or they can be paid through “escrow” and your mortgage servicer will pay them.
Usually sites like these want to show total monthly cost though, so they tend to include estimates for property taxes and insurance in the monthly payments. Whether it gets paid through your mortgage servicer or directly by you doesn’t change much.
If you have a mortgage, 99/100 the bank is going to make you pay into escrow for insurance and taxes.
This is just a simple online mortgage calculator so it’s not factoring in that you could just pay those yourself if you’re paying all cash for the house.
It can be paid directly by you, or it can be held “in escrow” and paid by your lender. Ultimately it doesn’t make a difference financially, but it does mean logistically you either are paying one bill vs 3+.
It also comes at the risk that your lender fucking up could result in, best case scenario, a paperwork nightmare and maybe a small fee with your insurance/county/whatever, worst case scenario, the cancellation of a policy you may or may not be able to get back into easily.
Online calculators almost always include, or have an option to include, these costs. In part it’s because that’s the number the bank will use to determine what you qualify for. Makes it much easier to say, “here’s your monthly obligation” and compare that to you monthly income, instead of “here’s your monthly obligation, and here’s your twice-a-year tax obligation.”
Liquidity Risk: Paying in full ties up a large amount of capital in one asset, reducing financial flexibility and liquidity.
Opportunity Cost: The capital used for a lump sum payment could potentially yield higher returns if invested elsewhere. Although, at current rates that is probably unlikely.
Leverage: Mortgages allow for leverage, where you can control a large asset with a smaller initial investment.
Interest Rates: With historically low interest rates, financing can be more cost-effective than using cash. This is currently not true.
Diversification: Investing the money in a diversified portfolio can reduce risk compared to putting it all in a single property. See Leverage.
Tax Benefits: Mortgage interest payments can often be tax-deductible, which is not applicable when buying outright.
Ah, so it depends if you want to buy a house so you have somewhere safe to live that you can’t be evicted from, or whether you want to use it to destroy society for your own immoral personal profit?
[Edit] Sorry, I’m probably being a bit severe there
Because if you have several hundred thousand dollars laying around to pay in cash, you’re better off investing that into an index fund which will have a higher rate of return than the interest on the mortgage.
If you have $500k and want to buy a $500k house, you could pay the entire $500k down and own the house free and clear, but you would only gain the appreciation on the house if you ever sell it. Assuming doubling in value every 10 years it should be worth $4M after 30 years.
If you had $500k and took out a mortgage of $400k, at the national average of 7% and 30 years, you would pay a total $1,033,654. If you took the other $400k you had and put it in just the S&P 500 which has averaged right at 10% annually, and left it there, you would end up with $6,979,760 in that fund at the end of the 30 years.
So you would come out ahead by about $4 million at the end if you took the mortgage and invested the cash.
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