this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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Work Reform
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I made the mistake of becoming a manager about 4 years ago. This is one of the most frustrating parts of the job. If you have a good relationship with your team they’ll usually tell you something like “I’ve been getting contacted about other offers, here’s what they’re offering.”
It’s usually about a 20% bump. I’ve not once been able to convince the company I’m at to match it. Usually the best I’m allowed to do is something like a 5-6% raise in the next salary increase cycle.
I’ll usually know for 2-3 months a team member is leaving before it actually happens because of this. Of course, if I’m allowed to hire a replacement they’ll let me pay market value.
Job hopping is definitely the best way to get a pay increase.
I just dont understand that logic
"Oh god, this guy wants a raise? Fuck him, he wont get anything.. but when he quits, hire his replacement at what he was asking for, or higher"
and they wonder why loyalty isnt a thing anymore
And even if that guy they hire is really good, there is still a large period of time where that person has to learn the ropes and is most likely less useful than the person who already knew the ins and outs. Also, most of the time, they are never as good...
Penny wise and pound foolish. They can’t resist the opportunity to exploit, even if it costs the company in the long run.
Everyday the idea of an AI CEO sounds less like a joke and more like a great fucking idea.
At this point it would be most likely to be an LLM which just emulates what it has seen CEOs do in its training data and would do the same sort of thing.
And more like a nightmare for the rest of us.
Hard to see how it could perform any worse, and the wage savings could be allocated to the people actually doing the work.
Yeah sure... The savings would go to buybacks or dividends, of course.
And that's still a better use of funds than wasting them on an overcompensated CEO.
Well the goal of an ideal CEO is to pull more money into the company and give as little out as possible. If we saw more AI CEOs we would just have further wealth disparity in our society and workers at those companies would be paid less as the AI would optimize their pay for maximum company profits. It would be everything we hate about capitalism but amplified, and the person who owned the AI would get paid even more for doing even less.
Correct, but often the actions of CEOs are performative and don't actually support the goal of bringing money in. They like to put on a show of being ruthless, and often behave more psychopathic than an "optimal" business AI would.
For example, it's been proven that employee retention is one of the #1 ways to boost productivity. Costco is one of the few companies with a CEO which truly believes in this and despite paying higher wages than any other grocer they are one of the top performers in my investment portfolio.
Remote work? Totally profitable and AI would maximize it instead of forcing workers back to the office to "put them in their place"
4-day week? Also proven to be a net gain as workers are rested and motivated.
A "cold and calculating" AI would be far more likely to make reforms that benefit both the company and the employees, as it isn't motivated by power structures or the need to look ruthless. Cutting pay is a losing move as it loses talent more than it saves money, and deep learning algorithms would realize this easily.
Also the "person who owns the AI" would actually be the shareholders, who are often ordinary investors. Rather than funneling money to bloated C-suites, the money would be more likely to circulate in the economy through dividends.
This sounds like a rather idealistic outcome to me. Sure those things might happen, but dependent and scared wage slaves work for much less cost.
Not just less useful. They have negative productivity starting out because training them takes away productive time from the more experienced staff.
We cope by saying they hire a replacement who asked for more. The reality is they generally don’t. They either offload the work to the rest of the dept and go “oh look at that we didn’t need them!” as the group drowns OR they find a wide eyed, younger professional who will take a crap - or at least lower - salary.
This varies from industry to industry but it’s very common.
Which doesnt seem to be common, seeing how you have shit like the report that OP posted that job hopping massively increases income.
Do you think OP is representative of the broader workforce?
Loyalty is a two-way street.
Remember that Star Trek where they go to the evil mirror universe and the baddies come to the Enterprise? The bad versions get caught because it's hard for someone with no empathy to fake it.
Classic trek.
The saddest part is that I really thought we had the potential to become the federation. It turns out, we were always just the farengi.
