FB vests quarterly for all employees, regardless of how many shares they are scheduled to receive.
GOOG vests monthly, but if you're going to receive less than 1 share that month, then I guess they might round that down to 0 and effectively vest less frequently.
Counterpoint, I botched a coding session at a FANG interview. They wanted me so they gave me a take home coding problem. I spent 40+ hours over three days banging it out.
Got the job. 57% increase in compensation. 550k/year combined.
Totally worth it.
Only negative is it's months later and my right shoulder still hurts a bit. Getting old sucks.
Ok, but FANG is a different matter: those are established, respectable companies. You shouldn't do the same for small, no-name startups that try to use those take-home assignments to extract free labor from you.
But I don't interview at companies unless I really need to get in. If it were some lousy startup and I'm interviewing there it's because I am hard up and need the job or it's tactically where I need to be next to get where I am going.
Basically if I am spending the time interviewing I am probably willing to do whatever it takes to get the job.
Currently switching jobs for a personal record 57% increase in total compensation.
And I was NOT poorly compensated before. I was already in the 99th percentile for individual income.
The harder I push on comp the more I get each time.
I am not going to lie and say that it didn't take years to build to this point in terms of skill, work record, professional network, and interview ability. It took three FAANG companies bidding against each other.
Meanwhile I get offered nothing in terms of growth from every employer I have ever worked for ever. Literally never happened my entire career. Just this time after I already had an undisclosed offer in hand I got a promotion with no meaningful compensation increase. It was the first promotion of my 15 year career!
Sure they were willing to match, but who wants to try and soak blood from a stone.
> Sure they were willing to match, but who wants to try and soak blood from a stone.
I've never tried it myself, but it's supposed to be common knowledge that perhaps more than half the time a company is forced into granting you a raise to match an offer you have in hand, they're only doing it long enough to arrange replacing you. There are certainly many reported exceptions to this, but why take a chance with a company that's already shown they don't respect you?
I am very wary of making this about respect or the individuals in the company who didn't grant you better compensation. It's toxic for yourself and if other people find out you think that way it can spoil relationships. Never underestimate how the people you work with at your old jobs can end up being stepping stones to bigger and better things later on.
I believe no one in my management chain could have done significantly better. They had their budget and even if they had moved things around in my favor it would have just been a different level of inadequate.
Structurally the entire industry is biased towards preventing you from achieving what I call equilibrium. Equilibrium is where you can't leave your current job for a >10% raise.
I believe it's just a cost saving measure (assuming the ability to pay exists which it may not) and the industry has decided that the average wage suppression is more valuable then the cost of the turn over it creates. I'm not going to pass judgement on whether they are right or wrong.
Ability to pay is a big factor. Most of my prior employers could only offer a fraction of what I currently make.
The bottom line the US is that respect is ultimately measured in dollars. I won't argue there isn't some toxicity to that, but a company that doesn't reward the vastly increased value of its developer employees as they move from entry level to journeymen to experts will suffer greatly from it, often fatally.
If employers can't afford market salaries, they should think very hard about the issue and see if they can't address it in other way, or accept that they're going to deserve and get no loyalty from most of their employees.
It kind of reminds me of the Brain Drain Microsoft experienced in the mid 2000s and saw them fall behind apple and google as the top of the tech food chain.
I agree. No need to make it emotional and confrontational with a “respect” interpretation in my opinion. Of course this is hard but if I can do it I imagine the best approach will be to simply make the best choices for my career while recognizing management has their own bizarre incentives I will never understand.
Off topic - but your username and the vast majority of your commenting history is primarily on salaries. Curious - is there some backstory to it? Feel you got severely underpaid?
To each and his own, but bay area engineers pissing about making ONLY 300K has always come off as being a bunch of spoilt brats - especially considering the vast majority just gem/npm/pip install this and that and glue all the code together. Of course the market deserves to pay accordingly but I think it's just a big bubble that's going to crash soon - since there is a huge mismatch between demand and supply of CRUD glue programmers (which most programmers are).
