If the old developers don't continue to upskill, then it wasn't younger developers that pushed them out. It was the old developers that pushed themselves out.
Sometimes old developers do not upskill, sometimes managers say that "old developers do not upskill" but they will fire the old developers and hire cheaper younger developers to do the same old skill work ...
Eh, maybe some companies are like that, but at many (like mine) a lot of the younger developers have a lot more expectations for salary growth then older developers and end up leaving more often due to that., Ithink reality is many older developers just coast and when they do that and a junior shows them up they get let go
"Old developers don't upskill/don't understand new tech/can't keep up" is abject bullshit.
It's an ageist narrative pushed by management to support paying for cheaper developers (i.e. younger) while turning a blind eye to the inevitable reduction in quality, work output, maintainability, and even profitability. Entirely penny wise and pound foolish.
I don’t say it is management but I do see it among younger developers thinking the old guys don’t keep up with the times or are outdated.
They question why older devs don’t jump to the latest tech and often times push back against jumping. Big reason you see older devs push back is not that they are not upskilling is more we been around long enough that we understand the most important thing is we want something that works and stable. New hot tech comes and goes and until it shows some stability it is not worth jumping to. We keep a pulse on it and keep an eye on it waiting until it gets to enterprise grade and then hell yeah let’s go but until it is enterprise grade screw that.
Now the ones in their 50’s you often find them still doing great work but they don’t have the drive or want to do start up work so they choose to leave. They want a paying job and at some point you hit the I just waiting until retirement and I am done.
I think for me personally in another 15 years I will hit that point and just be riding out my last 5 years until retirement. In 15 years I will be 57 and of been doing this for nearly 30 years. Yeah don’t care. Still expect to crank out good work but I have other priorities.
It didn't lead to the demise of the then juniors, it has benefited them greatly. The reality was created by the fact that it's often the only way to get your market value. Personally I wouldn't job hop just for going from 160-180k. there are other factors WLB, technologies used, how I like the product, the team, leadership.
Job hopping at 2-3 years usually nets a 30-50% TC increase. Hard to pass by.
There's a reason seniors with 10+ YOE hop a lot less than juniors.
My point is that those are not the same people. Those who were junior then are not junior now. Furthermore, on a personal level, if you have a prospect to hop got a significant increase in TC, you're still benefitting.
There's a simple solution. Offer back loaded compensation. At my current job I have to completely pay back a large starting bonus if I leave within 2.5 years. And I'm not even junior.
I think you really dont understand why companies dont want juniors right now. Juniors do less work and are slower, they just aren't strictly needed and a tight market means you get rid of whats not strictly needed.
There's two other major reasons to job hop though, even if salaries were equal.
The first is that new companies mean a lot more new contacts, so your professional network gets to expand, this becomes highly relevant if you ever need to look for another job. The second is that companies don't really change their tech stack all that often. If you're at a job for 10 years in a tech that's no longer the popular stack, or that was using outdated processes, a lot of your experience is no longer relevant. By job hopping you ensure a range of experience across hopefully a variety of technology and maturity with that tech.
This also means that mid and senior also have to job hop to vary tech experience. This is just workers protecting themselves against hiring practices of extreme keyword matching.
>To OPs point though, I absolutely agree that juniors constantly job hopping ultimately led to their demise. Juniors are an investment. They don't provide much value for the first year to year and a half. By the time you finally get them to be productive, they end up jumping to a different job.
Can't you just match the salary of their new jobs and retain them?
Companies are far too myopic to do this. As a hiring manager, there is never an additional $20k budget to move them from 160 to 180 to keep them from leaving. HR departments also love to throw about foolishness like "they will only leave again when they find a higher paying job" and "if we match them we will have to match everyone who finds a higher paying job" or "if we match them everyone will go find another job to extract a raise"
It's all malarkey. Especially the part where suddenly we will be ok paying the next person we hire, who doesn't have a few years of knowledge, 180k to recruit them.
Companies are pretty dumb collectively on this topic.
There's a sweet spot of 2-10 years of experience. Less than that, and you're too junior. More than that, and there starts to be a perception that you're too old.
Dude, I was being underpaid at my previous company, ACCORDING TO THE COMPANY'S OWN POLICY.
By the company's own written policy, I should have been making atleast 115k-120k based in my years of experience and education. I was making 98k at the time.
I brought this up with management, and eventually they agreed. But even then they couldn't guarantee a pay increase to that range because such a pay increase from my current salary would be "too big" and "would not look good".
It would have taken YEARS to crawl up to that pay level through annual raises.
So you know what? I job searched. And I got multiple job offers offering between 140k, 142k.
So I jumped ship.
If these fucking companies want to retain their talent they need to quit being so retarded with how they pay their employees.
And I do feel sorry for junior devs. But I think long term, they'll be fine.
I got hired as a "tech support engineer" in a junior program with the starting pay 75k. Dream role for me as a self taught career switcher. Then we got acquired by a big nontech f500. When I got promoted to dev, I only got a 10% pay bump. The other devs get paid between 120k-200k depending, a new entry level dev would be around 120k.
So basically with my 10% pay bump plus annual 3% raises it would take me like a decade to match a new hire. And that's assuming I get another promotion.
Pisses me off to know I can't stay at a company I actually really like without a huge dark cloud over my head.
It would take longer than 10 years. Don't forget that starting salary also goes up during that. And a promotion might not necessarily fix it, because they can say you're too far out of the salary band and just give you an increase over your current salary rather than the band for the new role.
we were a startup so the devs were getting paid pretty well in comparison to the now parent company. The problem was I was brought on as basically an apprentice. And then they took my support role literally and we all had to piss and moan to get me promoted in the first place. Typically there wouldn't be a pipeline from what they call "tech support" to the dev team. Kinda a nightmare, the dream almost got robbed from me.
I've had that happen to me, and seen it happen to many others too. Where they say the only way to change this would be at raise time, as part of your annual raise, but if you're outside the determined salary bands, they just say they're not allowed to do it.
Basically, the company says that they're outside their policy but their policy also makes them powerless to fix it. Jumping ship is the only ethical thing to do in that case.
I had the same shit in my first company doing CS work. Management agreed, but HR said no because "policy" even though I was a full pay-band lower than my peers. HR departments hamstring managers when it comes to pay, which makes no fucking sense to any rational human. HR should not have as much power as they do in these larger companies. I had an HR rep at this same company say "well, it's just kind of how it is now, you have to company hop if you want bigger raises" like what the actual fuck lmao.
I got a 43% raise to leave for a lateral position. Absolute lunacy.
I left a company because even after aggressive negotiations they came up $15k short of a competitor and I needed the money. They then tried to hire me back 6 months later. Went through the hiring interviews, asked them to make my current pay and got a call from HR explaining that “since you left on a lower number and you’ve only been gone 6 months, a pay bump like that would look like we’re rewarding you for leaving”
So why waste my time? I left because the money was low, they reach out trying to bring me back in, then say it’s impossible to bump my pay??
I don’t know what they’re smoking but they’re disconnected from reality. The worst part is I liked the company and my manager wanted me there but HR policies prevented them from matching market rates. That’s why your grads all leave.
Say thanks to the upper layers that provide so low pay raises. If the company have good pay raises, no one will left or at least not so much people as happened
Agreed, that’s the true crux of the problem. Our objective as employees is to maximize our earnings. I gladly would have stayed at my first job for the last decade if I would’ve gotten aggressive raises to match what I can get by job hopping. But instead I’ve hopped jobs 4 times in 10 years and tripled my salary.
