At my workplace we were hyped up for a special announcement during a company meeting. this is after, literally, years of layoffs, offshoring, cut after cut to benefits, and restructurings. Morale is incredibly low.
The big announcement is they are giving everyone one extra day off around a national holiday as a reward. We already have "unlimited" PTO but of course can't really use it. So their reward is letting us use a benefit we already supposedly had.
I don't understand. What is 'unlimited' PTO? And if it's so unlimited, why can't you use any of it? I've only had jobs with very specifically defined PTO that had no ambiguity in whether I could ever use it.
"Unlimited PTO" is a fiction created by accountants that sounds good on paper. When you need or want time off, you work it out with your manager. No debate about how many days you have left this year, or how many you have accumulated. It's undefined and technically you are supposed to work together and away you go.
Accountants like it because guaranteed time-off is a liability that appears on the company's books as a debt, especially in California where the company is required to pay it out when you leave (whether fired or voluntary).
But what happens in practice is no one feels like they are entitled to the time they should be entitled to, and negotiations from the employee side always come from a place of weakness. It's a terrible system.
Undoubtedly someone will respond to this post with just how amazing their manager is and that they have never had a problem. But you know when I have never had a problem taking time off, even a long time off? When I could point to the corporate policy that says I have X days, and I was taking those days.
And now I'm not playing manager roulette on whether or not I have the time, or how kind they are feeling. Or how buddy-buddy we are.
It's one of those things that are great in theory, and terrible in real life.
Most companies use the term "discretionary PTO". That means that there is no set limit on PTO. The positive take on it is that this means employees can take time off within reason so long as they're getting their work done. The negative take is that it means you have no guaranteed days you can take, and cultural or managerial pressure will prevent you from taking even a normal amount of vacation.
It also means that employees don't accrue PTO days, and therefore don't have to be paid out for that time when they're fired.
Its a way for US companies to avoid paying money. When employees get real PTO, companies have some legal and tax obligations. With fake "unlimited" PTO, they just pretend the person is working as usual.
Because of these shitty corporate companies that don't give a shit about their employees, the well is now poisoned for companies that do care especially smaller ones. Employees don't want to give their best anymore because they are burnt elsewhere and they become unemployable at smaller companies. It is a sad state of affairs.
I've found it's always best to calibrate around expecting something like the ice cream sandwich episode of The Office. Never feel too much of a letdown this way.
Stalling out on promotion has always happened. It can be explained almost entirely by two factors:
As you become more senior, the success metrics for your role change significantly. Mentoring only goes so far because there is a large element of self-awareness and a willingness to change. Some people never recognize this and many never successfully adapt to what seniority entails. It is the career equivalent of trying to raise a Series B with a Series Seed pitch deck.
There are a much smaller number of senior roles than people who can be promoted into them. Above a certain level promotions are highly competitive. You are being stack-ranked against everyone else that can do the same job and tenure is only an input into that calculus to the extent it gives you unique domain expertise. A successful strategy for avoiding hyper-competitive promotions is to create a new promotion-like role that doesn't really exist. However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit, and these opportunities only exist at specific moments in time.
Raises, on the other hand, are largely impacted by complex financial and economic considerations. Many companies could do much better at this but even then I think employees significantly underestimate the network of opportunity costs that must be considered.
Another thing I tell people is if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. Many people do a job well and make themselves too critical in a certain position thinking it will make their job more secure. First, the way layoffs typically work, they are likely not more secure. And second, it makes promotions much harder.
> Some people never recognize this and many never successfully adapt to what seniority entails.
> > However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit
Even if some aspects of that might be true on the individual level, this take is the classic "blame the individual, but don't question the system."
Nothing about the concentration of capital by mega-corporations (enabled by tax policies they pushed). Nothing about the unfolding multigenerational disruptions by AI on the white collar job market. Just the old well laundered "bootstraps" argument.
In a hierarchical organization, there's a lot less room at the top: There's only one CEO, only a handful of executive positions, ect. Not everyone needs to be a leader to be successful.
Another aspect of being promoted: many of us see what the next level has to do/is doing and isn’t interested in doing that. I’ve seen people get promoted and then immediately implode because N+1 started involving lots of politics that they couldn’t or didn’t want to handle. Even senior IC roles get more and more exposed to non-technical and organizational issues.
During the interviews for my last three jobs, I explicitly said that my career goal was to never become a manager. I guess I started saying that when I had about 20 years of experience.
There's no reward for loyalty any more, and it's caused everyone to job hop (at least while that was possible), including me. At the time, employees complained about it, and in the same breath refused to give out any promotions and/or reward employees. Or they'd reward them with some shitty voucher.
The world has literally become the people vs corporations. There is no soul in working any more.
My theory is: when it started being a bad thing to have any cash reserve.
With some reserve on the side, a company can survive bad times and not fire people. This is the kind of behavior employee will appreciate and make some diehard loyal.
But this available money is money not making more. So that's a bad thing these days and so the only easy variable available to survive is to remove excess workforce. It took some time for people to understand loyalty has been one-way only but now employers are reaping what they've sown.
There was famously an inflection point 40-50 years ago where wages decoupled from productivity to the downside. I'm sure it wasn't perfect before then, but things did change.
