People don't quit jobs, they quit bosses.

Not as much since Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) became law over ten years ago. Anyone can get minimum essential coverage, with a subsidy if income is low enough (as it would be when out of a job), regardless of pre-existing conditions.

Most employers aren’t really providing much “healthcare value” when compared to simply going on the exchange directly.

Maybe it was worse before the ACA but it sure isn't a picnic after.

In my experience, when you apply on healthcare.gov, you simply enter your estimated income for the year you're applying - that's it, and you get the subsidy. Then when you file your taxes for that year, you either get more subsidy as a credit, or pay some back depending on whether you came in above or below the estimate you provided on the application.

The househpold income is voluntarily self-reported.

In effect this means that while companies that give paltry pay bumps that don't keep up with the market may successfully hold on to lower performing employees, they'll be continually churning through top performers.

I think talent and the capability to market/self-promote oneself (only for the latter capability, the barrier to change jobs is much lower) are mostly uncorrelated.

I think there is an unstated underlying assumption in this comment that "higher performing" implies "drop-in transferable technical/social skills" legible to the target interviewing entity. Maybe for software but for wide swaths of actually engineering (double graduate engineers in this family) I doubt that rather strongly.

The default 2 weeks vacation for the decades experienced new hire is a pretty strong tell.

Firms give paltry pay bumps as default, but will fight with competitive salaries to retain top performers.

Top performers get completive raises by going to their boss with an offer letter from a competitor.

It's "business." Your manager isn't going to make a counteroffer, then wait a month and fire you. I mean, they might if they're a total D.bag, but I've not yet had that experience. And if I had, I'd already proven to myself and my manager that I could get a higher-paying job elsewhere. It'd be a minor annoyance on my side.

I don't want to give away specifics, so take these numbers with a lump of salt; the ratios are correct:

Went from $50k/yr [1]-> $80k/yr [2]-> $120k/yr [3]-> $205k/yr

[1] The company wanted me to stay and raised my pay to match the competing offers.

[2] The company wanted me to stay and raised my pay to match the competing offers.

[3] The company didn't want to pay that much, so I put in my two weeks and moved to a different company.

From my experience, I've found that requesting a raise without a competing offer often leads to a small or no increase in pay. However, when I've approached my manager with a better offer in hand, it has consistently resulted in substantial pay raises.

It's no different than price shopping between mechanics. You can do that while being clear on your intentions and not making any promises you can't keep

Also why do I want to stay with the cheap people? They proved to be unable to deliver market rates for my efforts unless I make a big scene about it. I don't like to do business with people like that.

No employers going to give you the maximum that they can afford without negotiation or a reason to. It's not being cheap, it's common business sense.

I also routinely get asked by managers for promo recommendations for coworkers thinking about leaving. IF they refuse to counter, then you should be asking yourself why you are staying.

You cant pull this maneuver more than once or twice, but it lets them know you are serious and wont just whine and accept token raises in future negotiations.

Now the jobmarket is nothing that can be compared to the Bay area, for sure. For example many places more or less use the standard increases brokered by the union, even if you or the workplace is not unionized, with some skewing for being a high performer.

In my businesses, I've had employees do this a couple of times. Both times my response was "you should take that offer". Also both times, if they'd asked for a pay increase equal to what the offer represented, they probably would have gotten it.

Coming to me with an offer letter in an attempt to get a pay raise is a thing that I think speaks very poorly of the person. It's an attempt to extort me, their current employer, and it's showing great disrespect for the company they got the offer letter from (because the employee is basically just using that employer and wasting their time).

If you have a market based salary view of the world, and an employee says they're actually worth more than what your merit/market system is paying them (and has proof), you should probably respect that.

The fact they're coming to you first is a risk in and of itself.

We are in total agreement here!

> Coming to me with an offer letter in an attempt to get a pay raise is a thing that I think speaks very poorly of the person.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate your honesty here, But I don't think that's fair, and probably why you're getting push-back in this thread.

It's OK if you and others don't think it's fair. We just disagree on that aspect. I don't think it's fair for an employee to use that particular method. To me, it comes off as a kind of extortion to the current employer, and mistreats the employer who made the offer.