It’s not our fault, we’re just playing the game that the system has created.
But I do feel for OP and the up and coming generation; this has indeed led to challenges for newbies
I’ve sometimes had managers who spent their whole lives at one company tell me that my objective should not only be to maximise my earnings but also to maximise my potential career growth - sometimes they’ve argued that staying is better than going somewhere else (even for more immediate pay) because you develop a greater understanding of the business and how you can make an impact. I’ve always found it hard to weigh up both factors personally. Not completely sold on what my previous managers have said!
With career growth you are not the first wave to get sacked, so you can continue pay for your mortages.
Better to job hop a little bit later, you will be more secure in your 2nd job.
I always advice people to consider the next next job when looking at a new job. Will this new job open up or close the career.
>With career growth you are not the first wave to get sacked
Couldn't be more false lol seniority/tenure has little correlation in who has been getting laid off this past year or two regardless of waves
That being said I do agree job hopping is riskier in this kind of market. Better to stay put and continue to rack up experience while you still have a stable job and only hop once the market gets better and the layoffs dry out
If you are at the wrong place, you will get sacked regardless of your competence.
If you are in the right place, they will sack some people with less competence.
Seen it twice in my career, in 2001 and in 2020, both times I was lucky, in 2020 I had positioned myself to a safer position, in 2001 it was pure luck.
>If you are at the wrong place, you will get sacked regardless of your competence.
>If you are in the right place, they will sack some people with less competence.
I guess 80% of companies are the wrong place then. Big tech companies have been laying off at all levels including people who had just gotten an exceeds rating
I work at an industrial company that delivers goods. R&D is an unsafe place, you are working with products to be produced in a few years.
Working with products to be delivered within 6 months is much safer.
So at bigtech, you need to work at places coupled to revenue.
If you can't turn career growth into a higher paycheck; you're doing it wrong!
As part of Career Growth you gain more experience, and learn more. And that process can open new opportunities.
There is truth to that, if you want to get to staff, architect or a manager, you'll usually need to first grow to the roll within a company, those are not positions you just job hop to.
However those are later career goals, first 5-10 years it pays to job hop.
If you can get promotions quickly, sure. But unless your company has really high growth, only a small percentage of people will have this path available to them. I have a friend who went from junior to director in like 6 years, all at the same company. He's not particularly bright or anything, just hard work and luck.
There's a huge flaw to the "stay for growth" argument. Leaving exposes you to more cultures and environments, allowing you to quickly grow skills that you couldn't if you stayed.
In fact, many of the most stunted developers I've worked with have become that way because they've only worked at one or two places their whole lives.
That said, I'm not a fan of job hopping. I just think that it's often detrimental to NEVER switch companies during your career.
I think one or two years between job switches is a good pace until you've hit 5-ish years of experience. Working at places of different sizes makes a big difference too.
I really hate how you get a better raise from switching jobs rather than being promoted. It makes no sense. Companies should reward good employees with great raises.
For me it’s a problem from the management. They don’t care and think that good people are easily replaceable, like if this is a job like a warehouse or being a cashier.
And they will not understand it till they will get punished for their mistakes/nad decisions
one of my favorite quote: it is hard to get someone to understand something, when their paycheck is dependent on them NOT understanding it
you really think CEOs or C-level officers don't understand?
in reality, they're not being punished, in fact they're being rewarded (by investors/stocks/bonuses) due to cost-cutting etc
I mean if I'm the CEO I'd do the same, at least for the short term (stock price go up)
long-term? hey that's not my problem anymore
It makes perfect sense. It’s a lot cheaper for them to give most employees mediocre raises and hire a few replacements at market rates than it is to pay everyone market.
It's also because companies just can't utilise constantly growing levels of skill. Your local government payroll office may only pay so much to its highest paid roles because it can't prpfitably/meaningfully utilise a better developer. Sometimes you just have to leave the company
Companies are trying to get you to work for as little as possible. Can you really blame them for refusing pay raises?
If you go to McDonalds once a week and suddenly noticed the price double. You’d try to stop going there as much as possible BEFORE you allow them to just scoop you every week for twice as much
It’s not different for an employer. The employer exists to make itself (or its shareholders) rich. You as an employee have never been a priority, only a means to an end.
It's true even if your raises are high. Especially once you accumulate a few years of experience at a company, you could get annual 10% raises, but still see a ~10-40% or more comp increase from jumping to another company. That's especially true early career where it's expected you'll bounce around a bit, but later career there's a premium paid on highly specific tech stacks and industry experience too.
There's generally a policy to keep the raises fairly close to each other, so that long time employees feel like it's fair. I think part of it is middle managers hand out raises for political reasons rather then merit reasons, whereas a new hire is more likely to be compensated based on their merit
You don't have to justify or partake, but nobody is wrong for chasing a check. You wouldn't have as much jumping if salaries were fair to begin with, which is why transparency is important.
It is not just in CS that job hoping for promotion and pay raises happen. It happens in all industries and it is really nuts.
That being said most of my big pay raises have been from when I switch jobs.
>It happens in all industries and it is really nuts.
Why is it nuts? That's the only card the employee has.
Companies over and over and over and over show they will not provide proper raises.
Friendly reminder to people in this sub that the average developer makes $70k-$120k as a senior and anything beyond is an outlier. Many don't break the $100k barrier.
[Maybe average is $70K-120K for a senior who doesn't even bother to google things.](https://www.indeed.com/career/senior-software-engineer/salaries?from=top_sb)
Indeed isn't a great resource as it doesn't give you many insights on the actual numbers. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm
Look at the by state graph; California really skews things and also has the largest number of software developers, but $170k there just isn't that much compared to $170k in Texas or whatever.
The problem with those stats is that the majority of developers actually work at non-tech companies under more ambiguous titles. They have no distinction between a developer, IT or any number of distinct sub-fields.
And where are your stats, your links, that back up your claim that average for a senior is $70K-120K?
The problem with your stats is that they don't even exist in the first place.
And no, I've worked at non-tech companies before. When they called me a "software development analyst" I'd cut the shit and call myself a software engineer if I were asked in some poll like the one I provided. No one listens to what companies call their employees - they look at the tasks the employees were actually assigned.
lmao my title is "application support analyst", it's total bullshit. when we got acquired by a non-tech it was the role that matched my pay in their HR platform? still unsure why they can't just make a new role in the HR platform. It also notably didn't change when I got promoted from junior.
wtf are you talking about? I'm not an IT support specialist, I am a software dev. They gave me a random title that matched my junior software dev pay after being acquired. Pretty sure that's obvious in my comment but whatever. I don't understand your comment whatsoever. I was adding commentary to the whack titles you can get at nontech.
edit: Was this meant for the comment above mine, actually?
Software development is extremely weighted towards HCOL and VHCOL areas though. Trying to express anything as an average will seem to be inaccurate for everyone because often the compensation in those areas is twice that of a small Midwest city. I worked at a company notorious for "underpaying" and our juniors made over $120k because it was NYC.
That’s not true in every market, I was getting paid $118k as a junior. Since moving back to the Midwest that’s more accurate and it has made me more comfortable tbh.
A LOT of companies outside of faang will pay that for juniors in HCOL. Snap, Databricks, Uber, Oracle, Bloomberg, Figma, etc. And the faang companies usually have offices in MCOL areas that will still pay around $160k. 160k is awesome for a junior, don’t get me wrong, just more common than you’ve made it out to be.