The last time we hit this low point was in the Gilded Age, when the economic producers essentially revolted and forced governments to regulate against capitalistic greed. As you correctly identify, in the early 80s U.S. leadership figured out that if you issue debt more freely then you can get the economic growth of ‘household spend goes up’, ‘production and GDP goes up’, and ‘foreign currencies weaken versus the dollar’ without having to force* corporations to pay out profits as wage increases against their will. One bonus outcome is that you end up with lifelong debtors who are forced to accept work circumstances that they wouldn’t have to accept if they still had wage negotiating power. Too bad about the demonization of unions in tech, eh?
* A tax on (gross revenue – wages – cogs) with rate (cpi + fedrate) ^ 0.9 would be an excellent start, with an exponential factor that halts ‘shift the tax to consumers through simple price increases’ — the more you earn, the more you have to raise prices, which raises inflation, which raises your future tax by more than your price increase; the more revenue you pay out as wages instead of shareholder dividends, the lower you can set prices, which lowers inflation, which lowers your future tax — and adding the FFER lever allows the Fed to perform their mission to control (price) inflation not only with banks but also with businesses. For example, (8% inflation + 4% fedrate) ^ .9 is ~14.8%, which is a completely acceptable surcharge for businesses having raised prices so high that it caused an 8% inflation year!
Obviously wages and productivity had to decouple. Wages measure human labor, while productivity measures all output, including that which comes from automation. ~50 years ago is when automation started to become more than a curiosity in industry.
Human productivity to wages have kept pace with each other, though, so there is nothing to suggest anything has changed for the human. It is not like the robots are seeking promotions (yet).
The PLC, Programmable Logic Controller, was 1968. After which it started to become possible to have automated assembly lines with a few humans monitoring specialized robots.
If this is what i think it is, then yes. Life for humans has rarely been fair but that inflection point is startling. It tracks the wealth gap growing too irrc.
30 years ago and prior for a generation or two. Employees had pensions instead of 401ks where tenure built up a guaranteed fixed income payment at retirement. Now we're all tied to the stock market.
Oh, and back then a single income could support a working-class family to buy a decent house, two cars and maybe send a kid or two to college.
401k became a thing in part because of deep structural problems with employee pensions. Pensions don't "guarantee" anything in practice and many people lost them or had steep cuts. It is a promise, not a law of physics. 401k/IRA wasn't created for no reason. Pensions are exposed to much more idiosyncratic risk than a 401k and companies are poorly positioned to manage those risks.
Some people might not want to take responsibility for retirement savings in the same way they might not want to take responsibility for providing themselves housing but the alternative is strictly worse.
The only pensions that kind of work is government pensions because they can paper over the structural deficiencies with taxation. But even that has significant limitations as we've seen.
A 401k isn't required to be invested in the stock market. It is advisable but not required.
Those pensions could also be tied to the market, or more often the profitability of the company that ran it. There are many, many cases of underfunded pensions by bankrupt companies causing issues. All being equal, I'll take the job hopping and my own retirement account.
I agree it's more expensive than ever to afford to raise a family, though. There's also a malaise in the air that I don't think broader society has felt since the late 1970s, too.
I'm having a hard time finding data on employee tenure that would support this. There seems to be a recent dip but it's only significant relatively, not in absolute numbers based on what I expected. Which was something like 25 years tenure not that long ago but that wasn't the case, more like 5.
The thing that changed was perception. People no longer believe loyalty to employer is worthwhile, just as they no longer believe hard work is what gets people rich.
They no longer believe it is worthwhile, because the landscape changed: companies found they no longer needed to treat their employees was well as they had. (Driven largely by the shift around that time toward quarterly results over long term sustainability, as I understand it.) And thus began a race to the bottom.
Another "America vs Europe" (well, UK): I have my notice periods written in my contracts, whether that's one month or three months, and it is always bi-directional.
this could be because the business have all the power in the relationship, especially in bad job markets like today. When they hold all the cards they can make us dance for them and they never dance for us
The fact that 1 in 4 white collar workers are not getting raises or promotions might not be a bad thing. As white collar workers get older they frequently stop optimizing for money and start optimizing for time, flexibility and other things and be totally OK with no promotions as the trade-off.
I personally find the US setup where often the longest serving and oldest workers would be earning the most, strange. Even when those oldest folks are clearly past their prime and themselves admit so.
There are always exceptions. I worked with a fantastic colleague who was a highly knowledgeable technical expert and a capable PM, always punching above his weight at work. One day in a chance conversation with him I was shocked to hear that he wants to retire soon because, now that he is on the wrong side of 90, he is not that interested anymore. My jaw dropped -- I never paid attention to his age. But I suspect many folks in the last quarter of their productive life will be happy to slow down. My 2c.
> I personally find the US setup where often the longest serving and oldest workers would be earning the most, strange.
Isn't the US significantly more meritocratic in this regard than other large economies? I.e. compared to Europe or Asia it would seem that Europe has much more rigid comp rules, Japan has formal mechanisms to ensure that older people are paid more. And this is a tech forum obviously where i.e. the right ML engineers are making 7 figures + right now in their late 20s.
The reason there are no raises and no promotions is because of this "just be thankful you have a job and income at all" mentality that exists in the current environment
It’s wild how different things are at different levels over time. When I started about 8 years ago, any technical skills and experience on your resume / LinkedIn would have recruiters reaching out non-stop. That died out over the last 3 years and I didn’t have anyone reaching out for jobs. Recently I updated my profile to state I’m a staff engineer and suddenly I’m getting messages like nothing ever happened. Senior engineer? Maybe one recruiter every 3 months.