My guess is that once Lambda School, Make School, ISAs all become mainstream and the pool of CRUD glue programmers matches the demand all salaries will come crashing down. I think overall it's a good thing for society in general (and especially the tech towns).
ps: Pardon my tone. I work in the space industry. Maybe I have an axe to grind ;)
This is an alt specifically for discussing compensation because I know it elicits that reaction and I don't want that associated with my professional identity.
I think discussing compensation frankly and openly is very important. People have no idea what is possible. Two people on the same team at the same company can have wildly different compensation. My goal with this alt is to get people to take the biggest slice of the pie they can for themselves and avoid wasting their precious time doing lousy work for lousy money.
I have wasted a lot of time and life opportunities working for less then what I am capable of getting. I wish my future self had been around to tell me to push harder and be more mindful and efficient with my time.
I don't think CRUD glue programmers are at the top of the market right now. You could flood the market with them and it might not move compensation for people in my space. Even so, that is just another argument for pushing hard right now. Strike while the iron is hot. No one knows how long this will last.
Any advice on learning your true worth? Assume for a minute that Glassdoor is useless, as the "salary range" it displays shows that the maximum is 2-2.5x the minimum.
There is no "true worth" that you can look up on a website. Your salary is your cost in the labor market. And like any market, worth is determined by what people are willing to pay. Go out and interview, get some offer sand see who is willing to compete for you. That's how you get your true worth.
The only thing that matter is what they think you can get elsewhere. eg. what others are willing to pay. Think of it as an auction. Something might be worth $100 but if the highest bid is $10 you are only going to bid $15 not $100.
> To each and his own, but bay area engineers pissing about making ONLY 300K has always come off as being a bunch of spoilt brats
I think your entire attitude is wrong. Not in the sense of "you're being mean"; rather, in the sense of your orientation toward engineer pay. Any money that doesn't go to salary will generally go to the owners of the business. If engineers can get more, why shouldn't they? Imagine someone saying professional sports stars make too much money and should be perfectly happy to make $1 million per year. What you're actually arguing for is that even-richer people (the team owners) should make EVEN MORE money than they already do.
> but bay area engineers pissing about making ONLY 300K has always come off as being a bunch of spoilt brats - especially considering the vast majority just gem/npm/pip install this and that and glue all the code together. Of course the market deserves to pay accordingly but I think it's just a big bubble that's going to crash soon - since there is a huge mismatch between demand and supply of CRUD glue programmers (which most programmers are).
Seriously? Why the hate?
300k is Tier 1 (FAANG) and 2 companies. They don't just do CRUD. Those that do CRUD probably work on the SETI/Infra/Tooling division for the BigCos and even some of these "Tool-Devs" created amazing OSS tools. Do you suggest they should be treated as 2nd class citizens and get paid half of the "product" people and creating an old-time rift?
I've seen a few Bootcampers that get a job in Tier 1 and 2 companies but they have "solid" background/previous experience (hardcore Math, Stats, Data Scientist switching to SWE, greybeard embedded software engineers), just not up to date skill set.
This whole "salaries" will crash down demise has been around forever and it hasn't happened yet just like any other "demise" prediction.
I'd suggest people not to hate the situation: our sector/field is getting paid serious money, why the envy/jealousy/negativity?
Do you like the situation where hi-tech industry as a cutthroat, no-union, rampant ageism, low-paying wage?
“This whole "salaries" will crash down demise has been around forever and it hasn't happened yet just like any other "demise" prediction”
- agreed, lots of people can some problems the naive way but you need to be at a deeper level of understanding and experience to know what will and wont work before you build it
Thank you. I wonder sometimes if that's me and I'm unaware. I currently write REST applications and work on a lot of the stack around that. But it's not as simple as Create Read Delete Update. Well it can be, but it's far more complex in my industry.
The hard part of engineering isn't the ability to glue packages and microservices together. Those tasks are literally done by entry level, bottom of the totem pole engineers. You're saying that all bankers do is run models and spit out valuations, and all a chef does is put stuff in a pan.
