Throwaway cause I'm a lurker and don't really care.
Just sharing a contrarian experience...
As a manager of 7, formerly 10, those 'non-superstars' can easily go find a job elsewhere as well. Remember, these are engineers. "Superstars" or not, they're not stupid. The demand is there.
When management balked at requests to bump pay (not even that much, and only to bring it in line for the region) for people they didn't think were 'rockstars', they walked off to better offers (I don't have authority here to bump pay without approvals).
It's created a bit of a headache. Not only do we have to find replacements, which is time consuming, folks are concerned they may not be considered a superstar (it hasn't been stated so succinctly, but the conversations have that vibe).
And in the long run, it was decided to raise pay across the board to reflect the increase in the area.
Be fair to your employees as a whole. Assess their overall contribution to the company. Not just number of commits, LOC, or that the wrote some really cool but useless feature in no time at all (really hate when my boss beams over having folks like that here, fortunately they're not on my team).
Allow me to give a slightly different perspective. When engineers are consistently outperforming their wage, I immediately recognize that with an unsolicited pay increase to match their performance. This has always been met with appreciation, as it demonstrates both that outperformance is actively recognized and rewarded, and secondarily that management is looking out for the benefit of the employees. This has positive cultural impact.
This is more or less difficult depending on the company. In a few cases, I had to go to war with HR to get a deserving employee a raise who deserved it but hadn't asked for it. Other companies have processes that are highly amenable to it.
In many cases, if employees have to ask for more money when they've earned it then it is a management failure.
I second this. It may sound as a surprise for many, but the reality is that it is very hard to justify to upper management any salary increases for the quiet high-performers, that just get work done without self-promoting and being vocal about it.
The system is based on the perception of "urgency" and "high-priority". If it not urgent to give a good salary raise or promote someone, they will be perceived as happy in the current position and be overlooked, until they leave.
From a company's perspective, just because one person gets a market rate that is higher than the rest of the team, the entire team can't simply be given a raise. While this sort of largesse may work for Google & FB, I doubt it would for those companies that grow in single digit to low teen % per annum.
Also, if the person given this raise is not amongst your top performers and now ends up out earning the rest of team, it ends up affecting overall team morale. Your star performers then start to feel short changed and think they have to leave to get a raise.
My team is all well compensated, above top 5 US metro average, full remote and all highly technical.
It's surprising to me that out of 100 people no one asked for a raise after seeing a pool of money, although there's a lot of industries and types of employees out there.
It's a smart thing to do from the employee perspective-- I would do the same in their shoes, I don't hold it against them, I'm actually a big fan of ambitious employees, and I've granted their requests (maybe not the full value of their ask, but at least part) every time.
Couldn't they just pay them more? Offer them worthwhile promotions and raises. Someone won't jump to more pay if it wouldn't be that much of a pay increase.
> some employees wished we would give across-the-board pay increases every year instead of merit raises. We weren't prepared to do that, because we believe compensation should be tied to performance... so...the top 15 performers share in our profits"
"Some employees told us they wanted X; we believe in not X, so we ignored their concerns and doubled down on not X."
Hate to say it but I think if you have to ask for a raise you're probably not going to get it (or won't get as much as you want).
I've seen companies let bonafide rockstars with the most domain knowledge in the group walk over money. I just don't get it. It's like someone in the HR industry made up this rule and bad companies stick to it for whatever reason. I'd go as far as saying the majority of the attrition I've seen has been money related, and all of my decisions to bounce have been motivated by money.
Companies will spend $100k+ on Christmas parties, sport box suites, and other marketing/sales related things but won't give a critical piece of the team an extra $25k or whatever? Just mind boggling.
The problem is that you are more likely to get a wage increase. Not a wage increase that moves the needle for you individually.
I love seeing the “union fought for years, after many strikes employees ‘win’ and get a 5% wage increase over the next 4 years” news articles, but they never strike me as something that I’d want to apply to me.
Certainly my company is increasing wages for high performers. They may not be happy to do so, but they’ll do it to retain talent they desperately need.
I imagine this would be different if the sector I was in was different, but right now, for software development, it doesn’t make any sense to me. There’s too much variation in skill levels to collectively bargain for anything.
It's only going to increase the morale of the 70 employees receiving the wage increase. I suspect it will cause some degree of resentment in the rest of the company. It also removes the incentive to improve for the lower tiers, since they have further to move up the ladder before they see an increase in pay.
Personally, I think it's a noble but foolish move.
Most companies are inclined to think of raises as tiny annual percentage gains, which may keep in step with cost of living increases only if you're lucky. If you ask for more than that, managers are trained to save the company money and not honor the request. They're expected to call your bluff. If you show up with an offer from another employer, they may counteroffer, but may just as well let you go because of your "disloyalty". People can and do often suffer retribution when they ask for raises.
The business world sees things completely differently than the engineering world.
I've seen some friends some do this. The time it took to go through, the size of the raise and the headache involved in convincing everybody (like pulling teeth), still, IME, essentially made it a losing proposition for them compared to just hopping jobs.
Still others have thrown out raises without being pushed but they were critical organizational lynchpins getting 10% raises when the market would bump them 50% minimum. That's even worse.
