[quote=Coronita]
Question: you think HR/VP’s are going to allow me to go back and re-adjust my senior engineer’s pay above what I’m going to have to pay any mid-level I hire now, after already making an adjustment at the beginning of the year?
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Now these rules don’t apply if you work at a company that while your position might suck, and your base pay/bonus might suck..but you have a a boatload of stock or stock options that are worth something..(IE Qualcomm, Intuit, ServiceNow, Illumina, etc).. But then if that’s the case, you’re in a completely different category.. You’re in the “rest and vest” category in which basically you really shouldn’t give a shit what they ask you do, so long as you can sit there and fully vest and put in your time…
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When I was in my first decade in the software industry, it was well known that the only way to keep a salary up equal to comps was to jump around from company to company.
So that is what I did. Eventually I found a company I liked a lot, but the same old problem reared its head…companies tend to think once you’ve been there 5 years, that you’ll stay and they don’t have to give you decent raises. So I left!
I went to work somewhere else. I got a big bump in salary, worked there a few years and when they tapered off in raises, went back to the company I had liked and got another big bump *and* a severance package from the company I left because they were about to do layoffs. When I got back to the company I liked, I found out that they had struggled during the years I was gone and for a couple of those years they gave out no raises at all none! So I came out even further ahead than I thought.
Another added benefit: for years after that, they could look at my history and knew I wasn’t afraid to leave. If I felt short-changed, they knew I’d find the exit. So my raises were pretty darn good for years after that.