I'm not speaking toward your argument of a bubble bursting, but engineering isn't going anywhere. And where else would an entry level engineer start than at the bottom, npm installing the package that solves their problem? It's using these concepts every day that builds good engineers who think of tomorrow's solutions, and can architect it both technically and socially. That is the line between software development and computer science.
Engineers paid under 120k that whine aren't doing anything beyond their immediate usefulness, i.e. 'just doing their jobs.' The engineers that get paid 300k are usually the ones running the show, and writing significantly less / no code.
$300K to live on the west coast is really not that appealing to someone who is living in a major city, with the stereotypical house in the burbs in a good school system with 2.1 kids where on the higher end you can make $150K to $160K as an architect/team lead/principal. Especially if you are married with two incomes where you can easily put the lower income completely toward increasing net worth or cash flowing your kids college expenses.
Engineers getting paid $300K could easily be the stereotypical r/cscareerquestions “learn LeetCode and work for a FAANG” type graduating from college.
I think you are perhaps too focused on the immediate salary, and not thinking long-term.
Yeah, $300k in the Bay Area isn’t that much. But if you work for a Tier 1/2 company for a few years, it can have a drastic impact on your future employment prospects and salary levels. Furthermore, the street cred can open many doors that otherwise would remain closed to you.
I think my reply would have had more context in response to a sibling reply made by another poster:
Consider the scaling factor for salaries; My salary is on the high end in my area, but would be on the low end of a living wage in the Bay Area.
My salary is in the neighborhood of 120k; I'm a senior-level engineer with almost a decade of experience...
So think about the trade offs. If you’re young and single, the tradeoff between a one bedroom in a major city anywhere not on the west coast and the west coast and the difference in the salary you can make is well worth it.
In most major cities a junior developer will make $60K and can probably find an apartment for $900/month in a decent part of town. If they work on the west coast and get $250K and find an apartment for $2400K/month, that’s a tradeoff worth making.
10-15 years into your career, you may already be married with kids. That $120K he’s making can easily buy a 3000 square foot house in the burbs, brand new build, great school system and close to work for $350K. This is from personal experience (not the salary, the price of the house). Now that tradeoff between $150K and $300K-$400K doesn’t look so appealing when you can’t live nearly the same lifestyle on the West Coast that you could live on much less money
If he’s like me, he’s probably built a local network where any door he wants to open locally is probably already open to him.
In my case, I’m 45, but because of $bad_life_decisions, I only started taking my software development career seriously a decade ago. But I do have a great local network, skills that match what the market demands and the house in the burbs with the wife, the white picket fence and 2.1 kids.
I don’t really need new doors opened to me. As soon as the youngest graduates and I’m willing to travel, I am already in the position of being a high earning “consultant”. Not bragging, I have been working over 20 years, I should be able to consult somebody
> Furthermore, the street cred can open many doors that otherwise would remain closed to you.
The assumption here is that technical screenings actually work. As many here have pointed out, technical interviews today are highly capricious and pretty have no correlation with actual technical qualifications. "Street cred" and even superb interview performance don't seem to matter anymore.
I’ve found that people who work for large companies are often not a fit for smaller companies. They may be good developers, but most of the time they come in with prebuilt infrastructure, processes, separate departments to handle the infrastructure parts etc.
Most small companies I’ve worked for, I’ve had to go back and forth between every layer of the stack - currently including the infrastructure set up. You just don’t get your hands dirty with multiple parts of the stack at a large company.
Anyone who is making $135K+ in any city that is not on the west coast or NYC, is probably 10 years into their career and may already have a family. In that case, they probably don’t want to make the sacrifices needed to go from making enough to live an upper middle class lifestyle - ie the nice house in the burbs to downgrading to a small apartment.
In my case, I’m 45, why would I move to the west coast for $300K when I can just stay in $major_city and work for a consulting when my younger son graduates and can make $180K-200K+ and still have the same lifestyle?