Fundamentally, I think the surplus value from these tech workers who hate interviewing and get "stuck" with cost of inflation raises are often a lot more profitable than we'd give them credit for, and a lot of companies are happy to risk losing a high performer if it meant keeping 3 profitable grumbling malcontents on lower pay.
I think there's much more evidence that there is a management mandate to squeeze as much as possible out of salaried employees than there is about counter-offered employees having their head on a block under management efforts to replace the perceived-disloyal. The proactivity being championed in the post and comments does not have industry support and any manager who suggests giving raises or benefits ahead of time likely has the Sword of Damocles hanging over them afterwards.
I wish. It's more commonly some sort of good-cop bad-cop routine, where the line manager really appreciates your work and fights hard for you against the upper level manager, who is just so stingy about raises in general. If you're stellar, you wind up with something way better than your teammates, but an insult compared to what you could command on an open market.
I think on some level, they're constrained by collective bargaining agreements. Maybe they hope you've been with the company so long you only see the people around you. Maybe they only see the people around them.
There was a real technical superstar of a guy a few years ago. I didn't work with him, but a coworker did. He went to management and said, "Give me a 17% raise or I'm leaving." They didn't and he did. The fallout was cataclysmic.
I left a project about three years ago, and there was widespread panic when I announced my decision to leave. I took four months to pack things up and leave them in a stable state, but you cannot totally mask the absence of talent. A coworker asked, "Is there anything this program could do to make you stay?" I answered, "No." He said, "How about a 200% raise?" I said, "Oh, I'd stay another year for that." Judging from the fallout over that year, it would have been an efficient option. But they either didn't have the power or didn't have the perception.
When there's a buyer's market for talent, making the raise process difficult and slow is a negotiating tactic on the part of the corporation.
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?
It was a landmark year in part due to freezing pay. I don’t know, everyone likes more money, but having been in leadership positions and now being an owner it’s not as simple as most “individual contributors” tend to imagine. For non-trade/non-service industry jobs, longevity or inflation are never good things to peg pay rates to, imo. Market rates and individualized retention considerations are good. For all we know, the “pay increase” budget was used to fund higher premium costs on the backend to keep ee benefit costs flat. With the glut of industry layoffs and supply of talent theoretically seeing a bump, a pay freeze doesn’t sound absurd to me. IME, the reality is that most higher level employees don’t jump over single digit percentage pay increases. If they dislike the environment they’ll go in any case unless you’re paying an absurd nuisance fee to keep them. If they like the environment and job, it’s worth more to them to stay in that environment and ride out these intermittent policies. I’ve never worked at a company where I felt entitled to an annual cost of living pay raise. If you feel you’re getting a fair deal for the important work you’re doing, keep doing it. If it’s a raw deal, jump. But the entitlement attitude is one I stereotypically associate with lower-value cattle employees. Do more, get paid more. Take on more responsibility, get paid more. Career and talent progression isn’t simply pegged to time for everyone, and so neither is pay.
Totally agree with this. I'm also an advocate for giving people substantial pay rises every year. It sounds profligate, but the alternative is that people leave for the so-notorious-as-not-to-merit-explaining pay bump one gets from switching company, and all your institutional knowledge ends up churning practically continually. It's probably the biggest thing I learned from my (former) time doing eng management.
(Also, fwiw, it's a non sequitur - I sat in Latin classes for 8 years and I still can't remember the conjugations well enough to explain why, but, long story short, it's a verb and so it doesn't obey the familiar rules of (even Latinate) English noun endings.)
((Also, that was a very classy and magnanimous response to a – speaking of the comment as distinct from its author – very classless and pusillanimous comment. Chapeau to you. I can't say I'd have managed the same myself.))
Yeah, and employers are whining that their people are no longer loyal to them.
Companies need to show that they appreciate their employees, but it's hard to
feel appreciated when one feels underpaid. And "just asking for a raise" is
not a solution. It's on the employer's side of to show appreciation, not on
employee's to fight for it after earning with hard work.
Given all this, even the excuse Nadella made is ridiculous.
I think your example might be more of an exception than a rule; the last company I was in that introduced pay bands only bumped up people who were below the bottom of the band.
The only people who were upset were those who found out some people were way over the new pay band and generated a bit of gossip over how those people were way overpaid for the quality of their work
Just sharing a contrarian experience...
As a manager of 7, formerly 10, those 'non-superstars' can easily go find a job elsewhere as well. Remember, these are engineers. "Superstars" or not, they're not stupid. The demand is there.
When management balked at requests to bump pay (not even that much, and only to bring it in line for the region) for people they didn't think were 'rockstars', they walked off to better offers (I don't have authority here to bump pay without approvals).
It's created a bit of a headache. Not only do we have to find replacements, which is time consuming, folks are concerned they may not be considered a superstar (it hasn't been stated so succinctly, but the conversations have that vibe).
And in the long run, it was decided to raise pay across the board to reflect the increase in the area.
Be fair to your employees as a whole. Assess their overall contribution to the company. Not just number of commits, LOC, or that the wrote some really cool but useless feature in no time at all (really hate when my boss beams over having folks like that here, fortunately they're not on my team).
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