This works because so many benefits are tied to work requirements. It's a systemic issue. Our employers enjoy the backing of our policy makers. If your health insurance (let alone you + your kids') becomes too expensive, it means taking time off to do things like train for a better job, risk starting a new job, etc., are untenable.
If I can just hold at this role for 6 more years, I'm happy. I chased promotions for a decade and regretted all but the first two, which brought me to this level.
There's a larger issue with that though: At some point, successful engineers _need_ to become examples or leaders if we are to continue exponential growth. If you are happy discontinuing exponential growth, then that's fine.
Years of experience don’t correlate to output in all careers. Surgeons and engineers get better over time. This might not be true for all jobs. Meanwhile, management is naturally capped because every manager necessarily needs people to manage under them, so there’ll be 1/N^y managers at the yth level of the org. Unless loyalty ought to be reward for its own sake, it’s not clear why 100% of workers should get promoted indefinitely.
It's not that promotions should be given out indefinitely but I think a pay raise in line with inflation should be the minimum, unless you are under performing. It's funny when a company excitedly shares a pay raise with you are it's below inflation...
I always look at inflation when I get a raise. Or if they are skipping raises because of the economy - I compare to inflation. I accept that as a staff level engineer I've reached about the top of what I can make - but I still expect my income to match inflation, and I have left when it doesn't.
Merit raises are typically based on market rates as a baseline. The employees' costs in terms of consumer price inflation are not a factor. If every employer gives out raises in line with inflation that also creates a positive feedback loop which contributes to higher and higher inflation every year (I do understand that's not the only thing which drives inflation rates).
If your wages are falling behind then look for opportunities in higher growth sectors.
As an employee I don’t care about the reasons that inflation exists, I care about getting the same real money over time (only counting inflation raises, not counting merit or other kinds). And citation needed about inflation raises driving inflation, there are much bigger factors that contribute to it.
There is a dual ladder setup. Where you can have Administrator, Systems Engineer, Sr. Systems Engineer, Lead, Architect, Sr Architect, etc. These will have parallel tracks to equiv. management positions for benefits and perks (bonus levels, etc).
Now obviously you can't have every employee promoted to a Sr. Architect or Fellow, but that is ok be cause not everyone can (or want to) obtain that necessary skill set. A while back I recall seeing a grid with various levels, what management title that would typically mirror, and the skills that would be required for each level.
There is a handover premium that you pay when you churn which often exceeds whatever savings you think you might find. Inertia and institutional knowledge are two of the biggest drags, not to mention morale, hidden costs recruiting fees, ramp time, and customer relationships.
It's fake bottom-line thinking that optimizes a few items while ignoring second and third-order effects.
I was at my previous company for almost 10 years, I had annual promotions and I roughly 4x'd my annual income in this period, which averages to about 15% of year-on-year pay increases. Part inflation, part growth in skills.
Virtually all of that happened in the first 8 years. In the last 2 years I also stalled and saw minor inflation corrections of 2% a year, so I quit.
In my experience it had everything to do with me. In the first 8 I was very hungry, and always willing to take on something more or different. In the last 2 I was very much set on just coasting and doing what I was already doing, and it translated in them paying what they had always paid me, plus a little for inflation correction.
I think the truth is usually that if others don't stall and you do, that the solution probably sits with you as well. That having been said, I think now with AI the value-add of an employee sees so much pressure, that I think stalling will be a major trend.
"Work hard and it will be recognized" is terrible, horrible, no good, very bad advice. "Tit for tat" is the most generous to the company anyone should ever be: try working hard, if it's recognized then continue, if it isn't see if you can politic until it is, and in the very likely circumstance that it continues to not be recognized either jump for a pay bump or work like you're paid.
I didn't say work hard. But if you keep contributing what you already contributed previously and nothing changes, your salary likely also doesn't change. Changing that doesn't necessarily require working hard, I haven't made any such claim. In fact my salary inversely correlated with my effort. But I do recognize that when I stopped changing things (i.e. my role in the company became stagnant), my salary also remained stagnant.
Your reasoning implies that specific people within an org are not getting raises, but in practice it is entire orgs going without raises or promotions, regardless of what any individual is doing.
If you had annual promotions for 10 years and you 4x your salary, you pretty much got what I got job hopping twice in 4 years, and it had nothing to do with hard work or my skills. Good market conditions, luck and leaving when you’re getting short changed is what got me that.
It's systemic when you consider policymakers penalize you for not working. So many benefits are tied to work. The fed also adjust rates to make sure unemployment doesn't get so low to ensure employers always have max leverage. The biggie here is health insurance. Especially if you have kids, it's a huge risk to take time off to train for a better job or to risk taking a new job. Even having different insurance from a different employer means you may have to start over with different doctors.
Kind of a silly article. If you're working in education administration or local government then why would you even expect career progression? These are not growth industries.
Those have always offered career progression, though. Whether the industry is growing is a different variable to whether someone is growing in competence.
Some environments require progression as a sort of anti-stasis measure. Famously including army officers, not exactly a growth industry either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out
Isn't it a natural pattern in empire? Everything grows, there's a huge administration class employed who manage to live in relative luxury from the profits, then as relative power and influence recedes, those jobs are the first to get cut.
It's an international market and everybody's using the same skills and tools. It's insane to think that 6 digit salaries would forever be sustainable when the rest of the world is doing the same stuff.
Developing tech to knock down barriers also paves over moats. I think the west is going to be in for some very trying times in the coming decades. The UK is a fascinating place to look at in this regard.