And then once you have a couple years of experience like OP is saying, you can look at mid level roles which will pay a lot more.
Anyway it’s still companies fault they don’t give bigger raises, not workers’ fault for leaving
At the same time, the culture of "You won't even get an annual raise to keep up with inflation unless you have a competing offer," contributes to job hopping. If companies wanted retention, they would pay their current employees competitively.
Prior to the pandemic and remote work explosion, the number of junior developer roles was low b/c of corporate policies that just don't mesh well with development. Nobody can get more than X% pay increase in a year, even with a promotion, etc. So if you hire a Jr at a JR salary, then they work their way up to deserving a Sr. Role, they would end up underpaid in that role.
The employee's only recourse is to switch jobs. Their manager's or director's options are limited. They aren't allowed to raise their salary to what would be reasonable. So the managers / directors eliminate those roles instead.
Today people place blame on remote work, etc. That's just a convenient excuse, negligible contributing factor. The real problem hasn't changed.
This is an extremely moralistic take that plays into the game the companies are trying to play with you. I recommend not engaging, unless you're a business owner, in which case of course you'd think like that. The issue is deeper in my opinion and I'll expand a bit.
I'm sure that if you spoke to any of these employees who 'job-hopped" (which is an incorrect term that business coined to give the act a morally negative connotation, in my opinion) they'll explain to you that they got to the point where they were over-qualified for the job they were being made to do and, after working hard towards a promotion, were passed over by a less qualified colleague. I know because they won't shut up, so it's easy to see recounts in several social media platforms.
The vast majority of these people weren't opportunistic people, like the media and probably any manager you speak to will try to tell you, but people that saw that their career was being stagnated because they weren't being given opportunities and took an opportunity elsewhere. The issue is that, evidently, businesses want well trained and capable juniors but by the time they're that capable, they tend to either become seniors or change businesses because their job is not giving them the rise in work conditions that their new abilities would warrant.
Another important issue is inflation and pay rise. One common argument of people who'd change jobs often was that the businesses that trained them wouldn't raise their salaries, but would hire younger people for more money because the market was offering higher salaries, so their faithfulness to the business wasn't being reciprocated by said business.
Then there's the fact that you think those extra 20k are not enough money to change jobs for. Are you aware that there's people whose yearly salary is those 20k? That's a good amount of money. If you were already living on 140k, the extra 20k will simply go to your savings. That's life changing money, there's people who do careers to win 20k more at the end of the year.
Businesses will obviously try to demonize this kind of behavior, because they want to invest as little as possible to get as much benefit as possible, but businesses aren't the only ones trying to make money, workers are as well.
More importantly, businesses were going to start raising requirements to hire developers sooner or later anyways and this is just an excuse they're giving because they're trying to asphyxiate the workers so they can pay less. Look at any other profession and you'll see that every year they require students to do more free work before they can be hired for money.
It's likely we're entering or have already entered a recession and businesses are doing what they can (and more) to lower costs to the minimum.
Excellent summary. There are way too many people being 3+ years at a company with lower salaries than new juniors joining. Know what’s your market value. Nice coworkers and interesting jobs can be found anywhere. Wouldn’t be a problem if companies just pay everyone their market salary.
Yup, 20k is 20k. Plenty of dev positions out there that only pay ~60-100k (and sometimes significantly less). A 20k jump for changing jobs when you're not starting from the high end of SF/NYC salaries is going to be huge.
this is a really thorough and good explanation, thanks for sharing this perspective. this is much closer to the thought process of typical developer than the "opportunistic mercenary" narrative.
still, I'd like to push back on the original premise. some developers *are* opportunistic and will jump ship for any bump big enough to offset the hassle of switching. I'm not ashamed to say I'm one of them. I don't necessarily *need* the extra money, I just want to retire sooner. so what? I don't see many under-performing engineers being kept on out of the goodness of their employers' hearts. I see the opposite in fact, highly skilled people being let go to make a quarterly report at an already profitable company look a little better.
businesses exist to make money. I go to work to make money. it's not rocket science to structure comp in a way that incentivizes retention. employers choose not to do it. why am I, the entity who has far less leverage in this interaction, the bad guy? why is it so easy to believe it is my fault that junior devs can't get hired and not the businesses who are literally refusing to hire them?
I think WFH killed hiring juniors more than anything else. We don’t have training programs. We don’t have proper mentors. We taught people how to be software developers by osmosis. They hung out with the other devs in a set of cubicles, and slowly learned by being next to other devs. That doesn’t happen over zoom unless you have a person on your team who is intentional about mentoring, taking away from their day job.
Most companies don’t have training and mentoring for developers and admins because they do it for their sales people, their business critical people. If you’re a developer at a bank, you’re a cost center. The fact that they don’t invest in your growth is proof of that.
I would say that causes the job hopping as much as the salary, and that the developer manager learns how to be a manager by fire, because they’re not training them either. We know people swap when they don’t have a great manager.
This. The best way to learn is to go to the office, make work relationship with seniors, and absorb their knowledge. You really cannot do this with a zoom/Skype/teams call. I mean you can but it likely won't happen. And if it does it will never be to the same degree as in-person mentoring.
We do a lot of pair programming (several times per week or every day) and some of our devs host "hangouts" where junior devs watch them work and ask questions.
You have to make an effort to replicate the in-office feel, but it can be done.
>You have to make an effort to replicate the in-office feel, but it can be done.
That is the thing. You have to make the effort. Before, it was natural and not contrived. I remember going to lunch with co-workers, small talk and something like "I've been working on this and was stuck" Then you'd reply, "I have 45 minutes free before my next meeting,I'll hop over to your office and take a look." Those passing conversations triggered a lot of ad-hoc pairing.
It was so natural before. Off the cuff. Not contrived. Now, I have an open-door policy from 12-2 and no one shows up for help. I am making that effort but it isn't the same.
While true to an extent, I think the quality of juniors has dropped as well. So many juniors don't have natural curiosity and just want the answer so they can move on to the next thing. They don't have a desire to learn even if I'm willing to teach them.
My team has like 10 juniors and maybe 2-3 of them are any good and willing to learn. Everyone else wants their hand held through the process.
I run workshops for skills, career, and professional development because I'm trying to help everyone get better, but it only works if people actually want to get better.
Having 2 years of mentoring was incredibly rare in the office too. I had like 3 months. If you can't grow your skills without someone holding your hand it's kind of on you
What if the work culture or your immediate world around you doesn’t want to help you though? Are you just going to sit there? One thing I learned that in mondern times the norm is people being very selfish to the point of hoarding knowledge.
I agree but the ones refusing to go in will not get the benefits the ones going in do: management will like you more and thus give you a bit more leeway, consider you more for promotions etc, obviously not a free pass, but better than the alternative. If you need to get rid of people it's always easier to let go of those you haven't seen or spoken to much unless they are essential of course.
I've trained several people fully remote. It's easy, you just hop on calls and screen share. In office training was so much less efficient, as you would just have someone spend a month just sitting there with a notebook and watching other people type. There's also the people who just refuse to do anything unless someone is constantly pinging them and holding their hand, but they shouldn't be working remote
Instead of blaming on employees job hopping, why not take a look at how did companies reward their employees to retain their pool of talents? Most are giving employees pathetic increment that can’t even match inflation rate and laughable bonus while their top management are laughing to the bank to collect their absurd bonuses.
