The reality is that software engineering automates software engineering jobs the most. As a result, people in this industry do highlight the importance of not neglecting your skillset.
However, I wouldn't take that as them trying to maximize their revenue. They've simply found that they need to do a deeper analysis on skills to not get automated out of a job.
> All those years of missed revenue add up quickly
I'm only talking about money here
But, if you are working for less than your fair market value, you’re providing the lifestyle that your company’s owners are happy with.
I'm not European, but I imagine that this isn't the case in Europe as it doesn't have the same culture around work.
For example, while landlords aren't supposed to raise the rent by more than 2% per year, I've had my landlord surprise me with a 5% change, but moving is too expensive to realistically consider [1].
Factor in all the additional costs of living, and if you don't get significant raises every year, you're going to fall further behind each year and be unable to afford a family, a house, or an emergency.
It's not great.
1 - When I moved to a good neighborhood in NYC, I had to pay a brokers fee of 15% + moving costs + up front costs to the landlord. Say my rent was 3k, this would be 5400 (0.15 * 3000 * 12) + ~500 + 9000 (first + last + security), or approximately 15k just to move into a place you don't own.
Rule of thumb for me in my career is I expect at least a 5% raise yearly to account for cost of living and inflation of currency, otherwise, like you said, you'd be losing money YoY.
Thankfully, I've gotten many > 25% raises throughout my career. It's possible, but it's rare, and jumping jobs usually gives larger pay bumps.
My mortgage is less than $2200 for a 3100 square foot house brand new build and that wont go up besides property taxes and insurance.
(Fortunately, this is a good employer that realises what the reality looks like and is willing to offer me competitive raises to make it a doubly mutually beneficial arrangement.)
That being said, I was quite content with my pre-Covid salary which was pretty much average for a top end individual contributor locally. But I did need to make at least $20K more over in two years.
Then Covid happened, along with pay cuts and the local market dried up.
But now working remotely for BigTech means my base salary is a little more than it was pre-Covid and RSUs+Bonus is pure gravy that goes directly to long term savings.
It also meant my wife didn’t have to go back to work in the school system with a Covid going around.
I know someone who applied for a similar role (one level up) at Amazon who lives in MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska and he made about the same as someone who lives in Seattle.
There was no harm in trying.
Improving soft skills isn't the same as playing the career development game by job hopping. Soft skills are as much a part of a developer job as programming. I'd actually argue it's the harder part.
Resume driven development often involves not giving a damn about what you're actually trying to solve, and trying to make what you're doing sound as impressive as possible to onlookers who have no clue what you actually did. Complicated architectures, hip technologies, fancy percentage based "improvements", it's all bollocks.
I agree largely that Western society has created a work culture where working for "the man" is not a desirable thing to do; employment, by and large, should not be the purpose of our lives. There are so many other things, like social life, family, sports, playing the guitar, and so on, that humans can do so well, but because of the capitalist structures that have been put in place where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, it's not hard to understand why this kind of approach to employment exists.
So? It gets them hired and at better rates than those who accurately estimate the size of the projects to boot.
Companies need to stop rewarding irrational behavior, but right now lack the right feedback loops including investors willing to "Venture" capital into a losing business, passive + TARP-like investing driving asset prices up despite inherent risks and bosses who care more about politics/appearances than facts.
The choices are either have relevant skills to keep yourself marketable or be willing to do the “leetCode monkey dance” and remember how to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard.
What other reason would I go to work everyday?
So now I have a job that pays below market rate but leaves me with a lot more time, in which to write my novels. I have more than enough money - more money won't make me any happier, but less discretional time will certainly make me worse off.
There is no such thing as having money to burn at the middle-class level unless you want to live on peanuts when you're in retirement.
When I say 'enough money' I don't just mean enough money for current expenses. In my opinion, there really is an amount of money beyond which you're probably just adding a measure of unhappiness to your life, if you're making money your first-order objective.
By focusing on money you can actually reduce your overall burden. In my humble opinion this far and away beats taking some low salary job just to get more time.
While you are busy not being concerned about money. I bet your employer is glad to be getting you cheaply.
And with this being both my abs my wife’s second marriage didn’t do us any favors.
My base salary now is the same as it was pre-Covid pay cut and was more than enough to reach our short term needs and slowly meet our long term goals.
The RSUs+Bonus goes straight to long term goals - paying off the mortgage, cash flowing college for my son and saving for retirement.
This is kinda of where I am right now. I still enjoy programming, but its becoming more and more apparent that I should have kept it as a hobby and pursued something else as a career.
That's the thing - this is much easier to do when you're financially independent. If you have kids, and have to put them through school, and maybe have sick parents to care for - costs can add up fairly quickly; and it's easy to find yourself in a position where you can't lose your job, which is a lousy position to be in.
Interesting part is - it can also be easier to choose what you work for when you have more money (or at least that's been my personal experience so far). A different version of the "rich getting richer" dynamic, basically - it's easy to say "no" to stupid things, to avoid or leave crappy jobs. Also if you're highly paid that often means you're listened to/ your voice has some weight - so chances of working on stuff that delights you increase significantly.
(NSFW:Language)
Japanese has a nice word for it, "Ikigai".
I don't mind working. I would just like to do it less. A few years ago I dropped to part-time in order to be in a grad program in CS. I found that 25 hours provided me with the perfect life balance.
Whether making a positive change to the world is in the front or back seat (or in the vehicle at all) will depend on company culture and may even differ within a single org.
I make good money. I work 10am-5pm every day. I don't make as much money as people who are more career oriented.
But I also save 50% of my paycheck even factoring in that I have a wife and three kids, and my wife stays home with them. What's the point of chasing more money? If anything, I'd like to scale back, but that's not the easiest thing to do.
I then job hopped when my current company was either not keeping my salary at market rates or were getting behind technologically. I left one job that had two products - a legacy PHP product and a new C# project that was using then current technology.
The C# product wasn’t gaining traction after two years, raises were anemic and they moved everyone to the PHP product. There was no way that I wanted to spend a year doing PHP. I left.
But the smartest but riskiest move I made the next time I was looking for a job was to leave a full time job for a contract to perm where I would get the chance to build a development department and lead two green field projects.
That’s where I first (belatedly) learned about AWS and discovered how much “cloud consultants” made.
Once those two projects were done, I self demoted to a senior developer where the newly minted CTO wants someone to make the company “cloud native”. I jumped on every single project and took the lead on introducing AWS services.
Just from working at those two companies I was able to get my current job.
I was there a little over 10 years ago at 35. I belatedly learned how to play the game. Until my current job, it was all about resume driven development and job hopping the minute my salary or what I am doing at my current job got out of whack with the market.