Others can, of course, have a different opinion. Nothing wrong with that. We simply disagree.

To make a little meta-comment: I am genuinely surprised at the negative reaction I've gotten from a few people here. I really didn't think I was saying anything all that controversial. Live and learn, I guess!

But then again companies typically do shitty things to employees all the time because the company has the leverage. You've probably witnessed some of that yourself.

Sam Altman and OpenAI come to mind.

So I guess I don't understand what's changed about the relationship when the employee finds leverage to use against the company.

It is no different than giving customers a notice of price increase or giving contractors an option to bid.

> Seems like honest communication to me.

Extortion is honest communication, too. The existence of an offer doesn't do anything to help me decide whether or not I can go along with a pay increase. It only communicates that the employee wants to threaten me into agreeing to one.

In my opinion, the better way is to ask for the pay raise without mentioning the offer. If they I don't give them the raise and it's that important to them, then they should just take the offer.

> It is no different than giving customers a notice of price increase or giving contractors an option to bid.

I think it's very different from that, actually. You can require a raise as a condition to stay at the company without trying to use another offer as a weapon.

At first I thought it was simply because it is presented as an ultimatum, but it seems like you have no problem being given conditions. Saying I want X to keep working here is acceptable, but the same exact statement with an offer weaponizes it.

If they have an offer they don't tell you about but have an otherwise identical request, is that less of a threat?

I just choose not to play that game. It's unnecessary. If an employee can't just come to me and be straight about their compensation requirements, that's a problem.

That's exactly what they are doing, but with evidence to boot so you are on the same page.

Having an offer in hand is valuable to the employee, certainly! There's nothing wrong with getting an offer, then asking your current employer for a raise that would meet or exceed that offer. The issue I have is actually communicating that offer to the current employer.

Now, don't get me wrong -- I'd certainly never punish or fire anyone who did that. I'm just not going to give in to what I perceive as extortion, and what I perceive as being unfair to the employer who made the offer.

If someone asked me for a pay raise and I turned it down, I'd also explain exact why I turned it down. (This is hypothetical as I've not turned down a pay raise). I wouldn't think poorly of anyone for just asking for a raise, but I suppose I'd start to get annoyed if they did it daily when the reason that I turned them down was still true.

Leaving is exactly what JohnFen actually recommended to these employees.

Not at all. I've never intentionally underpaid anyone.

> then insinuate moral failing on their part for proving their worth

Also not at all. Presenting an offer letter from someone is not "proving their worth". My objection is the manipulation they're engaging in rather than just asking for what they think they should be getting.

> and left you poorer for it.

Only one of them left, and I was not left poorer for it at all.

I'm not sure why you seem so hostile here. I never dealt with anyone in bad faith, even a little.

First, personally I’ve never asked my employer to match an offer. I just leave.

I do think the thought process makes some sense though.

If I feel I’m underpaid I’m going to look around to confirm before talking to anyone.

If I get confirmation I’m being underpaid then I’m going to wonder why. Here’s where I have a choice… I either assume it’s because you’re intentionally underpaying because you think you can, or it’s because you don’t understand what you’re doing.

I know companies understand compensation because I’ve worked in management and on compensation planning software, that’s why I don’t talk about it.

More naive people might give you the benefit of the doubt, i.e. think you just don’t know what’s fair. Those people give you a chance to fix it, and only then learn that you’re intentionally underpaying them.

It does speak badly of the person but only in the sense that they’re naive and think you “mean well” in some sense.

There are other explanations as well: for instance, just because an employee is worth a given rate to one company in no way means that the same employee is worth the same amount in another company.

The same effect might even be partially responsible for the OP observation. I.e. the cause and effect might not be "job-hopping gets you paid more" but it might instead be "having a lot of skill gets you paid more and also enables you to job-hop more confidently".

Just because you are a good software engineer doesn't mean you are good at finding a new job.

What most companies are really looking for is undervalued high performers. And there's probably a lot of those still that haven't moved to the bay area.

