Employees who stay in companies longer than two years get paid 50% less (2014) (opens in new tab)

I think talent and the capability to market/self-promote oneself (I believe only for the latter capability, the barrier to change jobs is much lower) are mostly uncorrelated.

What most companies are really looking for is undervalued high performers. And there's probably a lot of those still that haven't moved to the bay area.

I think MBA's these days have decided that they'll hold labor costs low by not rewarding high performers, and then hire whoever they can to fit their budget, but then have a yearly 5% layoff to hold their employee's feet to the fire.

And then those same MBA's get a bonus for keeping costs low, meanwhile enjoying their beach houses on the weekends.

Granted it sucks to be an individual contributor, but if you're a manager, you have incentives for cutting costs to the bone.

The same effect might even be partially responsible for the OP observation. I.e. the cause and effect might not be "job-hopping gets you paid more" but it might instead be "having a lot of skill gets you paid more and also enables you to job-hop more confidently".

Firms give paltry pay bumps as default, but will fight with competitive salaries to retain top performers.

Top performers get completive raises by going to their boss with an offer letter from a competitor.

Also when a family has/needs two parents working, Spouse A's next job becomes limited to locations that do not require Spouse B to also quit, and vice-versa.

I have a pet theory that dual-incomes are one cause of movement to urban locations: The family needs to be in a location with enough overlapping opportunities in each person's role/field.

I wish, but not in my country. Remote here means 2-3 days/week WFH tops and that's it. Nobody offers more. Meaning you're still tied to the location of your employer as you have to come regularly in the office.

It boggles my mind that employers don't see the advantage of employing people remotely nation-wide as that gives them access to a wider talent pool outside their area making it a win-win. But no, old-school boomer MBA managers want to see buts in seats in the office, otherwise to them it means people are slacking off as they can't possibly imagine motivating people to work if they're not within physical reach.

We also need to post pictures of the employees pretending to have fun at barbecues, teambuilding events and sitting in cramped open space offices on yoga balls wearing headphones with coffee mugs with nerdy memes on them. But it's ok, there's a weekly fruit basked, employee organized sports events and you can bring your dog to work. Totally worth spending 2h per day on commuting.

I just don't get it, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Is it me the one being unreasonable, or "is it the children who are wrong"?

The average cost of living for a 4-person family in SF is ~$350k [1] (I'm guessing that's pre-tax, and probably the job is also paying for 100% comprehensive medical & dental insurance for the entire family) and my spouse wouldn't be able to work (and even if she could, low chance of her also getting a $200k job offer at the same time!), and I'm not gonna willingly decrease my standard of living and my savings rate ...

I mean, I don't mind if that's their budget, I always mention that it probably makes more sense to hire someone local, but ... why even bother interviewing senior non-SF-based candidates in the first place?

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/27/how-much-money-family-of-4-n...

Not as much since Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) became law over ten years ago. Anyone can get minimum essential coverage, with a subsidy if income is low enough (as it would be when out of a job), regardless of pre-existing conditions.

Both saw a limit on the time someone could be at the company and still be promoted. The C-Suite people really felt if people were at the company for more than 5 years, they were no longer viable candidates to move up because they had become to "accustomed" to the corporate culture and would develop a sense of apathy with pushing their departments or employees to greater success. They have now opted to hire outside executives or managers to try and keep the ideas and approaches fresh so to speak.

I remember my director at the time wanting very much to move up into an executive position and had been at the company some 15 years. He had been a director for some 7 years and had already been passed over twice before for an executive position. He recruited me for a senior dev role and had stood up an entire cloud computing team to take on specific work the company was having a hard time getting done quickly.

6 months in and he pulls me into his office after our 1:1. He tells me he's putting in his two weeks and loved working with me and wanted me to come with him to his new company once he gets set up there. He told me his bosses boss told him she knew his aspirations of moving into an executive position, but it wasn't going to happen here. She told him in no uncertain terms he had reached his ceiling at this company and should move on if he really wanted to be an executive.

Same thing happened at another company. The VP of the company had been in that role for some 10 years and had been passed over at least three times for the CEO position which he wanted very badly. Many of the managers had told me he has just accepted he wouldn't get any higher than VP, but had no aspirations of leaving the company. This unfortunately created a huge choke point in the company because now managers would be at the company for a certain amount of time, and then know that's as high as they were going and leave.

While I agree with your point, I feel like there is some amount of time threshold you can cross where the corporate apathy can take hold and your value starts to decline. It seems that way the higher up the ladder you go.

As GP said, it's a rational strategy for them. I personally have lowered my expectations of salary growth over the years, and would be happy with some of those other benefits GP listed in the mean-time.

Now, this is solely based on my own experience, which of course might not apply to your specific field of work and disability type.

What I mean is, most large companies have a voluntary self-identification form at the end of their job application. And I tend to get a lot more responses when applying for roles where I am invited to disclose my disability.

On a funny note, recruiters always want to confirm that I indeed have a disability, but they can't just reach out and ask "hey dude you sure you didn't click on that button by mistake?".