Well it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the capital class, the "responsible" owners of the economy. Everyone knows that credit goes to capital and blame goes to workers!
The youngest baby boomers are in their early 60s. I doubt it will make a difference in tech, but traditional industries, or what is left of them, should see a lot of senior roles open up as baby boomers begin to retire. Then, as they begin to pass away, a lot of their accumulated wealth will pass to their heirs as well.
The baby boomers have been a serious "clog" in the system at a lot of levels. It will be interesting to see how things play out once they're no longer actively involved.
I'm pushing 50 now and I hit the wall almost 10 years ago. No real raises, new opportunities pay less. Inflation has been ratcheting down on me constantly, and my family has to make continual changes to stay in the black.
To be fair to the parent, jobs require capital, and big tech owns a big chunk of the capital, and thus do own a big chunk of the job market even if they aren't putting it to work. Which is part of the underlying problem. Those with capital don't really need workers and the areas of the economy who could put workers to work in a bigger way don't have the capital to do so.
It may be better for workers to stick to six month contracts at a good hourly rate. Note that there must necessarily exist a clause in the contract that requires an early termination of the contract by the employer to leading to 50% of the wages for the remainder of the contract being paid immediately to the worker. A worker may terminate the contract early only for a documented medical reason. All of this together is meant to everyone honest, transparent, and non-exploitative.
This has been the case for most of Gen X's career: there was very little mentoring, very little succession planning and career shaping. Instead Boomers (who came into an economy where these things, along with pensions, etc. still existed) took over early and have stayed in leadership roles longer than previous generations. A look at congress provides a template.
I've been in the industry for 30 years. "UNIONIZE" has always been the suggested answer. Always. But nobody ever steps up and actually does it, even despite the people being already socially united through platforms like HN, making formalization about as easy as can be possible.
The only times Ive gotten promotions was to get hired elsewhere. Better title, more money.
Its well known that retention budgets are laughable or nonexistant, and new hire budgets are well stocked. That means that if you want to grow from what youre doing, you gotta leave.
Every few years companies give a large raise to everyone when they notice they can't hire people and the ones they have are leaving. So if you don't manage to find a new job it isn't hopeless, so long as enough people are leaving.
Of course if you don't leave they may lay you off at any time. However assuming that doesn't happen they will eventually give you a large raise.
"Just hold out until they are desperate enough that they HAVE to give you a large raise!" is laughable.
Every single day you don't quit and get paid what you are worth, is a day you are leaving money on the table. Imagine waiting years for that big raise when you could have left and made tens to hundreds of thousands more in that time.
I did not say don't look for a new job though. I said that if you can't find one. Sometimes you can't find a better job - better is more than just pay, there are other factors that may apply to you personally (ethics of the job, working hours, where they need you to work, how much travel...)
Holding out isn't ideal, but it might be the best for you.
Interestingly, I've heard that job hopping no longer pays better than staying in place. I can't say if this is true (and no matter what's true, I'm sure that people have anecdotal exceptions!) but it would be quite discouraging if so.
There are too many "it depends" to make any statement. The economy isn't running hot now, and that means those who are forced to job hop (laid off) provide enough potential hires that companies don't need to try to pay someone more to leave.
The real question is will this change? Will companies start valuing long term employees thus making it not worthwhile to leave? Only time will tell (I wouldn't bet on it though).
Anecdotally it's true imho. accrual of benefits, sbc and wage-indexing, ... job hopping puts you at the ground floor of each, and salary jumps have narrowed.
At my workplace we were hyped up for a special announcement during a company meeting. this is after, literally, years of layoffs, offshoring, cut after cut to benefits, and restructurings. Morale is incredibly low.
The big announcement is they are giving everyone one extra day off around a national holiday as a reward. We already have "unlimited" PTO but of course can't really use it. So their reward is letting us use a benefit we already supposedly had.
I don't understand. What is 'unlimited' PTO? And if it's so unlimited, why can't you use any of it? I've only had jobs with very specifically defined PTO that had no ambiguity in whether I could ever use it.
"Unlimited PTO" is a fiction created by accountants that sounds good on paper. When you need or want time off, you work it out with your manager. No debate about how many days you have left this year, or how many you have accumulated. It's undefined and technically you are supposed to work together and away you go.
Accountants like it because guaranteed time-off is a liability that appears on the company's books as a debt, especially in California where the company is required to pay it out when you leave (whether fired or voluntary).
But what happens in practice is no one feels like they are entitled to the time they should be entitled to, and negotiations from the employee side always come from a place of weakness. It's a terrible system.
Undoubtedly someone will respond to this post with just how amazing their manager is and that they have never had a problem. But you know when I have never had a problem taking time off, even a long time off? When I could point to the corporate policy that says I have X days, and I was taking those days.
And now I'm not playing manager roulette on whether or not I have the time, or how kind they are feeling. Or how buddy-buddy we are.
It's one of those things that are great in theory, and terrible in real life.
Most companies use the term "discretionary PTO". That means that there is no set limit on PTO. The positive take on it is that this means employees can take time off within reason so long as they're getting their work done. The negative take is that it means you have no guaranteed days you can take, and cultural or managerial pressure will prevent you from taking even a normal amount of vacation.
It also means that employees don't accrue PTO days, and therefore don't have to be paid out for that time when they're fired.
Its a trick used to avoid financial liability.
https://www.businessinsider.com/unlimited-pto-vacation-scam-...
