As a result, my salary history is well below average for my location and experience. Further, since I was paid less than my less experienced (and less capable) coworkers, my input was usually ignored and I was basically sidelined except when something went badly wrong and I spent much of my time cleaning up others' mistakes.
Keep an eye on those pay increases and the IEEE salary survey in your region.
Unfortunately, I think there's no way to escape the need to network. But, it's a learnable skill so you just have to put in the time and effort.
The company makes $30/hr on every hour billed. This covers taxes, etc as we also handle payroll and taxes for the freelancers but you could easily forgo this part. The person who brings in the client gets a 10% finders fee. We use this money to subscribe to lead generation services which deliver us hot leads and such.. RFP's, etc.
Anyone who contacts these leads and lands a client can earn the 10% finders fee.
Devs then take the rest as an hourly.. usually this means they're making between 90-120/hr depending on the contract. We specialize in Ruby, Elixir, ReactJS/React Native work.
Couldn't agree more. The product design space is crowded with low end parties on both sides, and I've fruitlessly offered a percentage a few times for people to source mature, ready-to-pay clients.
There are solutions like upwork, and solutions like hired, but there doesn't seem to be an intermediate solution. Would be interested in what keeps more people from pursuing deals like this. 10% of a 50k contract is nothing to shake a stick at.
Short of going into management or doing a complete career change, it seems you can get stuck later in life.
It's especially true when you look at contribution vs reward for a skilled senior / principal engineer. If you take away the "steady paycheck" aspect of salaried employment, you can get 2x to 3x the reward for some percentage increase in total effort.
(Up to some limit obviously, as a guy with 16 years experience is unlikely to get a 10% premium over a guy with 15 years of experience)
1.5% raise the first year, made a huge fuss the second year and asked for a large raise (because my numbers of were insane) and only managed a 4% raise (promotion included).
I've been at a new job for about a year and have worked hard as always, but the things I am doing are much, much harder to measure. It's much more difficult for me to actually prove how much value I am providing. However, it's looking like I will be getting a ~15% raise shortly.
If a company wants you to stick around, they'll be proactive and show it. At least that's what I've taken from this...and I don't want to be anywhere I'm not wanted.
Working "hard" only serves to let you feel good about yourself.
Problem: My team's new manager had no part in the decision of putting me on that project, couldn't override the time that I was required to spend supporting it, but also couldn't use me as flexibly as her other developers. So I was first at the chopping block when the company decided to have a round of layoffs. I was providing value to the company as a whole, but not helping my manager in her own job.
Hard work: Check.
Delivering results: Check.
Delivering value to my manager: Nope.
Result: Looking for a new job.
Essentially by supporting that manager's political goals (to gain power within the organization), you receive rewards based not on skill or merit but as a result of your support.
In this system, people in a relationship are either 'patrons' or 'clients', and it is expected that patrons will help clients within their power and in return clients will support their patrons advancement, either through advancing their ends directly or undermining competitors.
All of these things are wasteful distractions, but then, that's politics.
Often the talent on a team is not nearly as important as the talent's relationship to the strategic direction of the company.
Ostracise, or at least selectively ignore certain coworkers when called for to keep the "team spirit" alive. And so on and so forth. For being a loyal page, there might be some great reward. Funny thing is, I'm not even sure the incumbents would count it against you if the tables are turned. They know and respect a mercenary when they see one and will be happy to take you under their wing. But not if you jump faction too early, then you are just a traitor. Nobody loves a traitor.
They also know that they are now 'lucky' enough the market is cold, and you'll be trapped with them for the next 5+ years out of fear.
A better conversation would be: "In order to get raise X% you need to do A, B, and C. In order to get raise Y% you also need to do D and E. We will checkpoint 4 times per year on progress, and you'll know well in advance if you've made it." Where A-E are things the employee has direct control over, i.e. not dependent on things like overall team success or company stock price.
The fiction must be maintained at all costs that the employee was the perfect fit at hiring time; neither overqualified aka too expensive or underqualified aka the manager screwed up.
People change, companies change, the business changes. The person you needed when you hired him might not be the exact person you'll need in a year, but a good manager will first see if that person can grow into a new role instead of firing him and hiring someone else.
I've stayed beyond what pay would incentivize at almost every company I've worked at because I liked the culture/coworkers/etc., but workplaces are fragile ecosystems, and culture/coworkers/etc. can drastically change with surprising speed.
I'd have gladly stayed at my third job for much longer than the ~21 months I did had there been training, retirement, reasonable pay increases, and career development offered. The same for my forth job. Some number of jobs later and my current one is also my longest tenure to date. Not coincidentally I have had and continue to have a clear path of career development, non-trivial pay increases and bonuses that aren't tiny. I've given up on employer-provided proper retirement plans and education/training.
"Firm hopping" exists, in my opinion, precisely because companies tend to either not recognize the role they must play in supporting long term tenures or else simply don't value them enough to allocate resources to the support.