We all have a different idea of what a high salary is but I would suggest anything in the area of $100k or the equivalent is good in almost any part of the world.
That said, I have a good salary which has risen by a little less than 65% in the 10 years I’ve been in the same job. I realise that’s not typical but changing jobs isn’t always the only way to a high salary.
I get what the market gets, we pay the average for your age, experience and some other factors. So I get a bump anyway since I am older and have more experience every year and when the market gets a bump that adds to that. So it is somewhere between 5-15% per year. Except for this year where somehow the average pay went down and I got zilch. Still the company is fully owned by its employees (I make like 3k a year from dividends, not a lot but it is basically free money) and the benefits are great. So not eager to jump ship just for a pay increase.
I’ve been with the same place for about 16 years. I wasted a lot of time staying in one department trying to be the best employee. I’ve moved repeatedly just within the company. Because moving within the company is pretty easy to do. The yearly pay raises I was getting was garbage. By moving departments and renegotiating my pay I’ve effectively doubled my pay from 4 years ago.
When there’s no incentive to stay but all the reason to go…
Yep, been at this job 10 years and only seeing annual raises of about 2%. Maybe we got 3-4% last year, but that was the exception and that was still a 4-5% paycut given what inflation is/was. I’m comfortable at my job though is what keeps me, and I’m sure that’s what businesses bank on. Workers are too afraid to look elsewhere for a job, so they’ll just stick it out no matter how much they’re losing.
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.
It’s sad how true this is. I quit my job and went to work for another company for a year. The previous company contacted me wanting me back, and hired be back after a year for $15k more than before. I’ve been there a year now and got a 3% raise. Probably should just quit again and get rehired
Suddenly no more office-only or office-first policies, suddenly there is money to offer, suddenly there is possibility to have a better computer.
Also suddenly HR system couldn’t work for a week, so signing a new counter-offer contract might not be possible at the moment. “Cancel your offer, you will sign in next week”.
Stupid question, wasn’t that a risky move? I mean, the way I was raised to think by my parents I can hear their voices in the back of my head if I went through a situation like this, similar to this:
“But aren’t you worried they might hire you then fire you just out of spite for switching companies? And then what are you gonna do?”
Not OP, but companies don’t really care about people to that degree. They act for profit, or perceived profit, or to avoid a loss- someone that they know to be useful who is already familiar with the business is more valuable than an unknown.
Makes sense. People think they are the center of the universe when companies only see you as an additional cog in the machine. I’m not sure if I’m happy or sad by this. I’ll choose the positive side of things today.
Yeah, it’s both shitty and sometimes useful. It reminds me of an article I read once about implicit hierarchies- sometimes when organizations try to do away with traditional management, what they end up with instead is an unofficial and opaque control structure based on cliques and influence. In those cases it can be better for newcomers if there is an explicit set of rules and guidelines.
It wasn’t risky because I wanted to leave. I had problems with how they ran things. Then I realized the new place was even worse, and the old place reached out to me offering my job back. They explained how many of the things that I had issues with had been resolved or were being worked on. And they weren’t lying because I’m still there and quite happy.
No company with a single HR person would re-hire you just to fire you out of spite. It costs a chunk of time and money to get someone onboarded, which would be wasted. If they didn’t like you, they could just forget about you.
“And then what are you gonna do” is pretty clear, go back to the other company or find a different job. Not really a bad outcome.
At my giant workplace, they don’t think people are “experienced” enough unless they move around. Then in hiring they also comment negatively about those who move around too much. It’s all arbitrary bullshit. Whatever random feelings a hiring manager has. Never what is actually needed for the job.
It’s not worth it if you chase money. Even the biggest assholes at your previous job might end up in a place adjacent to you, especially if you don’t look internationally (or at least out of your area) for jobs.
That’s interesting. I’ve never once had that happen.
The bigger employers I’ve left just didn’t care and were already looking into how to replace me while I was finishing out my last two weeks. The smaller ones always were concerned with squeezing as much production out of my last few hours as they possibly could.
In neither case were they ever interested in my career beyond their doors.
Tell you manager what went wrong politely if necessary, being rude in a professional setting may look cool in some fantasy but nothing good will come out of it.
It really doesn’t matter at all. You’re quitting. You already have a new job lined up. You will never interact with these people again. Nobody asks for references outside of minimum wage positions unless they’re a small shop.
Nobody asks for references outside of minimum wage positions unless they’re a small shop.
I’ve found this to be highly variable over my past few career moves.
My resume indicates that professional references are available upon request.
In my last two job searches, I’ve had responses ranging from absolutely zero interest in references, to not only requesting the ones I indicated but also asking for even more names and contacts.
Obviously your mind is already made up, but in my experience, it seems the wise move to stay professional in your professional life, even when leaving a bad job.
I am a mid career enginer, I was requested two references, one colleague and one manager, for my current job.
What is your reason for telling your manager to fuck off? Ego satisfaction for 5 min? What about thinking that if you tell him what went wrong, maybe they can improve, which may improve the work conditions of your ex colleagues? I find that more satisfying. I always try to raise my voice to improve my ex-colleagues conditions before I leave because I’m freer to speak up.
If you want an anecdote, I was cordial when leaving my last job while pursuing something with much more risk. To my surprise, my manager said the door is always open if I want to come back.
It cost me nothing to be nice, and it gave me a free safety net. You never know what opportunities you’ll get, so be nice, help others, and put in a tiny bit of effort.
I wouldn’t recommend burning any bridges you don’t have to.
Though my last employer was pissed when I got an offer for 30% more when he spent the last 6 months training me.
He immediately counter-offered to match and he didn’t even have to check with anyone. I called him out on underpaying me by 30%. This was probably a mistake, but he was kind of an asshole anyway so meh.
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 read a few times that there is a breaking point between people who switch jobs every 3 years on average. Any less often you make significantly less at retirement.
I’m sure there is a value that’s too often but I’ve tried to stay pretty close to the 3 year mark and we make about 5x what my wife and I wanted to make at retirement.
Add comment