Its a way for US companies to avoid paying money. When employees get real PTO, companies have some legal and tax obligations. With fake "unlimited" PTO, they just pretend the person is working as usual.
Because of these shitty corporate companies that don't give a shit about their employees, the well is now poisoned for companies that do care especially smaller ones. Employees don't want to give their best anymore because they are burnt elsewhere and they become unemployable at smaller companies. It is a sad state of affairs.
I've found it's always best to calibrate around expecting something like the ice cream sandwich episode of The Office. Never feel too much of a letdown this way.
Yikes. Talk about a slap in the face. Who let them even propose that?
Maybe next they’ll give you housing from the company property, and sell groceries from the company store, and see a company doctor.
"It's the least we can do, so it's the least we will do..."
Stalling out on promotion has always happened. It can be explained almost entirely by two factors:
As you become more senior, the success metrics for your role change significantly. Mentoring only goes so far because there is a large element of self-awareness and a willingness to change. Some people never recognize this and many never successfully adapt to what seniority entails. It is the career equivalent of trying to raise a Series B with a Series Seed pitch deck.
There are a much smaller number of senior roles than people who can be promoted into them. Above a certain level promotions are highly competitive. You are being stack-ranked against everyone else that can do the same job and tenure is only an input into that calculus to the extent it gives you unique domain expertise. A successful strategy for avoiding hyper-competitive promotions is to create a new promotion-like role that doesn't really exist. However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit, and these opportunities only exist at specific moments in time.
Raises, on the other hand, are largely impacted by complex financial and economic considerations. Many companies could do much better at this but even then I think employees significantly underestimate the network of opportunity costs that must be considered.
Another thing I tell people is if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. Many people do a job well and make themselves too critical in a certain position thinking it will make their job more secure. First, the way layoffs typically work, they are likely not more secure. And second, it makes promotions much harder.
> create a new promotion-like role
I do this for people on my team when I can.
> Some people never recognize this and many never successfully adapt to what seniority entails.
> > However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit
Even if some aspects of that might be true on the individual level, this take is the classic "blame the individual, but don't question the system."
Nothing about the concentration of capital by mega-corporations (enabled by tax policies they pushed). Nothing about the unfolding multigenerational disruptions by AI on the white collar job market. Just the old well laundered "bootstraps" argument.
Getting promotions that can pay $1M is something only possible with massive tech companies lol
Those employees that show that sort of initiative, create companies of their own - to at least sell that initiative as consultant.
In a hierarchical organization, there's a lot less room at the top: There's only one CEO, only a handful of executive positions, ect. Not everyone needs to be a leader to be successful.
Another aspect of being promoted: many of us see what the next level has to do/is doing and isn’t interested in doing that. I’ve seen people get promoted and then immediately implode because N+1 started involving lots of politics that they couldn’t or didn’t want to handle. Even senior IC roles get more and more exposed to non-technical and organizational issues.
During the interviews for my last three jobs, I explicitly said that my career goal was to never become a manager. I guess I started saying that when I had about 20 years of experience.
There's no reward for loyalty any more, and it's caused everyone to job hop (at least while that was possible), including me. At the time, employees complained about it, and in the same breath refused to give out any promotions and/or reward employees. Or they'd reward them with some shitty voucher.
The world has literally become the people vs corporations. There is no soul in working any more.
When was it different? I never saw that in big corporations, only SMBs when the founders were still at the helm.
My theory is: when it started being a bad thing to have any cash reserve.
With some reserve on the side, a company can survive bad times and not fire people. This is the kind of behavior employee will appreciate and make some diehard loyal.
But this available money is money not making more. So that's a bad thing these days and so the only easy variable available to survive is to remove excess workforce. It took some time for people to understand loyalty has been one-way only but now employers are reaping what they've sown.
There was famously an inflection point 40-50 years ago where wages decoupled from productivity to the downside. I'm sure it wasn't perfect before then, but things did change.
Correlating not causating with the first working spyplanes and spysats going over the soviet union.
The last time we hit this low point was in the Gilded Age, when the economic producers essentially revolted and forced governments to regulate against capitalistic greed. As you correctly identify, in the early 80s U.S. leadership figured out that if you issue debt more freely then you can get the economic growth of ‘household spend goes up’, ‘production and GDP goes up’, and ‘foreign currencies weaken versus the dollar’ without having to force* corporations to pay out profits as wage increases against their will. One bonus outcome is that you end up with lifelong debtors who are forced to accept work circumstances that they wouldn’t have to accept if they still had wage negotiating power. Too bad about the demonization of unions in tech, eh?
* A tax on (gross revenue – wages – cogs) with rate (cpi + fedrate) ^ 0.9 would be an excellent start, with an exponential factor that halts ‘shift the tax to consumers through simple price increases’ — the more you earn, the more you have to raise prices, which raises inflation, which raises your future tax by more than your price increase; the more revenue you pay out as wages instead of shareholder dividends, the lower you can set prices, which lowers inflation, which lowers your future tax — and adding the FFER lever allows the Fed to perform their mission to control (price) inflation not only with banks but also with businesses. For example, (8% inflation + 4% fedrate) ^ .9 is ~14.8%, which is a completely acceptable surcharge for businesses having raised prices so high that it caused an 8% inflation year!
Are you talking about the end of the Bretton-Woods agreement?
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
I mean, it's cherry picked, but still funny to see all those charts.
