I went to my CTO with a similar conversation and his response was "totally understand, leave it with me" - 6 hours later he had spoken with whoever it was he needed to speak with, and my ~20% raise was formalised. I was not expecting that response and the way it was handled made me even more happy to stay.
The company I work for even improved their benefits in some ways which do not directly affect the salary spend (added unlimited paid leave) to further sweeten the deal for everyone.
At the time I assumed they wouldn't want/be able to match it so I was very regretfully ready to go.
These conversations sometimes go differently to the way you expect!
I prefer what my employer offers: 30 days paid holiday plus the ability to sell days back to the company.
That can be very helpful when your pay dates don't line up right due to how different companies handle pay.
That’s the challenge this aims to solve. There’s nothing wrong with either approach, and “shaming people into not taking vacation” works either way.
Plus, there are other benefits to the employer, like not having to pay out banked PTO to employees who leave.
Unless it comes with a mandatory minimum, unlimited PTO is a negative for me.
1) Having a set number of PTO days can also often come with pressure to not take them. When I worked at Morgan Stanley, you got vacation, but taking it made you look bad.
2) Plenty of HR systems support unlimited vacation; ADP and Gusto both do, at a minimum. My company used Gusto, and the acquirer used ADP; both had unlimited.
3) Mandatory minimums are a fantastic idea, and it's something we implemented as well. Agreed there.
Whether PTO usage drops dramatically when unlimited is entirely dependent on how the company treats unlimited vacation; if they encourage it, that isn't true. Also, the flexibility of being able to 'not run out of sick days' and take a longer vacation during the holidays, etc., is something that all of our employees greatly appreciated.
Point is: just like anything else, it can be done poorly, but that's not as a result of it being unlimited.
Make sure to use at least 20 days a year
Take a whole week off per quarter and set that expectation
and the Christmas to New Years time doesnt count so double it in Q4
The only time this works is when the company's in early-days stages, when you'll be severely underpaid in cash and paid in equity instead, that the VCs have added a tolerance for crash-out-time to their spreadsheets.
I've never worked for a company that put "unlimited paid leave" in their job-ads, let alone the actual contract, so I'm curious how those things are spelled out.
Under at-will employment, the company can fire you for any (legal) reason, but if you bunk-off work all the time, but your contract says "unlimited paid leave", what case do they actually have? Has it been tested in court?
In New York, a compliance officer was fired for reporting compliance violations and this former employee challeneged that and lost, and lost on appeal, helping people realize that its a check-the-box job filling a seat.
https://www.jacksonlewis.com/resources-publication/new-york-...
So, as these will always be at state levels and will remain unresolved for all states within your lifetime, you have to make assumptions for how to achieve and maintain standing in society. Best to just assume its the same everywhere. As this extends to nearly anything regarding employment, there is no reason to elevate "using paid time off" as any higher reason you'll get fired than anything else. If you are intimidated and feel there will be a disruption in your ability to exchange time for food and shelter, then there is no assurance that US employment can offer you.
You have to try to make in-office leverage yourself, and then rely on the assumption that you have it.
I like unlimited PTO because it doesn't "accrue". I don't stay at places long enough to accrue PTO.
It really does need to come with a top-down culture of taking vacation which a senior former Netflix person told me was the case there. (Though I've also heard it varies by team.) It also isn't great if you want to switch around jobs a lot because you won't get any payout when you leave.
Though you do have issues with people taking vacation even in a more traditional system. In a prior job I took some month long vacations and there were some coworkers who were incredulous that "I could do that."
All holiday is subject to approval here, whether it's under your allowance or not.
However, this presupposes that most (all) employment is at-will, which obviously isn't true, especially globally.
I don’t consider france a productive environment that has struck a balance for doing business reliably, with a hostile sentiment that permeates down to seemingly everyone and so I don’t really put much stock in their particular labor advances
having "unlimited leave" where you can't cash it out if you don't use it seems pretty bogus.