Instead, they always send this very P.C. email that reads like "Here at [insert company name] we pride ourselves on bein inclusive and bla bla bla. You informed us that you had disability, and we want to make sure that we can accommodate you and make you feel welcome. If you need any special arrangement, please let us know".

To which my response is always "Yes I do have this thing, and no I'm fine thanks".

My disability has fucked up a lot of things in my life, but it's boosted my career.

For me having a shit boss, or a company who is crappy in a million other ways isnt a big deal. I can be flexible, in where and when and how in a way others cant.

IF having a good boss or sane hours matter to you, changing jobs is a risk.

> or lack of new skillset

Job-hopping is a powerful way of ensuring that your skillset remains current. That's 80% of why I do it.

I've had 50% pay raises that were nearly matched by the current employer. My last manager literally said the words, "What if we offered you a big bag of money to stay?". I left.

Now I work at a place where people stay literally until the die, 10, 15, 25 year tenures. My coworkers are mediocre. I'd say it's a mixture of laziness and sometimes maybe just incompetence.

It's a two fold problem. Employees that stay this long do not progress in their careers or learn new skills. I've learned next to nothing in my 5 years here. Employers that don't create churn in their workers create numerous problems. If we didn't hold a monopoly in our field, I'm sure we would have been bought out and had mass layoffs by now.

In my vicinity the trend seems completely opposite - HR is trying to get a smoother rehiring experience for employees they lost due to their high turnover.

This might be because the talent pool of people willing and able to do IT jobs in my country is very small, so you run into the same people over and over again in this field.

A risk adverse person, or even rational one, may avoid still avoid positive EV gambles.

That only happens at Meta and i'm dubious they could do the job of staff at any other company.

probably relevant detail is that I did contractor work for backend/server stuff for those gaming companies. And the two studios in question have each published the biggest games in their respective categories in the world(which basically means they both have infinite money)

I instead suggested that there are bad employers who pay above market rates as a way to compensate for problems with employee retention. Sure, they'll run out of money doing that eventually, but you'd be surprised how long a business can cover up their mistakes with such a strategy, especially with the right funding partners behind them.

If you have not had the misfortune of working for such a business, that's great, but I believe there are plenty of comments here on HN to support the notion that such businesses not only exist but are fairly common in any industry touched by Venture Capital or Private Equity, and I have seen many even suggest that their higher financial compensation ends up not being worth it in light of the added psychological and physiological toll.

Some of them, though it's hard to become really good friends with a coworker after only three months of a remote job.

At the jobs that I stayed two years at I definitely made lots of friends

> Did you maintain contact?

For a few of them, the ones that I got close to (generally the people that were as geeky as I am about bizarre CS concepts). That was immensely handy to get job referrals, and it's in no small part why I was able to land my current (very decent!) gig.

In most places I've worked, people generally like me ok (I hope), and usually I will develop one or two pretty close friends as a result if I've been there sufficiently long.

> In those three jobs you were laid off from did any of your coworkers also get laid off?

Yes, though in the more recent laid off jobs I sadly didn't know people well enough to get them to give me referrals or anything.

> No matter what story your resume tells, social connections will usually be a louder signal.

I mostly agree, but only to a certain extent. If you can make it to the interview stage, a good referral and social contacts can be great and really helpful, but the problem with short stints is that you're considerably more likely to fail the initial screening by the internal recruiter.

I get it, I don't really blame them, you can't go into super thorough detail on every resume that's submitted, so they have to look for red flags to immediately filter out stuff.

It's extremely hard for me to lie (or even do anything even remotely dishonest) during job interviews. I believe that omitting important details is still a lie, plus I think I have a mild form of autism that makes it so I have to be overly precise in my language which means that I get into really specific detail when it's really not called for (as I'm sure anyone who's read my longer HN comments has figured out).

I'd probably be better off if I just shut up more during interviews and let them assume things.

Consider someone making $60,000 getting a 10% raise vs someone making $200,000 getting a 5% raise.

The first will get $6,000 more per year, the other will get $10,000.

These days you also have to look at total comp as well.

My first job I was an entry level developer. If I had stayed there for 25 years earning 3% raises each year... my salary would have finally doubled last year. In real life, I left there after ~2.5 years, and left the next job after 2.5 years, at which point my salary had already doubled.

Of course staying in the same company, I'd likely have moved up some and gotten some promotions with meaningful raises along the way. That company was pretty small but... I know that a lot of colleagues at that time stuck around and are VPs of some sort now, as the company has shown consistent meaningful growth. Early on, though, there was little room for growth in the short term at such a small company.

My largest raise staying at a company was going from $9.05 / hour to $13.05 / hour. That's 44.2%. Ha! But realistically since being salaried, my single largest raise was a couple years ago during the inflation rush, where I got 13%. Often changing jobs would land me 15-20%, and I could generally do that every 3 years without any obvious negative consequences. Assuming a more conservative 12% at 3 years intervals (with 3% in the years between), after 24 years I'd be at around 4x my original salary after 25 years.

