The actual work (what is being done), the mission of the company (are you helping kids send pictures that disappear after 10 seconds or are you working on finding a cure to hearing loss?), the team, the location (do I have to spend 2h commuting?), the opportunities to learn, the opportunities to grow, etc. We each value different things, but if money is your only consideration, you will be treated as a "disposable mercenary" because that's exactly what you are. You will never be trusted, because your loyalty is directed at whoever shows more $$ to you.
Companies value more than just pure technical skills: loyalty, teamwork, communication skills, attitude, ethics, drive, independence, etc... If you only play in that one dimension, the game becomes very rough for both sides. I've never seen that work well, except for very short term assignments.
The problem is that most companies treat you that way anyway. If you want me to not act as a "disposable mercenary", want me to stay longer and want me to give you loyalty, give me a contract to prove it. Unless you're willing to surrender your power to dispose of me at will, I'm going to treat you as if you'll use it at any time.
Work is a simple contract. I give time. I get money. Period. The company will not hesitate to throw me under the bus if it can bring more money, and I do not see why I should be more considerate toward them ?
Honestly, I would rather work somewhere that is willing to get rid of useless and/or corrosive employees than somewhere that refuses to do so out of misguided loyalty.
Its a strange problem I guess. Systems are put in place to keep good employees around but are abused by bad ones. Then those systems are thrown out and everyone suffers.
I can say of a previous employer, all of the senior management took pay cuts before impacting the rest of us in a downturn. When my department did have to reduce by a person (I was the obvious choice to downsize), the entire (small) department, including my boss, took a furlough day instead. (Obviously, I started looking for new offers at this point, but I was never unemployed due to this.) Love that company. Great people.
I think a lot of people here may have experience with two types of terrible corporate environments: Faceless entity behemoths and cutthroat startups. There's a whole realm of small to medium traditional businesses out there where the owner knows everyone personally, and actually cares about the people who works for them.
Of course you have the right to deny a rise and let the employee go, maybe it really doesn't fit in your budget and/or you can hire someone else for less, but don't talk like the employee is wrong for searching a opportunity to grow.
Companies exist to make money.
Money must be my only consideration, because that is usually the only thing of value that I get out of the employer-employee relationship.
All those work-related properties reduce to money and time. A shorter commute means less time spent in traffic and less money spent on fuel and maintenance, but often also means more money spent on housing. If my company wrote software for managing cancer trials instead of flight mission planning for military aviation, I might give them a break of 2-3% on my salary expectations. But if they offer $20000/year less than I currently earn (anecdotally, this has happened to me), well, sorry doe-eyed leukemia kids, but I have to make rent.
As for the team... Well, do you pay them enough to stay? People who entice others to join because they foster a great team environment should be paid more, not less, and your suggestion implies the opposite--that people who work on a good team should be willing to accept lower salaries.
If you have employees coming to you with competing offers every six months, that means one thing: your raises are not competitive with the market. We all know that job hunting is a stressful, unpleasant ordeal, and that is a cost that satisfied employees won't be willing to pay. If you see competitive offers from your employees, not only do you pay too little, but you pay so little that someone was willing to do the job-hunting dance in order to find better pay.
Anecdotally (n~=9) I have found your final statement to be inaccurate. Companies are interested purely in how much money they can make from your work. Your individual manager at a company may value more things, but those things might not translate to another manager, or might not help you if the money is ever a problem. For instance, you might get a $500 discretionary bonus for exemplary work one month, and be laid off with 3 days notice and no severance the next (this actually happened to me).
Companies value money. I value money. As long as we are both honest about this, it tends to work out. It doesn't get rough; it's just business as usual. It is only when people start lying about how their companies value things that problems occur. Based on the statistics, companies generally value loyalty at -3% of current salary per year, or worse. The article implies -7%, I think; the math wasn't entirely clear, and heavily assumptions-based.
A wage that will enable me to buy a house and my kids to go to college.
Loyalty is not a asset that a bank nor college accepts as payment.
Furthermore, a company is a paper entity, a legal fiction. A company is not a person. A company has no conscious, no dreams, no aspirations.
No human being should pledge loyalty to a piece of paper - which is not capable of returning that loyalty.
Being employed with a company is a business transaction, where one party sells their time and skills in exchange for money.
Aren't employees disposable anyway? When the company runs low on cash, they are not going to hesitate to fire you to restore the financial health of itself.
Companies are motivated by money. It is in my interest to be motivated by money too. Companies are not loyal to employees. It is foolish to expect employees to be loyal to companies.
In my experience, there is a substantial difference in the quality of work of a person who cares about what they're doing and someone who doesn't care. Perhaps you've worked with a contractor who was willing to do a half-assed job, only fixing things if they were cornered. I certainly have.
Money can motivate that caring only so much.
Caring about money, caring about mission and loyalty and caring about work are all orthogonal to each other.
Working conditions (am I expected to be on call/respond to contact outside of hours), vacation time, flexibility in work from home and in leaving for appointments, how in traTed by my colleagues or other teams (does the sales department continuously overpromise and put me under fire?). The office space - I'd rather be in an open plan with my own "area" than in a cubicle farm with 500 other employees and no natural light.
Obviously pay is important but I'm not going to jump ship for a 5% raise if it comes with a worse work/life balance. Also, not everyone lives in San Francisco. There aren't _too_ many companies hiring c++ programmers in my area, so I'd go through them all in 5 years and probably annoy a lot of people along the way. Personally, for something that takes up so much of my time (40 hours a week) I'd rather be comfortable and get on with the people I share a working space with, than have them waiting for me to jump ship in 6 months
The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Based on studies done at MIT and other universities, higher pay and bonuses resulted in better performance ONLY if the task consisted of basic, mechanical skills. It worked for problems with a defined set of steps and a single answer. If the task involved cognitive skills, decision-making, creativity, or higher-order thinking, higher pay resulted in lower performance. As a supervisor, you should pay employees enough that they are not focused on meeting basic needs and feel that they are being paid fairly. If you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated. Pink suggests that you should pay enough “to take the issue of money off the table.”
To motivate employees who work beyond basic tasks, give them these three factors to increase performance and satisfaction:
Autonomy — Our desire to be self directed. It increases engagement over compliance.
Mastery — The urge to get better skills.
Purpose — The desire to do something that has meaning and is important. Businesses that only focus on profits without valuing purpose will end up with poor customer service and unhappy employees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_Ab...
I'm not really sure how this often quoted study relates to retention since that is outside the scope of the study.
What else would they be motivated by? It's not their hobby.
This doesn't mean they are also not into programming and coding challenges -- but those are constants that they can find in another employer too.
if they like the programming, it's not that they can't find a programming job elsewhere.
>2. If you give in once to this, the employee will come back 6 months later with demanding the next pay rise.
Sounds like the slippery slope fallacy. Even if they do, you can deal with it (and e.g. let them go) then.