It's very disheartening to not be even given the chance to fight for more money for my team.
Be kind to your manager. If you're seriously interviewing around at least drop hints in your 1:1s so your manager can start the ball rolling about your raise internally.
A manager going to HR with "cost of living increase please" vs "I have a valued member of my team who is dropping hints theyre unhappy about pay" are very different things.
You're presuming all employees are like yourself. Not everybody is motivated by money. I have team members who are well paid, know it, and turn down large increases elsewhere due to the projects they have excite them, etc.
Like, your manager in their mid-30s might value steady employment, a good salary and good benefits, whereas their low-mid 20s report might value fast promotion, salary growth and relocation potential. So if their request to move from London to Seattle got denied, the manager might think it's not a big deal, while for the report it's a complete deal-breaker
If that happens multiple years in a row, it's not just possible, it's likely.
Of course, it's your manager's job to make sure you are more comfortable talking to this about them than you are interviewing with strangers, which honestly is not a high bar to clear.
What is stopping my manager from doing a 20% raise today, then replacing me in 3-6 months with a lower cost person? How do you build trust or guarantee a 2-5 year timeline attached to that raise?
I thought I had trust with my manager, but when I converted from contract to FTE (required), they rejected my request for a small raise and tried to lowball me. They eventually settled on the same pay rate, so 2 years with no raise. Only to "adjust" my salary up in year 3 because 2 people quit. I'm still looking at an easy 15% increase and less stress by jumping.
I'm currently on a TC of £130k and I've been offered roles with a TC of £470k (this is UK remote)
UK market is extremely hot right now.
With RPI at 7%, this is actually fairly understandable, it's essentially no raise in real terms.
Because no-one else is saying it, I will:
Bitcoin, random cryptos, NFTs, etc, don't count as TC.
Ironically I’d count crypto towards TC more than what you actually see more often which is counting ISO or private RSU as TC. Mostly since I think there is much more risk they will never be liquid. And even if they go liquid they are tough to evaluate exact dollar value unlike something being actively traded. For example many private companies got valuations before bear market that would be worth a lot less if actively traded but doubt the recruiters at those companies admit that.
I hear that they capture your soul in a banker's box now, but in the 1990s it used to be a 3-ring binder, is that still true?
…no?
Look, anyone who admits they’re working for fintech is fair-game for punch-upwards jokes, regardless of their total-comp. I’d be cracking jokes about their soulessness even if they said they were working for a minimum-wage job in the sector.
It’s only slightly less disgusting than admitting you work for the Trump Organisation or Scientology.
Arbitrarily and hypocritically. This is the internet, after all.
> minimum-wage job in the sector
I don't think that means what you think it means.
I'd love to take a few cracks at you! Nothing better than a good insult.
> punch-upwards jokes
> It’s only slightly less disgusting than admitting you work for the Trump Organisation or Scientology
Ah, damn, sorry. I understand your situation now. I won't make any jokes as that would be punching down. Morally, I simply can't.
Never seen £470k TC though!
FAANG in London is around £150-300k (for L4-6), very senior could be £500k+ though I suppose
No-one can promise future-growth: if they don't offer an immediate equity grant in lieu of cash then just walk.
Does your CEO need to invoke inflation to justify his multi-million pay package?
If other companies are offering you +25%, then that's your current market value. You do not have to justify or apologize for it, no more than your CEO apologizes for the far higher pay package required to hire and retain them.
If you in general want to stay, just with a higher compensation, it's good idea to help them rationalize your salary. Especially if your manager will have to argue for you with his boss.
If you simply want a raise and don't care where, indeed that will not benefit you.
If you can point to where you went above and beyond, which improved the company's bottom line by $X, that will never hurt you in salary negotiations. In that sense, being able to justify your raise strengthens your position.
But you don't have to defend yourself against accusations of sinful greed, or justify why you should earn 3x what teachers or nurses earn. You're talking to someone who is paid more than you, not speaking at a college anarchists' debate about fat cat bosses. You don't need any special justification in that sense.