I think MBA's these days have decided that they'll hold labor costs low by not rewarding high performers, and then hire whoever they can to fit their budget, but then have a yearly 5% layoff to hold their employee's feet to the fire.

And then those same MBA's get a bonus for keeping costs low, meanwhile enjoying their beach houses on the weekends.

Granted it sucks to be an individual contributor, but if you're a manager, you have incentives for cutting costs to the bone.

I'm not sure about that, since very smart people often tend to be, well, "a little bit difficult to handle", in particular by bosses who got to their position by office politics instead of merits (as many do).

If companies were really looking for high performers, they'd create an environment where high performers can really flourish. Because in my observation there exist quite a lot of high performers who are "held down" by their current work environment, this would attract quite some potential high performers, including undervalued ones.

Sure, many people when they're young are geographically flexible. But that's less true as you age and are tied down by a house, spouse's job, kid's school, daycare, etc.

If you have to come into work, then all those details depend on your job location. You can't just change job locations. Again, this works for some single young people who rent apartments in NYC or SF. But that will always be a subset of job candidates.

This is why the trend towards remote seems inevitable. There are just too many incentives for too much of the workforce to require it. Long term that

Of course these things have always been true, but since remote work became prevalent I think people have realized how shitty of a situation it is - especially when you're not compensated for it. In fact you are actually compensated LESS since you arent job hopping.

I wish, but not in my country. Remote here means 2-3 days/week WFH tops and that's it. Nobody offers more. Meaning you're still tied to the location of your employer as you have to come regularly in the office.

It boggles my mind that employers don't see the advantage of employing people remotely nation-wide as that gives them access to a wider talent pool outside their area making it a win-win. But no, old-school boomer MBA managers want to see buts in seats in the office, otherwise to them it means people are slacking off as they can't possibly imagine motivating people to work if they're not within physical reach.

We also need to post pictures of the employees pretending to have fun at barbecues, teambuilding events and sitting in cramped open space offices on yoga balls wearing headphones with coffee mugs with nerdy memes on them. But it's ok, there's a weekly fruit basked, employee organized sports events and you can bring your dog to work. Totally worth spening 2h per day on commuting.

I’ve walked the path. Developers won’t develop anything good for $200k, but they will if you give them attention, care, events, and hope. I literally have to refrain myself from giving higher raises, because I’ve made people rich in the past and they’ve stopped being motivated. The more you pay them, the more they have the thrill to play competition.

(Please watch me if I don’t give them fat equity for the exit event, God, they deserve it).

That seems to be the Silicon Valley investment paradigm. Needed for attracting VC money. Otherwise, the users never gave a sh*t about those, they still don't. The rest of the tech world did not operate under such a paradigm either. I also suspect that it will also end in SV as the zero interest economy ended and the investment landscape changed. Now profitability is being valued instead of unprofitable infinite growth that may or may not be profitable in the future.

Lots and lots of companies have completely embraced remote work. You are not hearing from them because once they embraced it they found people better than you [1] who'll work for a tenth of the price. In other words, offshore.

Put another way, you're only seeing Office-work positions, because once they grasp that the job can be done remotely, they grasp that you're expensive.

I know, I know, soooo many reasons they should pay more to get you. On the other hand the entire manufacturing industry figured out "remote manufacturing" means cheap labor...

[1] obviously I'm speaking generally because I don't know you. But statistically it's likely to be true.

I know the companies in my country, they don't offshore because offshoring has additional overhead and costs they can't afford(small and medium companies), so they mostly prefer local workers they can tap on shoulder, and preferably German speaking.

And those few companies who do offshore(mostly banks and other large enterprises) already had offices abroad, no need for the pandemic to convince them.

Also when a family has/needs two parents working, Spouse A's next job becomes limited to locations that do not require Spouse B to also quit, and vice-versa.

I have a pet theory that dual-incomes are one cause of movement to urban locations: The family needs to be in a location with enough overlapping opportunities in each person's role/field.

As soon as that dual income want kids and can afford it on a signal income in suburbia, they'll take it most of the time.

