>The person to whom you're responding explicitly drew a distinction between discussing a raise with your boss vs going to your boss with another offer that you have secured.

Because it's only OK to ask for a raise when the boss has the upper hand?

Has the boss brought someone in to replace you and said, "Okay, Coldtea, we found someone to replace you at your job. He's as good as you and he'll take a 10% cut in salary over what we pay you. Do you want to take a pay cut so you can stay?"

That would be the upper hand.

Before that, it's just a discussion.

That's the default situation, even in software, although more often it's in this form: "Okay, Jon Employee, our company had a bad quarter, we're going to have to ask employees to make some sacrifices." Then Jon Employee is laid off and subsequently has his position filled by somebody much more junior at far more than a 10% discount.

This industry doesn't value engineering experience. It values breadth over depth. There are some exceptions. But the data are what they are.

It happens every time a company has more than one person who is technically capable of doing the same job. Companies have to do this once they grow large enough, so that the company will survive if any one person in it is hit by a bus (or leaves for greener pastures).

Every day I go to work, the implied threat is that my company could assign all my work to someone cheaper--generally speaking, give 1/Nth of my work to each of my N co-workers, then advertise an open position if that puts the team over capacity--and abruptly end our work-for-pay relationship. Or maybe they allow a tester to jump up into development, and give them tester+1 pay instead of developer pay. If I meet with my manager with competing offer in hand, that may invert the status quo of the power balance for all of 15 minutes. How unnerving for them.

You always need the company more than the company needs you. That's a corollary to the whole point of having a company, which is to produce an entity separate from and greater than its constituent parts.

Personally, I'd just keep silent about the amount of the competing offer and ask for a raise. They can do their own calculations about how much they can afford to give, and if they can't match the competing offer without knowing what it is, I'd take it. Telling them what that offer is makes as much sense as divulging your salary history when seeking out competing offers, which is to say it does not make sense. Let companies do their own calculation regarding how much you are worth to them, instead of copying the answers off of each other.

The bosses do that all the time. And if it wasn't for training delays and costs, they'd do it in a heartbeat.

Besides, that's exactly how they gauge what kind of wages to offer when they hire you -- from what others would accept in your place.

I like the analogy, but other offers help establish market value - in a free market anything, including labour, is as valuable as the highest available bidder. If this were a relationship another way of putting it would be "hmmm {person_x_whos_better_than_you_in_some_relevant_way} keeps trying to get in touch with me, I wonder why."

The issue with your example is the matter of context. A relationship, in the normal case, isn't a business arrangement. In the 21st century companies (and that's all companies small start up to large mega corp) have no loyalty to you as an employee and you sure as hell shouldn't have any loyalty to them.

I know it doesn't add anything of value to the thread, but that's a really good analogy.

It's a terrible analogy. A better analogy is you're a prostitute and you tell your client that you looked around and the going rate for this type of work is more than he's been paying you, so you're gonna go fuck other guys for money.

You don't fire your girlfriend in tough times, but your boss will fire you if he had to. It's a stricylty pay to play relationship.

We use the prostitute analogy a lot with my techie friends. Just don't tell my parents that I write software. I pretend to work at Starbucks.

This is why customers can never give you specific requirements for a project. Deep down they know you write software, but they can't say, "write this specific software for this much money". They have to use vague, hand-wavy terms so that they can always step back and claim it was just collaboration between consenting adults. They were just paying you for your time.

Not really. Business is business and personal is personal. If you look at them both the same you'll end up stuck in a job you hate for 8 years thinking you're being super loyal and that raise is just around the corner.

Spouses are loyal back, businesses are not.

This. Its so important for workers to realize just what predicament they're in. So while it was possible for lifelong jobs to be possible in the past, its not so much the case today. No job is really secure, and one does have to stay on ones toes.

Not saying that you should be concerned about getting fired everyday. But if you don't create demonstrable value to your company over a longer period of time (a couple of years perhaps) don't expect to keep the job. Things are moving wayy too fast today.

Generating value is only a small part of it. You can get fired or laid off for any reason in most places in the US. You can be doing great work personally, but if upper management screws up, or the business environment is just bad (despite management's best efforts), you'll get laid off as soon as it makes financial sense for the company to do so. You can also get canned or at least mistreated to the point of misery because of interpersonal problems having nothing to do with your performance, a terrible manager, etc.