And then go back to being just a developer anytime I wanted to and still live comfortably?
But you're assuming with 10-15 years of experience you're stuck at 250-300k.
People who advanced in their career at Bay Area can make 500k or more (IC, not management), solving challenges that did not exist in the first place too (that alone might potentially put you in top 1-5%?). There are more startup opportunities (whether IPO or just the technical challenges, that's up to you) with higher chances of success.
I’m not denying that different people have different goals. But if you already are living a life free from worry, can work part of the year, doing what you enjoy, paid off house, what’s really the difference between 2 million and 15 million? (not saying I am there yet).
It’s not like I go to work everyday hating software development and hating what I have been doing since I was 12 years old. My wife works for the government and we have guaranteed access to health care whether she works or quits tomorrow.
I can have technical challenges and jump from opportunity to opportunity in two years once my youngest graduates.
Outside of the west coast/HN bubble, people retire comfortably all the time with a million in the bank, I paid off house, and social security.
Married couple wanting more children? yes, it matters.
Parents who want their kids to enjoy life? yes, it matters.
Parents who need to take care both in-laws and kids? absolutely, it matters a lot.
2 mills can get you a Duplex (closer to center) /House (further away) in the suburb of Vancouver/Toronto (Canada) with probably 100-200k left. Certainly not enough for retirement. In Seattle (USA), I suppose it depends on the area of your chosen.
How long do you have to work to reach the point of no-mortgage (nice house), kids done college paid by parents, and $2 mills for retirement?
But this is just what might be one dimension of the discussion: financial => lifestyle.
> I can have technical challenges and jump from opportunity to opportunity in two years once my youngest graduates.
We both live in different cities. I don't know your city as well as you do but where I live, there's definitely a ceiling to that technical challenges. Now before we go further with examples... I live in a city that certainly have huge hi-tech ecosystems and quite well known internationally.
I don't see Facebook/Google/Uber/Netflix/AirBnB anywhere nearby. My coworker would love to do impactful ML work. There's zero companies in my city that does ML meaningfully (more than just gluing OSS solutions or calling 3rd-party APIs). I personally would love to work on tackling scaling challenges. These opportunities just don't exist here.
The companies here are quite good compare to major cities out there, but certainly there's a virtual ceiling/limit due to a mix of VC, culture, talent, etc.
Just to wrap things up and to put things into perspective, I'm not a workaholic or ambitious person. I see those challenges as opportunity to invest my skill to stay relevant for years to come so I can take my foot off the pedal a bit. Otherwise, I'd be just an Engineer like everybody else in this city...
2 mills can get you a Duplex (closer to center) /House (further away) in the suburb of Vancouver/Toronto (Canada) with probably 100-200k left. Certainly not enough for retirement. In Seattle (USA), I suppose it depends on the area of your chosen.
That was kind of the point of my replies. I live in metro Atlanta. Not exactly small town America. We just bought a house in the burbs two years ago - 5 bedrooms, 3-1/2 bath almost 3000 square feet, brand new build for less than $350K.
Parents who want their kids to enjoy life? yes, it matters.
And somehow kids manage to “enjoy life” where the average household income in the US is $60K a year.
How long do you have to work to reach the point of no-mortgage (nice house), kids done college paid by parents, and $2 mills for retirement?
Let’s talk about a stereotypical couple. Someone brought up that they were making $120K in a low cost city and they were in their early 30s. Let’s also say the spouse was grossing $50K (about average for a college educated person in the US).
According to paycheckcity.com. The lower earning spouse would bring home $3400 a month. The higher earning spouse would bring home a little over $6000 after maxing our his 401K (pretax) at $19K a year for retirement. Many couples I know in that situation live completely off the higher earners income. That’s what I would have done if I got married at the average age of around 30.
If they were just hitting their stride at 30 with no kids. That $350K-$400K 5 bedroom house could be paid off in around 10-12 years.