Obviously wages and productivity had to decouple. Wages measure human labor, while productivity measures all output, including that which comes from automation. ~50 years ago is when automation started to become more than a curiosity in industry.
Human productivity to wages have kept pace with each other, though, so there is nothing to suggest anything has changed for the human. It is not like the robots are seeking promotions (yet).
> ~50 years ago is when automation started to become more than a curiosity in industry
Where did you get that idea from?
The PLC, Programmable Logic Controller, was 1968. After which it started to become possible to have automated assembly lines with a few humans monitoring specialized robots.
> Wages measure human labor, while productivity measures all output, including that which comes from automation.
Until we have sentient robots, all that automation is simply a lever with a human laborer at the end of it.
If this is what i think it is, then yes. Life for humans has rarely been fair but that inflection point is startling. It tracks the wealth gap growing too irrc.
30 years ago and prior for a generation or two. Employees had pensions instead of 401ks where tenure built up a guaranteed fixed income payment at retirement. Now we're all tied to the stock market.
Oh, and back then a single income could support a working-class family to buy a decent house, two cars and maybe send a kid or two to college.
401k became a thing in part because of deep structural problems with employee pensions. Pensions don't "guarantee" anything in practice and many people lost them or had steep cuts. It is a promise, not a law of physics. 401k/IRA wasn't created for no reason. Pensions are exposed to much more idiosyncratic risk than a 401k and companies are poorly positioned to manage those risks.
Some people might not want to take responsibility for retirement savings in the same way they might not want to take responsibility for providing themselves housing but the alternative is strictly worse.
The only pensions that kind of work is government pensions because they can paper over the structural deficiencies with taxation. But even that has significant limitations as we've seen.
A 401k isn't required to be invested in the stock market. It is advisable but not required.
Those pensions could also be tied to the market, or more often the profitability of the company that ran it. There are many, many cases of underfunded pensions by bankrupt companies causing issues. All being equal, I'll take the job hopping and my own retirement account.
I agree it's more expensive than ever to afford to raise a family, though. There's also a malaise in the air that I don't think broader society has felt since the late 1970s, too.
Those "guarantees" could be lost in a bankruptcy, though. So that world wasn't as ideal as some make it sound.
Losing your job is bad; losing your job and your retirement is a nightmare.
20-30 years ago in private sector. Still is in government.
I'm having a hard time finding data on employee tenure that would support this. There seems to be a recent dip but it's only significant relatively, not in absolute numbers based on what I expected. Which was something like 25 years tenure not that long ago but that wasn't the case, more like 5.
The thing that changed was perception. People no longer believe loyalty to employer is worthwhile, just as they no longer believe hard work is what gets people rich.
They no longer believe it is worthwhile, because the landscape changed: companies found they no longer needed to treat their employees was well as they had. (Driven largely by the shift around that time toward quarterly results over long term sustainability, as I understand it.) And thus began a race to the bottom.
two weeks notice when you leave but where's the two weeks notice when they fired you.
Another "America vs Europe" (well, UK): I have my notice periods written in my contracts, whether that's one month or three months, and it is always bi-directional.
Don't give two weeks!
this could be because the business have all the power in the relationship, especially in bad job markets like today. When they hold all the cards they can make us dance for them and they never dance for us
These companies are making more money than they ever have.
I’m tired of all the excuses for shit leadership. They all can go to h** when they die.
Capitalism is trending towards uncertainty.
- Job security is getting lower.
- Insurance is getting spotty, will this be covered? Maybe?
- Companies are testing dynamic pricing.
- The rise of prediction markets.
Eventually the economy is going to be constantly gambling on our lives. Every ounce of certainty is a potential money making opportunity.
The fact that 1 in 4 white collar workers are not getting raises or promotions might not be a bad thing. As white collar workers get older they frequently stop optimizing for money and start optimizing for time, flexibility and other things and be totally OK with no promotions as the trade-off.
I personally find the US setup where often the longest serving and oldest workers would be earning the most, strange. Even when those oldest folks are clearly past their prime and themselves admit so.
There are always exceptions. I worked with a fantastic colleague who was a highly knowledgeable technical expert and a capable PM, always punching above his weight at work. One day in a chance conversation with him I was shocked to hear that he wants to retire soon because, now that he is on the wrong side of 90, he is not that interested anymore. My jaw dropped -- I never paid attention to his age. But I suspect many folks in the last quarter of their productive life will be happy to slow down. My 2c.
> I personally find the US setup where often the longest serving and oldest workers would be earning the most, strange.
Isn't the US significantly more meritocratic in this regard than other large economies? I.e. compared to Europe or Asia it would seem that Europe has much more rigid comp rules, Japan has formal mechanisms to ensure that older people are paid more. And this is a tech forum obviously where i.e. the right ML engineers are making 7 figures + right now in their late 20s.
> No Raise, No Promotion
They forgot the “More work, Constant threat of Unemployment” part
Exactly.
The reason there are no raises and no promotions is because of this "just be thankful you have a job and income at all" mentality that exists in the current environment
(Disclaimer: Tech sector specific)
It’s wild how different things are at different levels over time. When I started about 8 years ago, any technical skills and experience on your resume / LinkedIn would have recruiters reaching out non-stop. That died out over the last 3 years and I didn’t have anyone reaching out for jobs. Recently I updated my profile to state I’m a staff engineer and suddenly I’m getting messages like nothing ever happened. Senior engineer? Maybe one recruiter every 3 months.