Comparing 4x to the 2x from my first example, I've come out double. Factor in possible promotions and maybe it would've been 2.5x vs 4x which is about 50% more. If the promotions came with substantial pay raises, it would start to favor staying put. Personally I haven't seen any promotions like that because I've always been valuable as an individual contributor, and less so as management. But individual results may vary. We're looking at "on average" though.

I later found out when I was leaving I made ~55% more than this person.

Also of note, 50% more of someone's salary is less than 50% of your own. If you make 200k and someone makes 100k, they need a 100% raise.

But do I today have more RSUs earned cumulatively than a brand new hire at the same level? I would say yes, but only because of promotions and bonus grants -- Based on levels.fyi (grain of salt), my stock compensation is comparable to a new hire one level up.

I see what you mean, but I don't think the parent commented about career success, but just specifically pay. I agree with what you're saying in that there are other valuable things besides pay from a job.

1. Ambition is more a product of social mobility than product delivery.

2. Success is more a product of prior established salary than personal goals.

From an economics perspective these seem weird to me for two reasons. The goal of economics is always to redistribute resources to a more desirable pattern.

One of the first things I look for in job interviews from interviewers and hiring managers is perception of bias. This is easily discovered by looking at what they want which can be some mixture of technical competency, charm/vanity, or communications dominance. Interviewers want to control the conversation, so just let them until the conversation concludes or I achieve communications dominance passively. I don't want to play games, but when there is noise in the inter-personal communication I have to be a little bit smarter than I appear. I just want a job doing what the paper says, but people are silly.

The second reason why its weird is that in the past I have been that 10x (or much more) developer because my goals are different. The only point of software is automation, which means if I can automate my own job then I don't have to do it either. I usually keep this to myself, because the goal is time maximization so I can do other things with my day while delivering superior quality work. If I told other people about it my peers would whine and I would be tasked to do things outside of product delivery to compensate for their whining. I am certainly not looking for anybody's adoration. I just want to do less stupid.

I am coming up on 10 years and I frequently help my newer peers avoid pitfalls we fell into previously. Historical context is useful. That doesn’t mean I live there.

The "job hop for a salary bump" conversations always seem to assume you are early in your career, where this works. My first job hop was for about +50%. My second one was for around +20%. 20 years into my career, job hopping does not seem to increase my comp at all. The plateau is real.

After a certain point, you have to change roles and/or move into management.

FWIW I'm actually coming out of a 3 year hiatus making 50% more than the FAANG position I left in 2021.

neuroticism measures "the tendency toward negative emotion". Stress in the face of uncertainty is a good example of a negative emotion that can be exaggerated in some people. Negative emotions also correlate to less success in social and job situations.

For example, we still have the equivalent of early Medieval English right of "socn" ("soke") — the right to withdraw our loyalty from one lord and grant it to another. We're not "tied" to our corporate overlords the same way that serfs were through strict infeudation.

A recent court case threw out most of the nonsense non-compete clauses also helped beat away or forestall the rising threat of "you can't leave with what you know... I'll make you unemployable." But that was a threat to modern day "sokesmen."

One can even establish themselves as their own freeholder by incorporating, say as an LLC, or remaining a "freelancer" like the errant knights of old.

In other terms of what I consider "corporate feudalism:"

• Do you wear any "corporate heraldry" (logo'd gear like t-shirts, hoodies, polos, backpacks, laptop stickers, etc.)

• Do you participate in any "corporate jousting?" (benchmarks, competitive bakeoffs, panel talks or meetups)

• Do you have or retain any intellectual property you've created during your employment, or was it all work-for-hire and assigned away in perpetuity?

And don't get me wrong. I am somewhat of a big fan of the medieval period and feudalism. In a way there were more freedoms under feudalism than we realize.

Certainly we had far more free time.

I just find it an interesting mental exercise to spot the commonalities and the differences of then and now.

Fuck HR. 12 months is nothing for actual deep learning. I've seen job hoppers come through my company and it's obvious most of them don't get very deep in the work and just move on instead of becoming a real expert in the system. It's one thing not to hold it against them, but it's something else to say count it as an advantage at such short intervals.

Not taking RSU’s in these tech companies is a very bad idea financially, I like to think of it as equivalent cash. You can always sell your RSU immediately to get cash. But another advantage is when you individually invest in stocks, you rarely have a large fund into 1 stock, you probably diversify into index funds. This gives you consistent returns but leaves no shot at making a fortune. In my experience RSU’s as by default are fully invested into the 1 company you’re working for, give you that outsized return opportunity. Just ask employees at snowflake, NVIDIA, Tesla. Heck even MSFT RSU’s have doubled in value every couple of years and Amazon had insane growth from 2010 to 2022, where if you had gotten equivalent in cash you would be more than 10 times poorer than someone who just held Amazon RSU’s. Yes putting large amounts in 1 stock is risky, but not nearly as risky as you make it sound to be.

If all the companies you work for have similar likelihood of doing exceptionally well, you've paid 4 years and gotten either one lottery ticket worth X (strategy 1) or 2-4 lottery tickets each worth 50%-25% of X. When you don't already have "enough" money, 25% of X is still life-changing, and if you can get 2-4 shots at it instead of 1, that can be a very workable strategy.