Just my .02

The average cost of living for a 4-person family in SF is ~$350k [1] (I'm guessing that's pre-tax, and probably the job is also paying for 100% comprehensive medical & dental insurance for the entire family) and my spouse wouldn't be able to work (and even if she could, low chance of her also getting a $200k job offer at the same time!), and I'm not gonna willingly decrease my standard of living and my savings rate ...

I mean, I don't mind if that's their budget, I always mention that it probably makes more sense to hire someone local, but ... why even bother interviewing senior non-SF-based candidates in the first place?

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/27/how-much-money-family-of-4-n...

I often wonder if my lower pay is because I don't job hop, because of my disability, or if I'm just a piece of shit.

As GP said, it's a rational strategy for them. I personally have lowered my expectations of salary growth over the years, and would be happy with some of those other benefits GP listed in the mean-time.

I'm not sure if you are joking or not. This doesn't really make sense to me. Can you explain?

More passive, more avoidant, low confidence.

Depression undermines basically everything that helps initiate complete a negotiation. This is on top of any impact to actual work product.

I don't know. I try to maintain empathy, even for the most despicable -- but that doesn't mean their actions need to be tolerated.

For me having a shit boss, or a company who is crappy in a million other ways isnt a big deal. I can be flexible, in where and when and how in a way others cant.

IF having a good boss or sane hours matter to you, changing jobs is a risk.

Now, this is solely based on my own experience, which of course might not apply to your specific field of work and disability type.

What I mean is, most large companies have a voluntary self-identification form at the end of their job application. And I tend to get a lot more responses when applying for roles where I am invited to disclose my disability.

On a funny note, recruiters always want to confirm that I indeed have a disability, but they can't just reach out and ask "hey dude you sure you didn't click on that button by mistake?".

Instead, they always send this very P.C. email that reads like "Here at [insert company name] we pride ourselves on bein inclusive and bla bla bla. You informed us that you had disability, and we want to make sure that we can accommodate you and make you feel welcome. If you need any special arrangement, please let us know".

To which my response is always "Yes I do have this thing, and no I'm fine thanks".

My disability has fucked up a lot of things in my life, but it's boosted my career.

Both saw a limit on the time someone could be at the company and still be promoted. The C-Suite people really felt if people were at the company for more than 5 years, they were no longer viable candidates to move up because they had become to "accustomed" to the corporate culture and would develop a sense of apathy with pushing their departments or employees to greater success. They have now opted to hire outside executives or managers to try and keep the ideas and approaches fresh so to speak.

I remember my director at the time wanting very much to move up into an executive position and had been at the company some 15 years. He had been a director for some 7 years and had already been passed over twice before for an executive position. He recruited me for a senior dev role and had stood up an entire cloud computing team to take on specific work the company was having a hard time getting done quickly.

6 months in and he pulls me into his office after our 1:1. He tells me he's putting in his two weeks and loved working with me and wanted me to come with him to his new company once he gets set up there. He told me his bosses boss told him she knew his aspirations of moving into an executive position, but it wasn't going to happen here. She told him in no uncertain terms he had reached his ceiling at this company and should move on if he really wanted to be an executive.

Same thing happened at another company. The VP of the company had been in that role for some 10 years and had been passed over at least three times for the CEO position which he wanted very badly. Many of the managers had told me he has just accepted he wouldn't get any higher than VP, but had no aspirations of leaving the company. This unfortunately created a huge choke point in the company because now managers would be at the company for a certain amount of time, and then know that's as high as they were going and leave.

While I agree with your point, I feel like there is some amount of time threshold you can cross where the corporate apathy can take hold and your value starts to decline. It seems that way the higher up the ladder you go.

this is called "up or out", maybe 10-15 years ago my little sister had this same setup at Mckinsey but she's not there anymore. The idea iirc was if you haven't been promoted in 2-3 years then you're better off leaving and trying somewhere else so you get let go. I haven't heard of that setup in a long time.

> or lack of new skillset

Job-hopping is a powerful way of ensuring that your skillset remains current. That's 80% of why I do it.

A risk adverse person, or even rational one, may avoid still avoid positive EV gambles.