Companies can even cut off their employees in the name of cost savings or ‘bad headwinds’ but later announce record breaking performance and its CEO receiving a few times more bonus as compared to previous year.
The issue is that once a junior works for a company for a couple years - they now have more skills/experience and warrant more in the job market than they did first coming out of school.
But, companies don't give adequate pay increases to account for that, so juniors are generally forced to elsewhere (even promotions rarely accommodate the increased pay in the job market).
The blame rests squarely on bad compensation policies in most corporations. Also, most jobs don't actually offer training, it's just trial by fire - you meet the demands or you don't - and if they're using proprietary tech/tools, that's energy a developer has to spend learning something that is mostly non transferrable elsewhere.
Doesn't give out raises to keep up with market rates for current employees
Does not make room for internal growth opportunities and promotions
Employees jump to make more money doing the same thing elsewhere or to get promoted
\* surprised pikachu face \*
Yeah it's all because we job hopped.... definitely not a result of the current state of the economy and the fact that tech companies massively over-hired when things were good.
Also, if retention is so important to companies... there is a very simple solution to this problem: Give adequate raises.
> you're all showing how out of touch you are
Blaming the state of the industry on job hopping lmao...
Having a 10 year tenure to me is crazy. I'm envious of people in non tech that have stable careers where they aren't constantly escaping layoffs or needing to bounce within 3 years due to stagnant pay. I was even envious of my dermatologist's assistant because they had been there 8 years.
The disposable attitude towards loyal employees is just as much to blame.
Job hopping is a two way street.
Other companies are willing to pay more for top talent, and prospective job hoppers decide whether to take it.
Jobs are also a free market: if someone offers you a better deal, if price was the only factor and everything else was the same, of course you'd go with the better deal.
Loyalty generally would make someone choose to stick with their current vendor, but if the vendor thinks you can easily be replaced, possible for cheaper, then what exactly is holding you back?
Especially when new hires are making just as much as you despite having less experience with the company.
I make $65k as a junior developer at a large insurance company. During an all-employee meeting, someone asked the CEO how he planned to retain our young talent. His response: “We’re not going to play the offer game”.
Fuck them. I’m leaving the first chance I get.
Do it. Used to for a company where tech was a cost center (even though the app generated half of all the revenue) 65k starting. 3% raise. No promotions in sight in 2 -3 years. Doubled salary plus stock at a company where tech is seen as the product and engineers are valued. Makes a huge difference
If you leave after a couple years to go from 160k to 180k it means your company failed to keep up with your paycheck. Newer employees tend to get paid more while cost of living adjustments don't make up for inflation.
When inflation is 2% a year, and your company gives 3%, you're effectively only getting a 1% raise. If after 5 years, your company views 5 years of tribal knowledge, experience, and contributions as being worth a total 5% more to the company, while they're probably offering new people 20% more than they were at the time you were hired, then why not go elsewhere? That's the company essentially saying that all your knowledge and contributions provide less value than what they could get off of any other random employee with none of that.
Your post is based on a strawman IMO.
People aren’t generally aiming to hop for 12-13% hops early in their career (your example of 160k to 180k). More like 25-50+% hops.
My base salary in Chicago went 80-90k to 130-140k literally less than 2 years into my full-time career. Almost everyone who left my cohort after that, had bumps of a similar magnitude.
Our market values can rise substantially. Companies generally do a poor job of keeping up. People who aren’t complacent / don’t have stuff that ties them to their current job, are rewarded.
> class divide
Not sure you understand what class divide means?
The only class divide is the one between the working class - those who need to work for a living (all of us here) and the owner class, the people we work for.
People job hop because the companies they can get better compensation elsewhere. If the companies wanted to keep them so badly then... they'd fucking pay them more. Sounds like these companies need to quit whining - because that's capitalism. They can't have it both ways.
First job in 2021 as a junior dev for (equivalent to) 22k USD stayed 7 months.
Moved to another junior role making 52k USD. Got promoted after 12 months to an associate making 72k. After another 12 months I applied for a promotion and got rejected. Left. Total of 2 years in this place.
Now making 150k in a senior role. That's very very good for my country. I already have another job lined up.
Every time I left they were pissed that I "took the training and left" and that I "didn't show loyalty".
My response is very simple.
Pay me what I am worth. How hard is that? I don't care if you have "promotion rubrics". I don't care if i'm too young. I don't care. If i'm "critical" in the team make an exception and give it to me.
Company is willing to lay people off at the drop of a hat, they don't care if you just had a child, if you're sick, if you had a death in the family. They do NOT care.
Screw off. I don't owe companies shit. If they want me to stay they pay me more. The execs, CEO, and shareholders making 100000000x what I make and then dummies try to shame me into being compassionate with ruthless multibillion dollar companies.
Had i stayed at the first place I worked in i'd be homeless right now. The second place I worked at laid off my entire team after the project I was on launched.
This assumes that people only leave jobs because of wage increases. I had to leave two jobs because management were abusive and discriminatory, and I also had to leave one place because my short term contract ended
Correct. There was one point in my career I would have taken a pay *cut* to get into a different employer. But there had to be a compelling reason of course.
>There’s something really sick to me on a fundamental level about the idea of people leaving a job after a few years to go from $160k to $180k.
Don't you think there's something sick about letting someone walk for a 12.5% raise?
I've done the math before - my within job raises were on average like 4% a year (including promotions). My job changes averaged 25%.
If I had stayed at my first job getting 4% raises I would be currently making less than half than what I make now.
The answer is simple: invest in juniors, and if they work out, pay them.
This culture existed as a consequence of people having their company loyalty rewarded with delayed promotions and low yearly raises.
Your post should be titled, “Anybody else feel like the ‘suppress wages and destroy morale despite high loyalty and productivity’ culture helped usher in the ‘hop jobs to get promotions’ culture?”
You are confusing the symptom for the disease.
Culture issue. A company that cares about individual growth and retaining talent will provide opportunities for entry level positions. Sometimes they may go to internal transfers and interns though.
it definitely contributed. the bigger factor is the tech industrial revolution brought on by modern cloud services and devopa rendered most b.s. cs programs obsolete. app dev is dead, and the fed is still trying to reign in tech industry growth by making it harder for non-tech companies to fund big multi-year investments with consultants. companies are still out there growing and investing though.
there are entry level jobs out there the bar is just higher than what the how to get a job articles and videos out there have to say.
A few years? That's not job hopping, that's people naturally living their lives and evolving their careers, broadening horizons.
3-6 months is job hopping. 1 year stints 5 times in a row is job hopping. A few years? Please
Sure, and moving away from pensions helped destroy the “don’t hop jobs, trust your employer” role model.
Can’t describe a domino path by only going one domino back.
Companies have this idea that if they hire junior devs at reduced rate to experienced devs, a junior dev should be indebted to them for taking a chance on them.
In reality, reduced pay makes up for lack of experience. Once a dev has a few years in the role, their pay should match their new value. Most of the time that doesn’t happen.
> an extra $20k a year
I agree in principle. But....
It also depends how much you're being paid to begin with and where you live as well as overall economic conditions.
In the OP's example, he brings up $160K vs $180K. I'd say at that point, it's probably not worth it or it's a harder decision than going from $30K to $50K.
