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I mean, I would prefer to stay at the same place than hopping around, but I’ve never gotten a raise that pays as good as a new job at a different company
I still don’t understand the reasoning behind that tactic.
Why would a company effectively force turnover like that? No argument I’ve ever heard makes sense, if you think about for more than a few seconds.
Because job hopping is scary as hell (especially for developers who struggle with imposter syndrome) and job hunting is generally shitty.
What if I don’t like the new place? What if I can’t feed my wife and kids? What if I’m actually terrible at this and my current place is so stupid they haven’t figured that out? What if the economy tanks in the next couple of months and I’m out on my ear with no severance pay?
Better to stay put, accept slightly less money for another year and look at it again when I’ve got the time and energy to cope with it.
Better to stay put, accept slightly less money for another year and look at it again when I’ve got the time and energy to cope with it.
but Watch Out
Seriously, though, this is hitting the nail on the head. That dangling carrot of job security can be so exploitative when there’s so many unknowns (many of them confidence-based in a dev’s situation). I’ve heard that little evil voice (recently) telling me “yeah, you could probably go back to physical labor when you can’t find any more work as a dev. you’ll do okay out there”
I work hard for my company. But paying me raises to deal with inflation? Rewarding my efforts and loyalty? Why bother when they can just hold out and pay my identical wage to someone greener and less jaded in a couple short years?
And now think about, who stays in such positions. Not the ambitious people. It’s the risk averse, socially inept people. They will perform just enough to get by, simply because there’s zero reward for any ambition.
Your comment makes me personally angry. After considering several ways of explaining why it makes me personally angry, I’ve settled on telling you about this person I worked with a long, long time ago – let’s call her Anya.
Anya is the model employee per your value system. A risk-taker, a people person, full of gumption and ambition to get ahead. All her life she’s used these skills to project the image of someone knowledgeable, dependable, who is on top of things. So far so good. Unfortunately at one point she realized that she is much more capable at this, by many orders of magnitude, than at actually becoming knowledgeable or on top of anything. To her, learning and understanding the details of a system is a hassle; so why go through the hassle when it’s so much easier to just navigate every conversation about the system, and appear knowledgeable? Why make the effort to improve at the actual job when it’s so easy to judo-deflect every negative incident as actually a positive, or someone else’s fault? She has a gift; being a human, and not a saint, she is compelled to make use of that gift.
Anya is not a bad person. She just takes the path of least resistance – let he among us who is without that particular sin cast the first stone. Maybe she even has the natural capacity to match and exceed the skill level of her colleagues; it’s just that she never will, because what’s in it for her. One way or the other, navigating any problem with Anya on your team is an ordeal. Every step forward involves defusing some part of whatever elaborate web of obfuscation she’d weaved to maintain her image. To be blunt, the thought of people like her being actually in charge of some truly technical system, something that can’t be reasoned with or bullshitted, that will cause damage and cost lives if not handled properly – that thought puts the fear of god in my heart.
So in conclusion, being familiar with Anya, I don’t buy your Randian Dr. House fantasy, this dichotomy of skillful extroverted pushy go-getters who know the job and don’t take no bullshit and ‘tell it like it is’ vs risk averse socially inept introvert moochers. Given the choice between working with Anya on a project or instead working with Anya’s risk averse socially inept introvert colleague who is actually physically capable of articulating the words “I don’t know, I’ll go check” – give me the colleague any day of the week.
You used all these words just to say nearly nothing - and even that bit is wrong.
It’s not about “go getters” it’s about people who know their value. Those are very different things. If I know my value, I won’t stay in an underpaid job.
But if I don’t know my value, I’ll stay in a position that doesn’t fit me, that frustrates me and I will be neither happy nor particularly productive.
If you would have bothered to actually read what I wrote, I advocated for these people you described. But in your rage against, I don’t know, ducks, maybe? You decided to not think about what I wrote and instead came up with a worthless sob story.
Maybe you are exactly the kind of frustrated, underpaid, undervalued employee. Maybe you should not project your frustrations at other people.
Because business people are generally not actually competent, they’ve failed upwards and just continue doing the things that haven’t completely failed them yet.
Really, capitalism as a whole is fundamentally inefficient and just kind of dumb, and the economical theory underpinning it is simply incorrect.
Maybe enough people don’t know that jumping makes more money that low raises still save money overall?
Even knowing that though, job-hopping does come with risk. As with most money-related things, the more risk you take, the bigger payout you can get.
Plus, luck favors the prepared. If you’re confident you can get the next job then you probably won’t feel like taking a risk is actually that much risk.
I think it works when employees don’t want to switch jobs even when they don’t get good raises. Then it’s like a decision between giving out 100 good raises and keeping everyone or giving out 100 low raises and keeping 95 people.
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Allow me to introduce you to CODE-CWA
Interesting! Do you think they would take Embedded System Software Engineers?
I’ve been organizing with them for over a year, they want to help unionize the entire tech industry! They’ve helped organize unions at Google, Activision Blizzard, Paizo, Sega, and more. Knowing the people leading CODE, they would love to expand beyond the games industry