This works because so many benefits are tied to work requirements. It's a systemic issue. Our employers enjoy the backing of our policy makers. If your health insurance (let alone you + your kids') becomes too expensive, it means taking time off to do things like train for a better job, risk starting a new job, etc., are untenable.
Would it be wrong to flip the narrative and say "3 in 4 (75%), don't feel this way"?
Not trolling, genuine question.
Yeah if it's only 25 percent that's not as bad as I expected. I would have thought closer to half?
Only if that 3 in 4 number is increasing (documenting a trend) But that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Clearly you aren’t a journalist
Not one paid for clicks, anyway. Real journalists still exist.
If I can just hold at this role for 6 more years, I'm happy. I chased promotions for a decade and regretted all but the first two, which brought me to this level.
There's a larger issue with that though: At some point, successful engineers _need_ to become examples or leaders if we are to continue exponential growth. If you are happy discontinuing exponential growth, then that's fine.
Years of experience don’t correlate to output in all careers. Surgeons and engineers get better over time. This might not be true for all jobs. Meanwhile, management is naturally capped because every manager necessarily needs people to manage under them, so there’ll be 1/N^y managers at the yth level of the org. Unless loyalty ought to be reward for its own sake, it’s not clear why 100% of workers should get promoted indefinitely.
It's not that promotions should be given out indefinitely but I think a pay raise in line with inflation should be the minimum, unless you are under performing. It's funny when a company excitedly shares a pay raise with you are it's below inflation...
I always look at inflation when I get a raise. Or if they are skipping raises because of the economy - I compare to inflation. I accept that as a staff level engineer I've reached about the top of what I can make - but I still expect my income to match inflation, and I have left when it doesn't.
Merit raises are typically based on market rates as a baseline. The employees' costs in terms of consumer price inflation are not a factor. If every employer gives out raises in line with inflation that also creates a positive feedback loop which contributes to higher and higher inflation every year (I do understand that's not the only thing which drives inflation rates).
If your wages are falling behind then look for opportunities in higher growth sectors.
As an employee I don’t care about the reasons that inflation exists, I care about getting the same real money over time (only counting inflation raises, not counting merit or other kinds). And citation needed about inflation raises driving inflation, there are much bigger factors that contribute to it.
There is a dual ladder setup. Where you can have Administrator, Systems Engineer, Sr. Systems Engineer, Lead, Architect, Sr Architect, etc. These will have parallel tracks to equiv. management positions for benefits and perks (bonus levels, etc).
Now obviously you can't have every employee promoted to a Sr. Architect or Fellow, but that is ok be cause not everyone can (or want to) obtain that necessary skill set. A while back I recall seeing a grid with various levels, what management title that would typically mirror, and the skills that would be required for each level.
There is a handover premium that you pay when you churn which often exceeds whatever savings you think you might find. Inertia and institutional knowledge are two of the biggest drags, not to mention morale, hidden costs recruiting fees, ramp time, and customer relationships.
It's fake bottom-line thinking that optimizes a few items while ignoring second and third-order effects.
Innumeracy with a finance vocabulary.
I was at my previous company for almost 10 years, I had annual promotions and I roughly 4x'd my annual income in this period, which averages to about 15% of year-on-year pay increases. Part inflation, part growth in skills.
Virtually all of that happened in the first 8 years. In the last 2 years I also stalled and saw minor inflation corrections of 2% a year, so I quit.
In my experience it had everything to do with me. In the first 8 I was very hungry, and always willing to take on something more or different. In the last 2 I was very much set on just coasting and doing what I was already doing, and it translated in them paying what they had always paid me, plus a little for inflation correction.
I think the truth is usually that if others don't stall and you do, that the solution probably sits with you as well. That having been said, I think now with AI the value-add of an employee sees so much pressure, that I think stalling will be a major trend.
"Work hard and it will be recognized" is terrible, horrible, no good, very bad advice. "Tit for tat" is the most generous to the company anyone should ever be: try working hard, if it's recognized then continue, if it isn't see if you can politic until it is, and in the very likely circumstance that it continues to not be recognized either jump for a pay bump or work like you're paid.
I didn't say work hard. But if you keep contributing what you already contributed previously and nothing changes, your salary likely also doesn't change. Changing that doesn't necessarily require working hard, I haven't made any such claim. In fact my salary inversely correlated with my effort. But I do recognize that when I stopped changing things (i.e. my role in the company became stagnant), my salary also remained stagnant.
Your reasoning implies that specific people within an org are not getting raises, but in practice it is entire orgs going without raises or promotions, regardless of what any individual is doing.
If you had annual promotions for 10 years and you 4x your salary, you pretty much got what I got job hopping twice in 4 years, and it had nothing to do with hard work or my skills. Good market conditions, luck and leaving when you’re getting short changed is what got me that.
When you're asked to deliver 2x performance for +20% of salary, you sometimes need to take a step back and see how the others would fare.
Hold on. This is just geometry. Unless the number of top slots is growing, the cap will be fixed.
Not sure about stall but it sure feels like employers are capitalising on this sense that everyone is keen to hold on to their job
It's systemic when you consider policymakers penalize you for not working. So many benefits are tied to work. The fed also adjust rates to make sure unemployment doesn't get so low to ensure employers always have max leverage. The biggie here is health insurance. Especially if you have kids, it's a huge risk to take time off to train for a better job or to risk taking a new job. Even having different insurance from a different employer means you may have to start over with different doctors.
https://archive.is/UoLx0
Kind of a silly article. If you're working in education administration or local government then why would you even expect career progression? These are not growth industries.