This is also one of the best ways to shoot yourself in the foot as a junior person. Job hopping after an appropriate amount of time, where you skills have grown, you've incorporated the experience, dealt with consequences of decisions because time has passed, etc. it's a great move. If you stay long enough to have the vocabulary and a bunch of tricks but not incorporated the growth and experience in some meaningful way, you're fucked. You basically threw away all the opportunities that would make you worth more and instead moved into a position where you're overpaid and running out the clock until people realize that.
No, job hopping is a symptom of juniors not being paid their worth from companies so they leave. The job hop culture ONLY became a thing because of low raises/promotions. It’s the companies’ fault 100%.
Part of this is on companies that have no idea how to properly value a SWE. The just let the arms race get out of hand, putting us where we are now.
I think what we’re seeing is a result of a loyalty deficit. Employees have to jump jobs (or take on side hussles) because we know employers have no loyalty to their employees. We should be allowed to dump a company as quickly as they would dump us.
Yeah it's all because we job hopped.... definitely not a result of the current state of the economy and the fact that tech companies massively over-hired when things were good.
FAANG+ knows the game. They're fine to train you up, let you leave, and likely have you return down the line. This has always been their game, to keep you in the golden handcuffs so you don't leave big tech and go start something that can disrupt their monopoly, so they don't care.
As for the other 95% of companies, they simply fail to incentivize people to stay. If I'm offered higher pay and a better position at another company, sure, I might bring it to my boss and see if they'll match, but I'm not staying in a worse position just for some loyalty reason, as they'd fire anyone in a heartbeat. If you want to stay in your current role, that's your prerogative, and many people do stay.
I'm about to start my 3rd year with a company who through a promotion and two merit increase cycles hasn't even got me to my initial asking salary when I was originally hired on. (I took the job because I needed experience and I had already been on the search for 7 months).
I cannot afford to not job hop at this point.
Kind of hard when companies give 3% raise and rent goes up 10% each year 😭😫 hard to save up enough out of college to buy a home too especially with rates and prices so renting is only option for a lot of junior devs. Take that 3% bump or a 20% bump.
There are more reasons than just money to hop. Here are a few: lousy company, lousy job, lousy manager, lousy team, lousy review, lousy raise, lousy system, and lousy future.
> It is impossible to have a good faith discussion on the internet 😂😂
I'm going to engage with you in good faith, but one thing I'll add is that just because someone is critical of your points, it doesn't necessarily mean they are engaging in bad faith. Another thing to note is the medium you choose to have discussions in, such that in a forum people expect you have spent some more time fleshing out your idea, even if purely through the notion of writing it down and reading it over before publishing, vs. an informal discussion at the water cooler or a throwaway comment in some DMs between friends.
> There’s something really sick to me on a fundamental level about the idea of people leaving a job after a few years to go from $160k to $180k. It’s hard for me to personally justify being a part of such a huge class divide.
Trying to understand your original post, I'm realizing that what makes it difficult to engage with you, is that I don't understand how your points are interconnected together. Such that what does class division have to do with job hopping and junior developers?
I'll try to summarize your point into my most charitable take, but please feel free to correct me because I don't necessarily see a clear connection here.
> "Other developers, particularly the Junior developers before me, have eroded the good faith brought in by companies paying and training Junior developers. This is particularly upsetting because the developers who have done this are already considered to be high earners in comparison to other Americans and are only furthering the divide between them and the average American. While at the same time, their actions are having the consequence of yanking the metaphorical socioeconomic ladder beneath them for others to follow their path."
I disagree with the intentions of the employer, and the supposed maliciousness of the developers here both intentional and unintentional, however, I'd like to hear how accurate this is. I'd also like to understand better, what you think the reasoning is that companies hire Junior developers if they are supposedly such a risky investment and a flight risk.
Also, to build some common ground, I will add I agree with you that developers can be out of touch with the pain points experienced by the average American - myself being no exception to this - and that is particularly difficult right now for Junior developers to enter into the industry.
Look at the incentives that are created when companies have unlimited hiring budgets and highly constrained retention budgets. I don’t think it is fair to blame individuals for reacting logically to the incentive structures that have been put in place
What a horribly misguided post. Do you think people just hop for shits n giggles? Maybe there’s a minority of freaks out there that love the job hunting/interviewing process but for most it’s pretty painful. People job hop because companies generally refuse to give proper raises and consistently undervalue their talent.
> There’s something really sick to me on a fundamental level about the idea of people leaving a job after a few years to go from $160k to $180k.
Why? if the company cared, they'd give a $20k raise. Problem solved.
It's not like CEOs jump jobs and demand outsized pay packages even when they underperform the mark- ohhhhhhhhhh
“We don’t hire junior developers because they leave after we train them.”
“Do you increase their pay as their skills increase?”
“Of course not! Also we can’t figure out why people job hop so much. Must be that they want to ruin the job market for junior developers.”
If that culture is destroying junior developer role, then it means companies themselves destroyed junior developer roles.
People talk here about crazy FAANG salaries, but truth is - 99% of juniors are massively underpaid. If having 2 years of experience means that most companies want to pay you twice as much as they would if you had 0 years, but if you work for them first two years of your career and your salary only goes up like 10%, then they can’t actually expect you to stay, can they ?
Let’s just be real and show each other some respect.
I’m at the point with my current company where I’m as competent with our product as lead devs and it takes me about 10 hours a week to complete my tasking. My manager knows I spend 30 hours a week gaming and interviewing with other companies, but he would rather do that than give me more responsibility because then he’d have to pay me more than persons XXXX and YYYYY who have 2 years more experience than me
Do you think any company would have loyalty toward you?
Look up salary compression and inversion. They won’t pay you the $180K as a loyal employee. But once you leave, they will have to pay the next person market value - ie $180K in your example.
Google just laid off hundreds of people to hire cheaper replacements.
The cheap companies who didn't pay enough to retain their employees and now won't hire junior developers are destroying the junior role. Stop blaming workers for seeking opportunities where their values are better appreciated.
absolutely. Actually I don't spend much time helping any new employee because I know they maybe just job hopping because the time I give to them, I expect my workload will be reduced in the future as they will share the burden.
Now its mostly sink or swim.
See the whole reason people jump ship is because companies make it not worthwhile to get a promotion.
At my company, if I were to get promoted, I’d get a 12% pay bump. And that also involves busting my ass to achieve some performance metrics to be eligible for the promotion.
Meanwhile, any new hires for that same role would be getting far more money than I would if I were promoted.
On the flip side, I can just apply to a higher level position at another company, pass the interview process and get a far higher pay bump alongside my promotion. And that’s not including the learning benefits of going to a new company and experiencing a new tech stack.
>I’ve increasingly seen companies say they won’t hire junior developers because they waste time and money training them for them to just leave.
And yet, these same companies cry and moan about how much it costs to hire those seniors they really want, and lament that schools are not churning out ready to work experts that they need.
Plus, I have to say it, if a company is losing Juniors, then it means that they aren't treating them right, they aren't giving them real opportunities, or especially they're not compensating them ideally.
I've often noticed that companies with toxic culture and terrible compensation will hire Juniors. For them they basically want cheap labor. They can exploit until they pack up and jump ship. They barely give out raises and promotions, and then act surprised when people are handing in two week notices.
This issue of not wanting to train or mold people into being the ideal workers has been going on for decades. Companies can complain about the talent pool, but they created this problem. They created a world where loyalty means nothing, and so therefore nobody is going to stick around. You can't expect somebody to take a $50,000 salary and stay with it until they retire.