The market for me is $X, you are paying $X*0.5 - that is unsustainable
"The salary and benefits package I'm given is a direct measure of how much I'm valued as an employee. This other company values me 25% higher".
MANAGER: your salary was just raised by 25%.
SWE: wait, why?
MANAGER: that's the new market salary for you.
SWE: ok...
Why is offering even a small raise so unpalatable?
I've been through so many cycles of: work 1-2 years on the same domain (or product), finally achieve mastery of all its components: infrastructure, dependencies, dependents, product vision, to the point where I can give detailed and relevant assessments on the future planning of whatever I'm working with.
Whenever I get to that point my salary stagnates, I need to change teams or domain, or company, to get a decent bump (10-20%), if not I will be stuck on the forever cycle of either aiming for a promotion or getting 2-5% raises/year.
It looks so stupid from the factory floor side, when I'm finally a master of what I'm working with I get devalued. When we hire a new senior+ engineer they will get a similar or higher salary than I have. That will naturally push me to search for something else.
I simply cannot understand on an organisational level how can not giving raises but paying premiums for new hires is sustainable or even in the best interests of said organisation... I have never got a good answer from CTOs (or other C-level executives).
Two examples to illustrate this. Back in the 2000s, I got an offer from a larger corporation, for 25% more than what I was making at the time. Told my then manager and his counter was a 5% raise, plus a not quite moving “we are all a family here” speech. It wasn’t only me though, at least ten other engineers left in a few months, all were offered between 3% and 7% raises. The team was eventually disbanded and people were reassigned to other projects. After some years, someone told me that they simply didn’t have the budget.
In the late 2010s, while working at a large multinational, I asked for a raise. At the time, I was repeatedly told that the project I was leading was, by far, the most impactful of the whole division, so I thought I would deserve it. Manager went to HR they recommended that I shouldn’t get a raise, since I was doing “well” already, according to their salary charts. Now, my manager could have fought it harder, but the disconnection and power over budget HR and higher ups have, made it so difficult and dragged for so long, I ended up leaving.
Instead of telling your employees "no" you can tell them "ask again in 6 months" because of the "budget process" or "headcount approval" or "appraisal process" or "salary bands" or "fixed pool for raises" or some other nonsense, as a soft way of refusing their request. Junior managers will be able to deliver that message sincerely, because they genuinely believe it. Maybe the company finds there's a good chance the employees stay around.
Of course, if the job market favours workers this tactic doesn't work any more. But how many companies are agile enough to respond quickly to changing employment market conditions?
As a manager it's your job to wheel and deal within that constraint. Eg turn a vacant role into a less senior position to free up budget for keeping a valued team member.
ME: I got a work proposal from some company
MANAGER: That sounds awful! Don't you like here?
ME: I like the people.
MANAGER: Is there anything that can change your mind?
ME: It actually is.
MANAGER: It's money, isn't it?
ME: Well, yes. Inflation is 10%, I haven't got any raise. MANAGER: How much do you want?
ME: The other company is offering me +25%, so that's the amount.
MANAGER: I will try to speak to the higher ups, but there's already an order from above not to raise wages.
ME: Please do. How much do you think it will take?
MANAGER: speak to me in one week.
Two weeks after.
ME: Hey, did you speak with the higher ups?
MANAGER: Yes, and they said we shouldn't raise your wage.
ME: Ok then, we should talk about my resignation.
MANAGER: But couldn't you still not leave? You don't have a small salary after all.
ME: The prices are crazy, next year there is a prognosed high inflation too, and I have kids to take care of. So, regretfully, I will have to say good bye.
I wasn't the only one who resigned and for three seniors who left, they only found a junior to joined them now. I don't feel sorry for the company, I feel sorry for my former colleagues who have to endure a higher workload, because business people don't care there is a smaller number of people to do the same jobs.