Those have always offered career progression, though. Whether the industry is growing is a different variable to whether someone is growing in competence.
Some environments require progression as a sort of anti-stasis measure. Famously including army officers, not exactly a growth industry either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out
Isn't it a natural pattern in empire? Everything grows, there's a huge administration class employed who manage to live in relative luxury from the profits, then as relative power and influence recedes, those jobs are the first to get cut.
It's an international market and everybody's using the same skills and tools. It's insane to think that 6 digit salaries would forever be sustainable when the rest of the world is doing the same stuff.
Developing tech to knock down barriers also paves over moats. I think the west is going to be in for some very trying times in the coming decades. The UK is a fascinating place to look at in this regard.
> administration class
Well it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the capital class, the "responsible" owners of the economy. Everyone knows that credit goes to capital and blame goes to workers!
The youngest baby boomers are in their early 60s. I doubt it will make a difference in tech, but traditional industries, or what is left of them, should see a lot of senior roles open up as baby boomers begin to retire. Then, as they begin to pass away, a lot of their accumulated wealth will pass to their heirs as well.
The baby boomers have been a serious "clog" in the system at a lot of levels. It will be interesting to see how things play out once they're no longer actively involved.
I'm pushing 50 now and I hit the wall almost 10 years ago. No real raises, new opportunities pay less. Inflation has been ratcheting down on me constantly, and my family has to make continual changes to stay in the black.
ALDI is great though!
Big tech owns a big chunk of the job market. So, the job market is not a market but a centralized system were big-tech has all the power to shape it.
Unionizing is just part of the fighting back. Only splitting the big monopolies can bring back competition and healthy salaries and promotions.
Monopolies are bad for consumers, but they are also bad for employees when that monopolies control most of the jobs of the industry.
> Big tech owns a big chunk of the job market
Big tech employs less than 1% of the people in the country.
To be fair to the parent, jobs require capital, and big tech owns a big chunk of the capital, and thus do own a big chunk of the job market even if they aren't putting it to work. Which is part of the underlying problem. Those with capital don't really need workers and the areas of the economy who could put workers to work in a bigger way don't have the capital to do so.
not getting laidoff is like a promotion now
Promotions are not worth it. You get a better salary bump by switching jobs. That's it, that's the whole story. Saved you 15 minutes.
It may be better for workers to stick to six month contracts at a good hourly rate. Note that there must necessarily exist a clause in the contract that requires an early termination of the contract by the employer to leading to 50% of the wages for the remainder of the contract being paid immediately to the worker. A worker may terminate the contract early only for a documented medical reason. All of this together is meant to everyone honest, transparent, and non-exploitative.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/no-raise...
This has been the case for most of Gen X's career: there was very little mentoring, very little succession planning and career shaping. Instead Boomers (who came into an economy where these things, along with pensions, etc. still existed) took over early and have stayed in leadership roles longer than previous generations. A look at congress provides a template.
I read a few articles about this yesterday actually. Read them in order, the second is commentary on the first:
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/pig-python-baby-b...
https://fortune.com/2026/05/31/boomer-reaction-economy-feel-...
I’ve been in the industry for 40 years. This has always been a complaint. Always. It is not new.
UNIONIZE
I've been in the industry for 30 years. "UNIONIZE" has always been the suggested answer. Always. But nobody ever steps up and actually does it, even despite the people being already socially united through platforms like HN, making formalization about as easy as can be possible.
GTA VI developers unionized about two days ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324499
HN-style startups couldn’t afford to unionize, right? To a founder it would look like eating your seed corn for no realizable benefit.
This has been true for at least since 2008.
The only times Ive gotten promotions was to get hired elsewhere. Better title, more money.
Its well known that retention budgets are laughable or nonexistant, and new hire budgets are well stocked. That means that if you want to grow from what youre doing, you gotta leave.
Every few years companies give a large raise to everyone when they notice they can't hire people and the ones they have are leaving. So if you don't manage to find a new job it isn't hopeless, so long as enough people are leaving.
Of course if you don't leave they may lay you off at any time. However assuming that doesn't happen they will eventually give you a large raise.
There is no guarantee that will happen.
"Just hold out until they are desperate enough that they HAVE to give you a large raise!" is laughable.
Every single day you don't quit and get paid what you are worth, is a day you are leaving money on the table. Imagine waiting years for that big raise when you could have left and made tens to hundreds of thousands more in that time.
I did not say don't look for a new job though. I said that if you can't find one. Sometimes you can't find a better job - better is more than just pay, there are other factors that may apply to you personally (ethics of the job, working hours, where they need you to work, how much travel...)
Holding out isn't ideal, but it might be the best for you.
Interestingly, I've heard that job hopping no longer pays better than staying in place. I can't say if this is true (and no matter what's true, I'm sure that people have anecdotal exceptions!) but it would be quite discouraging if so.
There are too many "it depends" to make any statement. The economy isn't running hot now, and that means those who are forced to job hop (laid off) provide enough potential hires that companies don't need to try to pay someone more to leave.
The real question is will this change? Will companies start valuing long term employees thus making it not worthwhile to leave? Only time will tell (I wouldn't bet on it though).
Anecdotally it's true imho. accrual of benefits, sbc and wage-indexing, ... job hopping puts you at the ground floor of each, and salary jumps have narrowed.