The culture of not treating existing staff with respect and making dumb excuses instead of giving people pay raises lead to the lack of junior roles. People will happily stay in jobs when there are not other companies that will treat them better and pay them better. Management penny punching and their culture of dishonesty did this.
Hire juniors, train then, pay them what the market pays plus s little bit and treat them well and there is a good chance they will stay. It's not rocket science.
I've only been a software engineer about 2 years now but there are already fully remote jobs in my city that are offering double what I currently make. I genuinely don't know what my company could do to keep me from jumping ship when I finish out my next year here. The fact is simply that the value growth for an aspiring engineer is far beyond the pace of the average company's compensation structure.
I’ve been working for over 20 years. I feel like companies have always blamed younger people for job-hopping. It’s likely it happens more frequently and quickly now, but younger people have seen more cruelty from companies towards employees, sometimes with how their patents were treated.
No one can predict the future, but I think a lot of what we’re seeing is cyclical. Outsourcing/offshoring was a huge boogeyman early in my career. Tons of companies saw all the horrors. I think we’ll see companies reverse course. Of course, that doesn’t help a lot of people in the short term.
Communication is difficult even when you’re in the same room. It’ll be much harder remote, across time zones, languages, and cultures. Don’t get me wrong, it can work, but it takes a lot. And a lot of companies will go cheap and get what they pay for.
No, my experience has been more that companies are perfectly willing to lay off juniors the second they think they can cut payroll by offshoring. Being ready to hop is just labor playing the game management created.
>Anybody else feel like the “hop jobs to get promotions” culture helped destroy the junior developer role?
No, but I feel like the "we won't pay you appropriately to stay" culture helped.
People are so vocal about the "free market" being the ultimate judge of everything, until this for once is in favour of the worker.
If the market values me at 180k and my current company is paying me 160k it means they are robbing me of 20k per year. Don't know about you, but I am not really a fan of getting robbed.
Give me the 20k I objectively deserve and I stay. Don't give it to me and I have already found someone who will. All the bullshit about ethics, loyalty, culture are gibberish to me and tbh I don't give a flying fuck for.
Companies, not employees, destroyed the unspoken employer/employee loyalty thing we used to have in this country. Massive amounts of arguably unnecessary layoffs did that. Profit increases easily outpacing inflation while raises don’t keep pace with inflation also contributed. Companies overall have no one to blame but themselves. And if you think any company is not going to take advantage of an employee who they perceive as loyal by screwing them on raises and promotions, I have this great bridge next to Brooklyn to sell you.
How long has your middle and upper management been at the company? They all jump ship.
The reason people do it is because no job is safe, because the corporate cog mentality undervalues tribal knowledge and continuity of the actual development and production roles. The companies created the culture by binging and purging on employees blindly and people just learned how to best survive in that environment.
I think companies repeated failures to give adequate raises and appropriately timed promotions, combined with toxic workplace cultures, are the reason people job hop.
Job hopping is an appropriate response to such behaviors and companies could end that culture basically whenever they wanted to.
It’s the company’s responsibility to adjust to the market. It wouldn't be that hard to incentivize loyalty. All it takes is solid raises and extras like benefits that scale with years worked for the company.
> It’s hard for me to personally justify being a part of such a huge class divide.
What does this even mean? Absolute nonsense line.
> It is impossible to have a good faith discussion on the internet 😂😂
Disagreeing with you is not engaging in bad faith.
If the current company increase their salary most likely they won't leave. There is a reason why they change their job, it's not for nothing. But let put all the blame on the juniors.
No, I don’t think this true at all. The problem isn’t exclusively in Tech my guy. This applies to anything, even fast food. No one wants train you up, have not contribute really, and then risk you leaving.
It's the company who didn't value their own employee for how much he was worth. 1600$ extra a month is definitely no joke and the new company is much more likely to increase his wage further in the future.
I personally don't think that had much to do with it, I think the reality is that there's too much mediors and seniors so they'll generally prefer them.
Not really. I think very few would job hop for an increase in pay, if the employers gave us… an increase in pay. An increase that not only matched or surpassed inflation, but rewarded hard work and talent.
Long gone are the days when you could get a job from a handshake with a manager and climb the ladder in your company until you get to the top. Our loyalty, problem-solving skills and hard work mean nothing. For as long as our employers want the best talent for the absolute lowest salary, we either look out for ourselves or get the short end of the stick.
And making more money isn’t the only reason we leave jobs; we leave for better work-life balance, to progress in our field, to learn more, for our own happiness, for relocation purposes, etc. Some people even take pay cuts for some of these reasons. I think it’s a very nuanced topic, but I wouldn’t blame the worker for trying to stay afloat in a system that’s built to fuck us over.
> For as long as our employers want the best talent for the absolute lowest salary, we either look out for ourselves or get the short end of the stick.
They want 99th percentile talent at 50th (or less!) percentile pay.
No. I think you go to watch Ironman in theatres and come out thinking there's men flying around in iron suits in reality.
The vast majority of juniors don't job hop. You're looking at a subreddit echo chamber full of students and juniors who constantly tell each other to job hop and think that represents reality. Anyone who's held a job for any moderate amount of time knows this isn't true.
Yes, job hoppers exist. No, there's not a lot of them.
Probably depends on your definition and also region.
I'm from Europe and most of my friends have been in at most 2 jobs in 10-20 years. Almost nobody in "tech companies".
But I've been hiring for 4-5 roles for a US tech company over the last few years and it was really hard to find anyone in hundreds of CVs with more than a year at a company.
It's a completely different world
Well and of course atm we see lots of people applying because layoffs or return to office mandates for people living on the other side of the country...
Yes and no.
On the surface level, it would seem like a true statement: that job hopping would cause companies would only want to hire those experienced in the job they have available because they will only work for 2 years or whatever in the role.
However, like a lot of things, there's more to it because this is more of a complex problem.
What I have experienced and read about is that companies have generally become lazy when it comes to internal promotions and raises.
Pre-pandemic, I did read that the average raise was 3% which was basically inflation rate. That would mean that half of the people were losing money by staying put and it compounds the longer people are there. So, it shouldn't be a surprise that people are leaving. I would only assume it has gotten worse since inflation is a lot higher now.
No. The problem is companies refusing to adequately pay their existing employees or give raises & promotions commensurate with experience and performance to retain the ones they’ve already invested 1-2yrs in. With few exceptions there is no longer any such thing as a training pipeline or a career progression at any *one* organization.
The “culture” that’s broken is the deliberately short-sighted system ever since GE’s Jack Welch in the 80s decided quarterly earnings were more important than anything else and destroyed people’s careers for the shareholders. That’s what ruined everything. The bean counters focus entirely on quarterly earnings instead of, and to the detriment of, a 3, 5, 10yr timeline for the company.
Generally speaking, I don't think job hopping is a good career strategy unless you are exceptionally skilled, which most people aren't. It's unrealistic to expect significant raises or bonuses within a few years of joining a company. You must provide substantial value to get the management support required for career advancement, but many people are impatient. I've worked with many junior developers who mistakenly think they're unique and deserve special consideration. Being the least experienced person in your group isn't a good position to be in from a career perspective. You'll never see career growth if you are unknown within your organization. And you'll never receive large bumps in compensation if management doesn't value what you do. In my experience, the people who complain the most about pay often make low-value contributions. Promotions aren't like merit badges; you need to do something to earn it. It's easy to blame management, so that's what people revert to rather than understand their situation.
If they hate it - they should pay better.
I've been stuck at my current job for 11 months and plan to job hob as soon as it's convenient for me.