“Probability of job loss is strongly monotonically declining in tenure,” with job-loss probability falling from 15% for first-year private sector employees to 5.8% after twenty years [1].

(If you’ve ever had to do lay-offs, you know that it’s easier to lay off the new guy than someone with deep ties to the team.)

[1] https://www.princeton.edu/~ceps/workingpapers/171farber.pdf page 31, Figure 16

    - The company has a limit for how many times you can leave and come back. For example (last I checked), Intel is 2, Apple is 0.

    - For large companies, internal transfers can be diverse enough to make someone happy with a change. Although, pay raises are more limited.

In my vicinity the trend seems completely opposite - HR is trying to get a smoother rehiring experience for employees they lost due to their high turnover.

This might be because the talent pool of people willing and able to do IT jobs in my country is very small, so you run into the same people over and over again in this field.

And, from what I've been told about Apple, the idea is that if you can't find something within Apple (since they literally do everything, even textiles!), then Apple probably just isn't a good fit, especially since it is possible to spin up a team to make something new internally.

To be honest, none of the stuff I've worked on I've gotten comfortable within a year. At Oxide I feel like I understand maybe 30-40% of the stack at the moment after 18 months?

One day my boss "forgot" to bring up a very small raise I had negotiated with the CEO (who signed off on all raises personally), failed to see any urgency in fixing the situation to restore trust and gambled on me being one of those people that don't find another job. He seemed very surprised to be wrong.

My raise from switching jobs was about 50% - and I got to work with people who hadn't given up on improving things half a decade ago.

Ambitious employees "know" that switching jobs will give them the pay they're looking for, because they see those numbers right on the job postings. What's less obvious is that a current employer might really value an employee's skills, and would be willing to match or exceed the competition - if they just open up the conversation.

IME it's not even (always) any kind of rational decision on behalf of management to "stiff" people. If you have a happy employee making a wage they're satisfied with (+ annual COL), then these conversations about TC may not even come up at all. It's easy to just turn on autopilot here.

If you like your job, but you're not happy with your TC, make sure you're letting management know. It could be that everybody could end up happy. Even a good manager might not be doing this for you until/unless you advocate on your own behalf.

I've had 50% pay raises that were nearly matched by the current employer. My last manager literally said the words, "What if we offered you a big bag of money to stay?". I left.

Now I work at a place where people stay literally until the die, 10, 15, 25 year tenures. My coworkers are mediocre. I'd say it's a mixture of laziness and sometimes maybe just incompetence.

It's a two fold problem. Employees that stay this long do not progress in their careers or learn new skills. I've learned next to nothing in my 5 years here. Employers that don't create churn in their workers create numerous problems. If we didn't hold a monopoly in our field, I'm sure we would have been bought out and had mass layoffs by now.

Oh no, you tell them before you start looking that you feel like your TC is too low based on your contribution. You don't threaten to shop around, you just tell them your skillet has value beyond what they're offering.

It goes like this: either they come back with something to make you happy and everybody is satisfied, or they don't and you start applying.

But people don't always give employers this chance and just start applying first. Then when they go to leave things get weird with counter offers.

If you think your job sucks and you're ready to move on, there's no reason to bother with this approach. But if the only reason you're thinking of moving on is to increase your pay, it never hurts to ask first.

You could subsume all of these points into "moving house is hard", but the details matter. We moved across the country for a job for the money and even with an empty nest it was dauntingly difficult, the hardest thing we have ever done over 4 decades, and we didn't have to worry about money!

    - Visa status

I just struggled through this list for years. First, internally - then I announced my intent to leave.

People raised some of the points in a caring way. I have so many trust issues I don't know if I was being gaslit or if they truly believed it. I started to wonder who it served when I saw the patterns.

Anyway, don't believe the bastards. If you're willing to work, good people will teach you what you need. Find them.

Don't waste your time places where you aren't happy and valued

  - In a sea of jobs with on-call, workaholic hierarchical reward culture, and night/weekend work, a company may pay less but offer work-life balance that a 30k pay bump in New Corp may not outweigh the risks.