If the developer just put $2083 a month (that includes the $1583/month in his 401K) in an S&P Index fund that historically earned 11% a year, they would have 2.1 million in today’s dollars adjusted for inflation (2.9%) by the time he was 52.
Getting the kids through college? Let’s add some variables. The wife could take a year or two off when they had kids and the house would still be paid off by the time they graduated from college and they could put her income toward cash flowing the kids through college. I also didn’t take into account that hopefully they will get more than inflation adjusted wages.
We both live in different cities. I don't know your city as well as you do but where I live, there's definitely a ceiling to that technical challenges. Now before we go further with examples... I live in a city that certainly have huge hi-tech ecosystems and quite well known internationally.
While the numbers for income I quoted above were theoretical, the fact that I have plenty of opportunities to work for a consulting company after my youngest graduates in two years and I’m willing to travel isn’t. I live in the same city as the world’s busiest airport. Getting a direct flight to almost anywhere isn’t a problem. Even Amazon is hiring AWS consultants who live in most major cities.
I personally would love to work on tackling scaling challenges. These opportunities just don't exist here
Even if the challenges don’t exist where I live, one or two of my friends/former coworkers work remotely. As I said above, I’m willing to travel.
But I know people, like my former manager who is in his late 50s, that wanted and did just the opposite, he changed jobs, self demoted to a developer and is doing your basic Microsoft/Azure full stack development. Once you have “enough”, you can get off the hedonic treadmill and make different life choices, you can take a pay cut to have a less stressful life, a better work life balance, etc.
I didn’t make nearly the same “good life choices” as the idealized couple I wrote about above but even I can say no to consulting companies that would pay me more than I am making now because I just really don’t want the headache at this point in life.
One final point. My parents are in their 70s, they retired in their mid 50s in the small town south with less than a million in the bank. My mom was a teacher (with a pension) and my dad was a factory worker (no pension). They aren’t struggling. They had 5 years left on their 30 year mortgage when they retired - they were paying $600/month for their mortgage.
Why is that the only definition of complex? Most complexities in business comes from process complexities or even business complexities. I once worked with a software as a service company that provided software for the car repair industry. We had to translate these rules for both the repair shop and the car owner.
Did we have millions of users? No. The rules were complicated, and most processing happened once a month. There is a central exchange that both sides go through.
I’ve had three jobs in healthcare. While the scale of users weren’t anything crazy. The business requirements were complex.
Because that definition of complex opens tons of doors to companies that are leading tech industry?
My background has always been in Enterprise software (healthcare, insurance, BI, etc, almost a decade). At some point I felt that translating complex biz reqs are no longer interesting.
I find dealing with scalability (and hopefully build my own system library) is more interesting and challenging that the Enterprise market.
Consistent Hashing algorithms, Distributed Systems, System programming, build your own programming languages, maybe build my own messaging/background processing?
Consider the scaling factor for salaries; My salary is on the high end in my area, but would be on the low end of a living wage in the Bay Area.
My salary is in the neighborhood of 120k; I'm a senior-level engineer with almost a decade of experience, involved in some of the high-level planning tasks you describe.
I feel for people working in video games and in the space industry. Often they enter those industries because of passion, although I think in aerospace it's more common to stay for longer because you end up working with technologies that just don't apply well to most other industries (lots of DSLs that most businesses don't care about).
As for CRUD glue...hard call about long term labor market. There's a lot of slip-shod working being done to hold up other slip-shod work. I think there's a good analogy in "unregulated construction." You can hire anybody off the street to build you a shed. If you have money to throw at it, though, you still might be willing to pay 15x to hire a well-vetted professional who will make something both beautiful and lasting.
I would seriously have to think about giving up my lifestyle where I don’t make nearly $300K to move to the west coast and work for a FAANG. I like my short commute, good school systems, and my big affordable house in the burbs that would cost at least four times as much if we moved.
No. If you give your current salary during a negotiation, the other end is going to come right back with that salary +5% (at best).