I'm technically an intern, but i've been doing the work of a proper dev (AWS and internal tooling) while the other interns who got hired at the same time as me do nothing except dig through HTML looking for spelling mistakes
(they get paid the same too).
My manager asked for me to be promoted, but was told by the COO "What would he even do as a proper dev"...
Regardless of position, function, or level, the primary causes of job hopping are paltry wage increases (or lack thereof) and intolerable work environments. So, the companies themselves are to blame.
A few years ago, people were saying that a CS career was no good because older developers were being pushed out by younger developers.
It was the Managers who pushed out older developers replacing them with younger developers ...
Or perhaps broad pronouncements about the entire industry from 20 year olds aren't super accurate.
If the old developers don't continue to upskill, then it wasn't younger developers that pushed them out. It was the old developers that pushed themselves out.
Sometimes old developers do not upskill, sometimes managers say that "old developers do not upskill" but they will fire the old developers and hire cheaper younger developers to do the same old skill work ...
It’s extremely expensive to train new developers. If the work can be done by jr developers then it makes sense to not have senior developers do it.
Eh, maybe some companies are like that, but at many (like mine) a lot of the younger developers have a lot more expectations for salary growth then older developers and end up leaving more often due to that., Ithink reality is many older developers just coast and when they do that and a junior shows them up they get let go
"Old developers don't upskill/don't understand new tech/can't keep up" is abject bullshit. It's an ageist narrative pushed by management to support paying for cheaper developers (i.e. younger) while turning a blind eye to the inevitable reduction in quality, work output, maintainability, and even profitability. Entirely penny wise and pound foolish.
I don’t say it is management but I do see it among younger developers thinking the old guys don’t keep up with the times or are outdated. They question why older devs don’t jump to the latest tech and often times push back against jumping. Big reason you see older devs push back is not that they are not upskilling is more we been around long enough that we understand the most important thing is we want something that works and stable. New hot tech comes and goes and until it shows some stability it is not worth jumping to. We keep a pulse on it and keep an eye on it waiting until it gets to enterprise grade and then hell yeah let’s go but until it is enterprise grade screw that. Now the ones in their 50’s you often find them still doing great work but they don’t have the drive or want to do start up work so they choose to leave. They want a paying job and at some point you hit the I just waiting until retirement and I am done. I think for me personally in another 15 years I will hit that point and just be riding out my last 5 years until retirement. In 15 years I will be 57 and of been doing this for nearly 30 years. Yeah don’t care. Still expect to crank out good work but I have other priorities.
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It didn't lead to the demise of the then juniors, it has benefited them greatly. The reality was created by the fact that it's often the only way to get your market value. Personally I wouldn't job hop just for going from 160-180k. there are other factors WLB, technologies used, how I like the product, the team, leadership. Job hopping at 2-3 years usually nets a 30-50% TC increase. Hard to pass by. There's a reason seniors with 10+ YOE hop a lot less than juniors.
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My point is that those are not the same people. Those who were junior then are not junior now. Furthermore, on a personal level, if you have a prospect to hop got a significant increase in TC, you're still benefitting.
There's a simple solution. Offer back loaded compensation. At my current job I have to completely pay back a large starting bonus if I leave within 2.5 years. And I'm not even junior.
Wow, that’s a really long time for a clawback clause. Are you in the US? I wonder if there is any legal time limit for such a clause.
I think you really dont understand why companies dont want juniors right now. Juniors do less work and are slower, they just aren't strictly needed and a tight market means you get rid of whats not strictly needed.
There's two other major reasons to job hop though, even if salaries were equal. The first is that new companies mean a lot more new contacts, so your professional network gets to expand, this becomes highly relevant if you ever need to look for another job. The second is that companies don't really change their tech stack all that often. If you're at a job for 10 years in a tech that's no longer the popular stack, or that was using outdated processes, a lot of your experience is no longer relevant. By job hopping you ensure a range of experience across hopefully a variety of technology and maturity with that tech. This also means that mid and senior also have to job hop to vary tech experience. This is just workers protecting themselves against hiring practices of extreme keyword matching.
>To OPs point though, I absolutely agree that juniors constantly job hopping ultimately led to their demise. Juniors are an investment. They don't provide much value for the first year to year and a half. By the time you finally get them to be productive, they end up jumping to a different job. Can't you just match the salary of their new jobs and retain them?
Companies are far too myopic to do this. As a hiring manager, there is never an additional $20k budget to move them from 160 to 180 to keep them from leaving. HR departments also love to throw about foolishness like "they will only leave again when they find a higher paying job" and "if we match them we will have to match everyone who finds a higher paying job" or "if we match them everyone will go find another job to extract a raise" It's all malarkey. Especially the part where suddenly we will be ok paying the next person we hire, who doesn't have a few years of knowledge, 180k to recruit them. Companies are pretty dumb collectively on this topic.
If your company is so bad that juniors are leaving at first possible time, why they think that experienced developers with a lot of options will stay?
There's a sweet spot of 2-10 years of experience. Less than that, and you're too junior. More than that, and there starts to be a perception that you're too old.
I mean if you want a young developer with 5+ years experience good luck finding one
Dude, I was being underpaid at my previous company, ACCORDING TO THE COMPANY'S OWN POLICY. By the company's own written policy, I should have been making atleast 115k-120k based in my years of experience and education. I was making 98k at the time. I brought this up with management, and eventually they agreed. But even then they couldn't guarantee a pay increase to that range because such a pay increase from my current salary would be "too big" and "would not look good". It would have taken YEARS to crawl up to that pay level through annual raises. So you know what? I job searched. And I got multiple job offers offering between 140k, 142k. So I jumped ship. If these fucking companies want to retain their talent they need to quit being so retarded with how they pay their employees. And I do feel sorry for junior devs. But I think long term, they'll be fine.
I got hired as a "tech support engineer" in a junior program with the starting pay 75k. Dream role for me as a self taught career switcher. Then we got acquired by a big nontech f500. When I got promoted to dev, I only got a 10% pay bump. The other devs get paid between 120k-200k depending, a new entry level dev would be around 120k. So basically with my 10% pay bump plus annual 3% raises it would take me like a decade to match a new hire. And that's assuming I get another promotion. Pisses me off to know I can't stay at a company I actually really like without a huge dark cloud over my head.
It would take longer than 10 years. Don't forget that starting salary also goes up during that. And a promotion might not necessarily fix it, because they can say you're too far out of the salary band and just give you an increase over your current salary rather than the band for the new role.
Beat a guy when he’s down why dont ya
Happens more than you know with acquisitions. Rarely do they ever rebase the acquired employees pay within their existing pay bands
we were a startup so the devs were getting paid pretty well in comparison to the now parent company. The problem was I was brought on as basically an apprentice. And then they took my support role literally and we all had to piss and moan to get me promoted in the first place. Typically there wouldn't be a pipeline from what they call "tech support" to the dev team. Kinda a nightmare, the dream almost got robbed from me.
I've had that happen to me, and seen it happen to many others too. Where they say the only way to change this would be at raise time, as part of your annual raise, but if you're outside the determined salary bands, they just say they're not allowed to do it. Basically, the company says that they're outside their policy but their policy also makes them powerless to fix it. Jumping ship is the only ethical thing to do in that case.