That's not true at all in my experience. Both as a manager to others, I've always tried to be loyal to employees who invested in the employer/employee relationship - and as an employee who benefitted from having an employer/managers look out for me when inevitable bumps in the road occurred in my personal life.

Outside of my own direct experience, I can also recall many other co-workers' experiences where the companies I've worked for went above and beyond in their commitment to their employees. One time that meant making many extraordinary allowances for an employee suffering from a mental breakdown. At times it has meant extending the employment of someone who was looking for a life/career change, but the company kept on paying a salary until the employee found somewhere new to land - way beyond where the employment had any real benefit to the company. There are many others.

By all means, takes some precautions. By all means, stand up for yourself. By all means, make sure that you're being fairly compensated... but if you go into every relationship, personal or business, with your shields raised and phasers set to kill - you will reap what you sow.

Loyalty on a large scale requires threat-backed enforcement. Mafia members were loyal to each other not just because family was sacred but because they'd be killed otherwise. Big megacorps of the 20th century basically worked by vesting your payout over your lifetime; leave halfway, and you'd miss out. No such threat exists in America today, so while it's possible for individual managers and employees to choose to behave in the loyal manner you described, when giving general advice, it's wise to treat business as business.

I see a lot of employer hostility on HN. While it's good to watch your back, the constant call to go in with guns blazing doesn't seem helpful to me.

I know that personal relationships aren't exactly the same as business relationships, but to pretend that they aren't somewhat analogous doesn't line up with my own experiences. I've had a lot of personal relationships in business. Almost every boss I've ever had has been my friend on some level and the same goes with a lot of people who've worked for me.

When you treat people with respect, consideration, and friendship in your work life - you'll be surprised at how often you get the same from them in return.

>the constant call to go in with guns blazing doesn't seem helpful to me.

Getting independent information of your value isn't "guns blazing."

Getting independent information consists of going on GlassCeiling or Dice to look at industry salary surveys, googling, etc.... maybe even talking with some recruiters about going rates.

Going out and getting a job offer is a step beyond that.

It's not like getting a job offer in tech is free to the employee and can just be used as a casual "fuck you" to the boss. Even with the current tech market the way that interviews are currently done will use up a lot of your PTO to get through. If an employee is at the point where they are effectively spending money to get this information why isn't it viewed as a the employer's fault for making the employee feel it was necessary? I know I don't want to switch jobs frequently but when the company posts record profits but my quality of life is decreasing due to cost of living increases, what would you expect me to do?

OK, then the boss isn't able to get any specific reports on my performance, they can only ask me directly how well I'm performing or look at standards of performance. Going out and tracking my individual performance takes too much work and shows they don't trust me. Seems fair.

But "coming to the boss with another offer you have secured" is the expected next logical step after you've unsuccessfully discussed a raise, no?

It's a very interesting analogy, and shows the terrible and wrong mentality that managers like 'scaryclam' have.

Work is NOT like having a girlfriend. Like the other poster said, a better analogy is your relationship with a prostitute. But it's good you brought up this incorrect analogy, because I think it really shows the horribly wrong mentality that bosses have, because they believe this to be a good analogy even though it isn't.

I'm not showing up to work every day because I have any warm and fuzzy personal feelings for the people there (especially the management). I go to work because they give me a paycheck. That's it. It's no different than prostitution, except not quite as icky. If my girlfriend tells me she needs to spend less time with me for a little while because she's going to spend some time with her family for some family problem, or she's working on her own start-up business and needs to spend extra time on it to make it successful, etc., then sure. If, however, employer tells me they need to cut my pay in half because they're having money problems, I'm immediately going to look for a new job. I don't have any personal feelings for my employer, and I don't expect to grow old and retire with them either, and I also know that if they don't need me any more, I'll be out the door with a pink slip that day.

I think this analogy really shows how many employers think (wrongly) that employees should have some kind of loyalty to them, even though the employers rarely have any loyalty back to the employees.

I just wanted to say that I've learned a LOT from the back-and-forth on this thread. My thanks to all that were involved.