Hidden information is your friend in any negotiation, but especially here, since the hiring folks also know how variable industry salary ranges are. You want to put the first move in their court - decline to give your current salary at all costs, and ideally also avoid offering up your preferred compensation number until they've made a first offer.
The only point where quoting your current salary makes sense is if the company offers less than you are currently making, and you are in such a bad situation at your current where you'd be willing to absorb the pain of changing jobs for no additional money.
This advice functionally doesn’t work. They’ll just intentionally lowball the first offer and then say well they can’t read your mind so you need to tell them what you want.
A better strategy is to really research competitive wages and anchor high by honestly saying what you want. If they can’t come close, then walk away. If they ask you to compromise, tell them you’re not going to negotiate against yourself by stating any specific compromises, that you arrived at what you stated by considering what you’re worth, and that you’re happy to consider any kind of offer they would like to make, but that to accept an offer you have to believe it is competitive for the value you can add.
Any arguments about salaries at different cohorts of companies, or salary bands based on years of experience, just outright ignore and tell them if it’s a dealbreaker, you understand but aren’t going to compromise just because of their pay bands or random assertions about market analysis.
First of all, they cannot force you to give them your current salary. My standard answer to such question is a slightly more polite version of "it's none of your bussiness". And if they don't want to provide a salary range, and ask you to come up with the number, then just give them your current salary +50% and see how they react. Of course you might then need to step down a little, and accept your current salary + 20-30% instead, but that's still pretty good.
They won’t try to force you. They’ll just lowball the first offer, and if you say “that’s not close to what I’m seeking” then they’ll say, “well we can’t read your mind, so it’s unreasonable for you to expect us to just repeatedly guess until we hit the number you want, so you need to outline your expectations.”
If you still decline to discuss a range of expectations at that point, they will usually just drop interest in you and decline to interview you further, assuming that you might just be fishing for a high offer to use to negotiate somewhere else, or that you want way more than they could possibly offer, etc.
Thing is in many cases their low ball offer might still be more than you thought you could get. It gives a lower line, on their terms. From there you can negotiate upwards. After all it is their first offer.
They won't lowball a good candidate. People know that lowballing is a good way to lose a good candidate, that's why most companies will try to get you to state a number first rather than give out a too-high or too-low number.
If you want to know what I have in spending money, I expect the other party to show me what they have as well. It's not a fair negotiation if you play with lopsided rules.
This is the "common knowledge" thing to do, but I don't think it's always applicable. If you have an advantage in the market (e.g. are sought after), you can simply present a high figure and either they accept or you move on to the next. By playing the let-them-go-first game, you're implicitly signalling that you don't know where the ceiling is. On the other hand, if you say a high figure with confidence, they may accept it even if they weren't really prepared for that to begin with. Information asymmetry can also go the other way.
My finding has been the same. I got a match once. I would have been better off leaving to some place more promising. Early on in your career your current employer is almost invariably a dead end.
Advancement happens, but it's the exception not the rule. Strong organizational growth is a driver of the exceptions.
Even if it’s true it’s not a good argument. You deserve to be paid market rate and if other people in the department are willing to settle for less, that’s their problem.
Just tell your manager you need a moment and want to go see how much your coworkers make. Then go to your co-workers tell them how much you make and that you want a raise and ask them how much they make.
I generally tell people at jobs how much I got hired for within 2 days of joining a company.... there are no down sides.
There are plenty of downsides if your pay is higher than someone with seniority because they aren't gonna like the “new guy” being paid more. Then that will cause animosity between them and their boss for bringing in outside talent instead of feeding the mouths he already has. Then your boss will be annoyed with you for already creating a headache in your first week
And yet every manager I have ever had asks me not to discuss salary with other co-workers to prevent them from getting jealous. Usually in the same discussion where they tell me I am the highest paid one.
This is usually a few weeks before I have an offer for 40% more.
I think they lie because they know they are going to lose me anyways so it's a gambit with a low probability of success, but no additional penalty for failure.