I heard somewhere that's what they were trying to say when they made at first. The episode just didn't work. DS9 redeemed them.
The Ferengi never had a world war
They're probably hoping to not hire a replacement at all
I keep waiting for someone to lay it out and explain how the companies are actually benefiting in some subtle way from this arrangement. As far as I can tell, no, this is just what they decided to do.
Maybe an advantage of this setup is that you ensure that your bus factor is high and you're constantly testing it to make sure it stays high? Kind of like how Netflix uses ChaosMonkey.
It all makes "business" sense for those who see employees as "commodities", i.e. all kinda equivalent and hence easilly replaceable with nothing lost when they're switched.
It's basically the MBA thinking of employees as just another "raw material" or "supplier".
The reality, more so in complex domains, is that employees have an adaptation and learning period when they arrive (unlike engineered devices, companies aren't standardized machines using standardized parts, so you a new "part" won't just seamlessly fit and start delivering full performance) and often never written institutional knowledge that goes with them when they leave.
However as those things are not easilly quantified and measurable, MBA types - being unable to add it to their spreadsheets - will simply ignore them rather than trying to balance such costs against salary costs: giving a decent salary increase (a guaranteed cost) will always look like a worse option in an accounting spreadsheet if its only counter is a sub-100% possibility that they might lose that employee (and, remember, since they don't count adaption and loss of institutional knowledge costs, that's listed there as costing nothing) and replace it with somebody else who might even be possible to get with a less "decent" salary (so, more than the current employees but less that a fair salary for the current employee).
Such approach works well if all companies are doing it and the probability that people will leave if they don't get a decent salary is low enough (which it probably is, since the majority of human beings favour stability over change).
It's a bit messy for the employer. You can't just hand out 20% raises every time someone threatens to leave. Then everyone would be threatening to leave. And that's a hefty cost to add to what's likely your largest operating expense. Also, that's not just 20% in the employee's pocket, there are additional costs like unemployment insurance and the like.
OTOH, unless your employee plain sucks or the job is simple, it's almost always better to keep them than train a replacement. Tribal knowledge is valuable knowledge.
And no, only very small-time employers expect loyalty. They understand the game, and we should as well.
Funny that lemmy whines and moans about capitalism all day, without realizing they can play as well. Jumping jobs over the last 11 years got me $14 > $22 > $39. Been at this place 5-years, thinking about jumping ship again. Probably put me over $100K with a little luck. Oh, and I've never had such fat benefits or worked less. From home to boot.
Related: When we first moved here, a friend started at an oil change place, well below his skill set and previous pay. Kept job hopping and stacking his resume, now he's the top service manager at the largest auto dealer group. He quit moving, guess he's fat and happy. Sure drags in the $.
if you have multiple employees getting job offers that are 20% higher then you're not paying your employees enough 🤷♂️
Fine. They all claim to have offers. It's not like employers don't track turnover and market rates. Some of them just decide it's cheaper to allow high turnover. Not like they can't work an Excel sheet.
Having said that, I've found many employers wholly ignorant of metrics that aren't easily tracked. For example, 2 jobs ago I was a key player at my shitty little shop. Kept the customers rolling in, despite their aggravations with the company. You can't put a solid number on that. (And many told me they left for the competition when I quit.)
Last job, I quit for an offer doubling my pay and benefits. They loved me, wouldn't go for it. The next year they paid far more in IT costs than it would have cost to keep me.
Back to my point, work hard, achieve something to be proud of on your resume, jump ship. The game is only rigged for the employer is you're in a shit job that requires almost no skills. As to that, see the example I talked about with my oil change buddy.
How is it messy for the employer to keep wages at market prices?
You don't have to match anything or contend with mass quitting if you just pay the going rate to start with.
Do you think employers are stone ignorant of market rates? Who said anything about mass quitting? The people not moving on are the people who can't. Hell, that's where I'm at. Pretty sure I've attained the Peter Principle for now.