Not only that... tech companies like Apple, Adobe, Pixar, Google, Intel, eBay, Lucasfilm, and Intuit all illegally colluded to keep them low. The settlement for the affected workers was appallingly low!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
I've always done freelance/contract work, so I'm not 100% sure what 'significantly' better means in the normal software world, but I'm going to assume 5k/year would be a really significant raise. I know the national average is somewhere around 3%, so 5k seems like it would be absurdly more than average. Please do correct me if I'm wrong.
So, just going on $5,000 lost for a year for the 64,000 litigants, that's $320,000,000. They settled for $324,000,000. I swear I didn't presuppose any of those numbers, they just worked out like that.
And 5k is too low. Google gave a 10% raise across the board around the time this information came out. So assume 150k salary * 10% = 15k. Salaries also continued to rise more rapidly after the 10% raise, but it's hard to say by how much without having access to the internal data.
Hence 4 years of wage suppression. Given tech salaries in SV, $5k is off by about an order of magnitude -- especially when you consider the knock-on effects of job mobility that was systemically quashed by collusion (i.e. moving jobs => better pay => faster career progression => compounded earnings).
Wikipedia seems out of date, what was the final result?
https://pando.com/2015/04/14/apple-wage-fixing-plaintiff-acc...
And it only costs about 10% of that per year to pay the engineer. Winning.
Basically, there's no incentive to give raises to current engineers because when your company doesn't care about profits or expenses, but about getting and maintaining investment and stock value, it doesn't matter how expensive it is to train new people and how ineffective they are. As long as they are just effective enough to maintain a N(user) growth, you're good.
I won't dispute that this is said, but every once in a while I get the sense people saying these things should double check which column of their balance sheet these things belong on.
If companies want the best, yes they should do all you said. If companies are just trying to grow grow grow, they can probably do better with an approach of 1,000 coder monkeys instead of 10 expert systems builders.
Plus, no reasonable company is going to pay the 10 expert people the equivalent of the 100 coder monkey duties they are actually performing. That would be what... a salary of $10 million to $20 million per expert employee per year. Yes, you are worth that much, but the market finds true-value untenable. We'd rather let companies keep hundreds of billions in spare cash than paying it out to employees who are allowing such hoards of wealth to be, well, hoarded.
Companies do do that. It's called an acquihire. It happens when an expert starts a startup that develops a technology that a bigger company needs. This bigger company then buys said startup for the sole purpose of hiring said expert.
They don't care about the user base or the interface or the company as a whole. They just want the expert to continue developing the technology they're an expert at, but do it for the big company instead of themselves.
Exactly. Wasn't the original question about how to get a raise at the same company though?
The option of "quit, give up all your security, hope to make something amazing, then get acqui-hired" isn't a tried and true path to just getting a raise.
We see people at Google taking that path all the time. Work at Google -> Quit -> Create new company with the same work you were doing inside of Google -> Get acquired by Google.
Cisco is famous for encouraging that tactic too. Lots of serial quit-acquirhire-vest-quit-acquihire loops going around. It's easy once you have the connections in place to drop out and instantly be established as legitimate again.
With extraordinary rewards, come extraordinary risks.
But the bigger point of this comment thread is that you can get raise jumps with practically zero risk as an engineer right now by switching jobs. As an engineer right now you can switch jobs without a single day of unemployment. Just do interviews as a side-project, then when you get hired somewhere else, quit your current job.
Bam.
60k shitty entry level job (< 3 years)... quit for a
90k slightly less shitty job (1 year) ... quit for a
140k + $350k bonus/equity (< 2 years) ... quit for a
160k + much more equity, nearly certain IPO (hopefully for the full 4 years to vest 100%)
Don't hate the mercenary, hate the employer who won't pay you what you are worth!
I think you fail to see a fact, the same fact that was overlooked by all your former bosses actually.
Your 6-years-ago self was probably not worth half of what your current self is. Your ability to land each new job was built upon the foundations of higher skills and professional maturity you achieved on the previous job.
Ambitious, talented employees keep growing, positions are static by nature. Job hopping is the de-facto career path.
I'm in the L.A. area and people want to crap their pants when I tell them to give me 150k.
1) Management in all but one job I've had invested nothing in training and helping new employees grow. My technical growth has come through personal projects and taking on extra work.
2) Promotion never offered anything like the salary increases a new job offered. The incentive to stay is not there.
I think employers massively overweight experience, particularly in a field that changes as fast as ours. Five years ago I was just as smart as I am now, maybe smarter - I didn't have 5 years' experience with tools X, Y and Z, but tools X and Y are already basically obsolete. But the market says I'm worth twice as much now as I was five years ago.
Also, there is the concept of social proof - which you may argue is a form of over-weighting experience, but that's an open ended question. If you have a track record of going to work for somebody else and achieving X, Y, Z goals there, you are perceived to be a safer choice than someone that in theory might be smarter than you, but that is lazy or otherwise unreliable, or with low communication skills, or a first class jerk. Not that you cannot hire this types if you go with someone more experienced, but from HR perspective, you are more of a "known quantity" once you have been around for a few years and built a track record for yourself.
These companies can be found, and you probably know their names. You can get through their interviews by adopting the mannerisms of their interviewers (be it old cynical guys, or Stanford new grads, or whatever) and studying your SAT interview question book.
The way to really strike it rich is look for say a social network with 30+ million active users that is willing to give you options. It's hard to fuck up 30+ million users.
EDIT: Just because I got lucky does not mean the OPs post is wrong. My luck was aided by me jumping ship as frequently as I could whenever a good new opportunity presented itself.
Keep in mind that I stayed at none of these companies for more than 2.5 years!
There were 2 brief interludes 1) Non-technical grad school, but that actually netted me a very slick summer internship one year that paid way better than my previous job too. 2) Failed startup, that paid nothing
Unfortunately, I think I've maxed out on the software engineer pay scale now unless I get even luckier.
> Pick a number, any number: somebody does a lot better than that. For most numbers you’d naively think of, its an awful lot of somebodies. $100k? Not the top. $250k? Not the top. $500k? … Not the top.
The less emotional benefit of getting higher in the pay scale is that job-switches can be about something more meaningful than just, "Oh shit, that's more money!" Now, so long as I can get close, I'll be happy to just go wherever would be most fulfilling.
My trajectories been
25k 6months, 45k 6m, 75k 1yr, 110k now.
Hoping to get to 150k in one more year. 150+ would be a sweet salary!!
(Throwaway)
Correction: they are below what people of the quality they want are willing to work for. There are plenty of engineers willing to work for those salaries; the vast majority get rejected.
Whether these entrepreneurs and managers actually need the level of quality they are seeking is a subject for a different religious debate.
I'd say its more accurate to say "The quality of engineers isn't effectively determined in most hiring processes."
Now that a lot more infrastructure and tooling is in place, we're seeing the effects of that prolonged depressed supply. It's easy (relatively) to hire junior devs, and much harder to hire senior devs. And even still, I talk to senior devs who have trouble getting a raise. I'm like... ok... well I hear X is hiring.