I feel like when you're outside of let's say a Fortune 500-ish type of company, there are no 'levels' and a manager will always attempt to minimise pay/budget and absolutely will not bring up promotion. The structure of the company isn't there unless there is decent turnover and there is rarely the growth needed to create new positions. Promotion / pay is most likely initiated on the employee end. It's easier just to take a few interviews than try to haggle with current management and budgets.

My experience, at least in the valley has been there gets to a point where it’s easier to get internal promotion than hired in at that level. For example it’s easier to go from L6 to L7 than to get hired as L7.

EDIT: You can take a quick skim through the FAANG VPE's on LinkedIn. Most were:

1) Promoted internally to VPE vs hired in at that level

2) At the company for a significant amount of time.

Yeah, this. It's simply not worth it for a manager a company with less structure to entertain the idea of giving you a raise, even if you're underpaid, certainly not if you don't demand it. Even then they won't give you much.

I got a <10% raise after much haggling at one company and a 50% raise by switching companies into a lower-stress position. Maybe it's better at companies with a defined career ladder, but it's not worth it to stay elsewhere.

Ugh, same thing happened to me. Bumping my salary from 55k to 60k was inconceivable, so I went to another company for 120k. (Turns out, the same skills you use to make piece of crap parking meters/medical devices are needed to make smartphone operating systems)

Then something similar happened again a couple of years ago.. The top local software companies in Japan were offended when I told them I'd been making 180k USD/year but would be willing to settle for ~140k USD to work for them. Anything over 120k was just unthinkable, and even that was a stretch in their minds. I didn't have much luck explaining that Silicon Valley firms are just going to roll in and eat their lunch if they don't hire people like me. It was better for my long-term savings to work 1-2 years in Silicon Valley, then hang around and be a jobless bum in Tokyo for 1-2 years than to work full time in Tokyo for 2-4 years.

Moral of the story: Go where the money is

This starts to apply at the director level, where if you’re not even sticking around to see the outcomes of your decisions it tends to look bad. 5 years is the cap on that though, unless you’re constantly renegotiating.

Seconded. As a “core influencer” my contract gives me legal protection and severance. Not to mention a healthy salary and bonus.

It’s very difficult to find the same comp package elsewhere. I basically need to be invited to similar jobs.

> legal protection and severance

FWIW, in many countries, these are standard features of any employment contract. The US has unusually weak statutory protections for workers.

This matches my experiences, and I'm certainly no Distinguished Engineer, but as a PE I would still have relatively few options to work at a similar level and compensation if I was looking. Thankfully I'm quite happy where I am.