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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   26045 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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The even crazier thing here is you often don't need huge wage bumps. In my experience, even a 10-15% raise is enough to keep people and keep them happy.

That's just not done. HR doctrine has annual raises much smaller than that within a band, and larger raises only with promotion to a new band. Promotions are spaced at a minimum of 2 years. (Of course there's exceptions, but fighting for them is likely harder than switching jobs). So unless you promote them immediately on being trained, they're underpaid.

This is why good CEOs crack down on HR

It's unfortunate that it doesn't. With the vast number of smaller tech companies, one would think a few would hit "defect" and do it, and gain even more long term employees.

My experience has been that those companies are fairly short lived, merging with or being acquired by larger less remunerative organizations.

Medium sized to large companies just don't have the agility to do it. Mostly as @Mantergeistmann notes, it's HR departments "working to the industry best practices", but there's probably also a feeling among management types that if the techies want more they should fight for it they way they (management types) do. The way it does work is imperfect but adequate; if you want more money you jump ship more often (up to a point, usually a minimum of 2 years at a stint). The companies complain, the employees who move don't care, the employees who don't move complain and the employers don't care.

It depends on the situation, but it can happen. Several years ago I got an unsolicited 20% salary increase. Due to a combination of market factors and bad culture, there was a max exodus at my firm. I was in oil and gas at the time, and the head of the title department plus 2 of 3 supervising associates left in the span of like 2 months, along with a number of regular associates. This is only a few months after we landed a major client the partners had spent years courting, and we were just starting to turn in work we did for them. I remember going into a supervisor's office to ask a general question and being told not just that she was leaving but how much I could be making if I followed her out the door, or even if I applied to one of the other firms that gave her an offer. I was about to follow suit myself when I got called into the head of the oil and gas division's office and was given an immediate 20% salary bump plus other little bonuses. A couple weeks later, someone from the Board of Trustees met with those of us who remained and acted as a sounding board for all the changes we wanted. That being said, this only happened because the oil market suddenly rebounded from being in a multi-year slump. The firm had agreed to a lot of long-term contracts that didn't pay a lot so they could stay in business, and always used that as an excuse for the long hours and low pay. I had said in the past that the worst thing to happen to them would be for oil to rebound, since they'd have a ton of work and no one to do it.

That's exactly the way my company works. Presumably our HR departments are comparing notes and "working to industry best practices" and "benchmarking against the median of competitors".

They can’t let individuals renegotiate salaries regularly since it (a) risks discrimination lawsuits and (b) leads to ballooning pay since senior managers at firms are usually charismatic and persuasive enough to make a good case for why they and their entire team should be paid more. Thus the bands system and benchmarking.

I work for a major tech company. Two managers have told me that HR looks at industry wages and pays us according to that. So yes, exactly how you explained it.

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