This happened to me as well, the only way I was able to get above that plateau was to go freelance and start my own thing. Charging a fair market value for my time. Best decision I ever made.

That's about what I've decided, but all the freelance work I've seen available has been web development---the kind of thing I'm trying to escape. Freelancing for a systems programmer has a "I can't get there from here" problem, particularly since I'm crap-tastic at networking.

I feel like there's a market for independent contract sales. I would love to pay 15% of a contract to someone who could source and close contracts for me.

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 people who can close sales end up starting companies and they hire programmers. They end up taking a lot more than 15%.

I have 2 other freelancers I work w/. We've created a freelance conglomerate of sorts. We all work on a contract to contract basis. We offer our entire network a 10% finders fee. If someone you recommend closes w/ us you get 10% of the contract. This has worked out great for us. This also extends to the company we registered to provide all the freelancers w/ insurance and other things you should have when running your own company. So all the freelancers get 1m+ insurance through the company they bill as.

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.

>I would love to pay 15% of a contract to someone who could source and close contracts for me.

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.

I work through 10X Management, doing freelance programming. They find customers, define the work parameters and scope, close the deals, do all contract and billing, and provide customer support as necessary. Flat 15%, I see the contract with the customer. They get better rates than I do on my own.

10X Management seems to be heavily focused on web development as well.

Not really. The whole world is very focused on web development so it looks that way.

That's what consulting companies do, although they'd take a bit more than 15%. More like 40%, but then they have a higher rate too.

The plateau is real. It's not unheard of for your first job hop, early in your career, to get you 10-50%. Next move might be 5-15%. Over time, as you approach the ceiling, your reward for job hopping will diminish. I've got close to 20 years under my belt, and my last few hops were less than +1%.

Short of going into management or doing a complete career change, it seems you can get stuck later in life.

For me, the route out that I'm trying is to try to build a consultancy or productized-consulting business. It's effectively going into management, but the person you're managing is yourself.

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.

Yep. At my company, the Engineering Manager position starts at about 10% above the equivalent tech track position's upper limit in the band, has larger RSU grants and a bigger bonus pool.

! I've seen 6 to 7 percent about twice in my entire career. 3% is the usual max, and 1-2% more common.

But job hops are an easy 10-15%, hence the problem ;)

(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)

First job out of college Inhad something to prove and worked my ass off. What I did was extremely measurable and I was easily doing 2x the work compared to the department average. Every single day.

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.

I discovered early on that, at least in larger companies, advancement in a role is based on your strategic value to the company, and not even remotely related to your work ethic. If your manager is willing to go to bat for you, you stand a chance of getting a meaningful raise. And that depends on whether you can demonstrably make their job easier.

Working "hard" only serves to let you feel good about yourself.

Not only are you dependent on your manager, your often only able to secure significant raises at the cost of other team member raises. The bucket is allocated to your team based on a company standard, with nothing connected to your performance, then that has to be divided, which they often claim is performance based...

Yes. Except, "strategic value to the manager"

What is strategic value to the manager that is not hard work and delivering result? I'm asking sincerely, since I do hear a lot about the lack of correlation between hard work and promotion. I want to understand.

Consider this case: For one of our software releases, we worked with another product group in the company to co-release a new product line. I was basically on loan from my team to work on that project, as the only developer from my product group, and working under another manager. During that time, my team's manager stepped down, and a new one was hired. The product was released, the salespeople made a lot of money on commissions selling the product. The "other manager" left the company. The dev team in the other product group all either left or were reassigned, and I was left as the sole escalation support for the product.

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.

Reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_machine as well as the background in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage_in_ancient_Rome

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.

In my experience delivering results that the manager can leverage to demonstrate his or her value is more important than either working hard or delivering results in the strict sense that, e.g. you write solid code to produce a feature.

Often the talent on a team is not nearly as important as the talent's relationship to the strategic direction of the company.

This too, I agree with, when my cynicism is not cranked to 11.

Backing your manager and/or attacking other princes in the org. Finding dirt on incumbents... playing along and don't making a fuzz when stupid rules are put into effect.

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.