PostgreSQL still supports 32-bit platforms, heap and index files can get large enough that it's not feasible to mmap them into a 32-bit process. As far as the specific number of 64k though, I don't know why they choose that, writing 8 pages to disk at a time (especially sequentially) doesn't really take advantage of modern hardware well.
This is consistent with my experience. Was making 175k in a lower cost of living area. Google wanted to pay 190k and require relocation to Mountain View. Had an offer in hand from another company for 240k. Google refused to negotiate.
What a waste of my time. Never again.
The two people I know who came to Google as juniors are forever typecast as such and are also not being paid well.
Not Google continued to treat me better after as well. If it's bad going in it's going to stay bad.
At Google the recruiter put me in the SRE/SWE track which I was skeptical of and communicated to them. I also communicated about the compensation issues in advance saying if I got a bad offer it wasn't going to happen. Still wasted my time.
It's high for the industry if you consider the entire US or the world. The solution there is pick the right employer. The right ones are not that much harder to get into than the wrong ones especially if you play the interview game. You also need to not get caught location based comp schemes.
It's not high for a big corporation that is doing well. They just want you to think it's high so they don't have to pay and the small fry want you to think it's high because they can't afford it. These are all just line items in a budget.
So I read your comment history and it looks like you changed jobs quite a bit to get to the higher salary. Do you also focus on a particular niche or are you just a general senior engineer?
I am not doing this as a generalist. I picked a specialization and within that specialization I picked a specific ecosystem and then ground out some seniority in that ecosystem.
Once I had that I could pick from anyone who is invested in the ecosystem.
I don't believe that has actually heavily impacted what I am paid in the sense of the credentialing being worth more to individual companies it has just made it easier to get through hiring filters and interview loops. That has made it possible to focus on companies that pay well.
There is market rate and then there is market rate. Have you ever met a manager who didn't claim to pay market rate and pull out the old "salary data" yarn.
Managers seem to think that just because they say something their employees believe it when the reality is the employee doesn't care and will just replace the faulty manager.
I've always wondered how employers measure "market rate". If there were a reliable public source of market rate, negotiations would be much simpler, and they aren't. And presumably the managers themselves aren't actively interviewing at other companies to see what they'd get offered.
So I think the only good source of market rate is people (either candidates or current employees asking for counteroffers), and if you're poor at being competitive for recruits on all axes other than money, or at making it safe for employees to interview and tell you about their offers, you have poor information.
We buy market data from two sources every year. They get their data by collecting it from the companies that buy their data. Obviously that's not perfect, but it's more objective than most other methods.
That hardest part is figuring out which generic categories match our specific positions, since every company in the survey has different definitions and requirements.
Our employees seem pretty happy with the results, and we've had very few offers rejected for salary range reasons. So it seems like we're pretty close. If anything, we're probably a bit above our local market.
Do you use The Employers' Association by any chance?
I used to work for a company that used their data. The reports they provided did not have any technical positions included. There was no transparency on their process.
Comparing those numbers to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the salaries for anyone doing technical work were below market rate. https://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm
BLS data is transparently provided and very specific.
I worked at a place which got the salary data, and then announce that everyone was underpaid and that salaries would be adjusted 'soon'. When is 'soon'? Why, it's inaudible mumbling.
Another important aspect of compensation. When you negotiate compensation with new hire make sure to negotiate the salary you can retain them at not the lowest salary you can get them to leave for.
At my current job I accepted knowing I was going to be leaving at 2 years on the dot. I told the manager hiring me this verbatim. For the first time when I leave a job I will be able to simply say "Well this is what you agreed to when I joined."
Perfect example of cutting of your nose to spite your face IMO.
It's just the money. For a 30% raise there isn't a job I would stay at. It's fine by me for a company to be just one more 2 year step on the ladder.
A bit of experience, a bit of pedigree, a bit of pay bump, and a good job while it lasts.
I'm not going to stop switching until people stop offering me 30% raises. Once equilibrium is reached I'll start evaluating them on merits, but the jobs that pay better have also been better in all dimensions. At least that was how it has gone during my career progression.