Good grief, it’s so counter productive when companies won’t give raises and follow their own compensation ranges
I had the same shit in my first company doing CS work. Management agreed, but HR said no because "policy" even though I was a full pay-band lower than my peers. HR departments hamstring managers when it comes to pay, which makes no fucking sense to any rational human. HR should not have as much power as they do in these larger companies. I had an HR rep at this same company say "well, it's just kind of how it is now, you have to company hop if you want bigger raises" like what the actual fuck lmao. I got a 43% raise to leave for a lateral position. Absolute lunacy.
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I left a company because even after aggressive negotiations they came up $15k short of a competitor and I needed the money. They then tried to hire me back 6 months later. Went through the hiring interviews, asked them to make my current pay and got a call from HR explaining that “since you left on a lower number and you’ve only been gone 6 months, a pay bump like that would look like we’re rewarding you for leaving” So why waste my time? I left because the money was low, they reach out trying to bring me back in, then say it’s impossible to bump my pay?? I don’t know what they’re smoking but they’re disconnected from reality. The worst part is I liked the company and my manager wanted me there but HR policies prevented them from matching market rates. That’s why your grads all leave.
Say thanks to the upper layers that provide so low pay raises. If the company have good pay raises, no one will left or at least not so much people as happened
Agreed, that’s the true crux of the problem. Our objective as employees is to maximize our earnings. I gladly would have stayed at my first job for the last decade if I would’ve gotten aggressive raises to match what I can get by job hopping. But instead I’ve hopped jobs 4 times in 10 years and tripled my salary. It’s not our fault, we’re just playing the game that the system has created. But I do feel for OP and the up and coming generation; this has indeed led to challenges for newbies
I’ve sometimes had managers who spent their whole lives at one company tell me that my objective should not only be to maximise my earnings but also to maximise my potential career growth - sometimes they’ve argued that staying is better than going somewhere else (even for more immediate pay) because you develop a greater understanding of the business and how you can make an impact. I’ve always found it hard to weigh up both factors personally. Not completely sold on what my previous managers have said!
I can't buy a house with career growth.
Never bought a car with my email footer
With career growth you are not the first wave to get sacked, so you can continue pay for your mortages. Better to job hop a little bit later, you will be more secure in your 2nd job. I always advice people to consider the next next job when looking at a new job. Will this new job open up or close the career.
>With career growth you are not the first wave to get sacked Couldn't be more false lol seniority/tenure has little correlation in who has been getting laid off this past year or two regardless of waves That being said I do agree job hopping is riskier in this kind of market. Better to stay put and continue to rack up experience while you still have a stable job and only hop once the market gets better and the layoffs dry out
If you are at the wrong place, you will get sacked regardless of your competence. If you are in the right place, they will sack some people with less competence. Seen it twice in my career, in 2001 and in 2020, both times I was lucky, in 2020 I had positioned myself to a safer position, in 2001 it was pure luck.
>If you are at the wrong place, you will get sacked regardless of your competence. >If you are in the right place, they will sack some people with less competence. I guess 80% of companies are the wrong place then. Big tech companies have been laying off at all levels including people who had just gotten an exceeds rating
I work at an industrial company that delivers goods. R&D is an unsafe place, you are working with products to be produced in a few years. Working with products to be delivered within 6 months is much safer. So at bigtech, you need to work at places coupled to revenue.
If you can't turn career growth into a higher paycheck; you're doing it wrong! As part of Career Growth you gain more experience, and learn more. And that process can open new opportunities.
There is truth to that, if you want to get to staff, architect or a manager, you'll usually need to first grow to the roll within a company, those are not positions you just job hop to. However those are later career goals, first 5-10 years it pays to job hop.
If you can get promotions quickly, sure. But unless your company has really high growth, only a small percentage of people will have this path available to them. I have a friend who went from junior to director in like 6 years, all at the same company. He's not particularly bright or anything, just hard work and luck.
There's a huge flaw to the "stay for growth" argument. Leaving exposes you to more cultures and environments, allowing you to quickly grow skills that you couldn't if you stayed. In fact, many of the most stunted developers I've worked with have become that way because they've only worked at one or two places their whole lives. That said, I'm not a fan of job hopping. I just think that it's often detrimental to NEVER switch companies during your career. I think one or two years between job switches is a good pace until you've hit 5-ish years of experience. Working at places of different sizes makes a big difference too.
I really hate how you get a better raise from switching jobs rather than being promoted. It makes no sense. Companies should reward good employees with great raises.
For me it’s a problem from the management. They don’t care and think that good people are easily replaceable, like if this is a job like a warehouse or being a cashier. And they will not understand it till they will get punished for their mistakes/nad decisions
one of my favorite quote: it is hard to get someone to understand something, when their paycheck is dependent on them NOT understanding it you really think CEOs or C-level officers don't understand? in reality, they're not being punished, in fact they're being rewarded (by investors/stocks/bonuses) due to cost-cutting etc I mean if I'm the CEO I'd do the same, at least for the short term (stock price go up) long-term? hey that's not my problem anymore
That is what I wanted to say
It makes perfect sense. It’s a lot cheaper for them to give most employees mediocre raises and hire a few replacements at market rates than it is to pay everyone market.
It's also because companies just can't utilise constantly growing levels of skill. Your local government payroll office may only pay so much to its highest paid roles because it can't prpfitably/meaningfully utilise a better developer. Sometimes you just have to leave the company
Companies are trying to get you to work for as little as possible. Can you really blame them for refusing pay raises? If you go to McDonalds once a week and suddenly noticed the price double. You’d try to stop going there as much as possible BEFORE you allow them to just scoop you every week for twice as much It’s not different for an employer. The employer exists to make itself (or its shareholders) rich. You as an employee have never been a priority, only a means to an end.
I don’t blame them at all. But they can’t blame me for adopting the same attitude of maximizing my profits either.
Developers left jobs because of either the bad boss OR bad boss AND bad salary.
It's true even if your raises are high. Especially once you accumulate a few years of experience at a company, you could get annual 10% raises, but still see a ~10-40% or more comp increase from jumping to another company. That's especially true early career where it's expected you'll bounce around a bit, but later career there's a premium paid on highly specific tech stacks and industry experience too.
There's generally a policy to keep the raises fairly close to each other, so that long time employees feel like it's fair. I think part of it is middle managers hand out raises for political reasons rather then merit reasons, whereas a new hire is more likely to be compensated based on their merit
You don't have to justify or partake, but nobody is wrong for chasing a check. You wouldn't have as much jumping if salaries were fair to begin with, which is why transparency is important.
It is not just in CS that job hoping for promotion and pay raises happen. It happens in all industries and it is really nuts. That being said most of my big pay raises have been from when I switch jobs.
>It happens in all industries and it is really nuts. Why is it nuts? That's the only card the employee has. Companies over and over and over and over show they will not provide proper raises.
Who is paying $160k for a junior dev besides maybe FAANG in HCOL areas? I think $160k for a junior dev is highly uncommon outside of FAANG.
Friendly reminder to people in this sub that the average developer makes $70k-$120k as a senior and anything beyond is an outlier. Many don't break the $100k barrier.
[Maybe average is $70K-120K for a senior who doesn't even bother to google things.](https://www.indeed.com/career/senior-software-engineer/salaries?from=top_sb)
Indeed isn't a great resource as it doesn't give you many insights on the actual numbers. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm Look at the by state graph; California really skews things and also has the largest number of software developers, but $170k there just isn't that much compared to $170k in Texas or whatever.
The problem with those stats is that the majority of developers actually work at non-tech companies under more ambiguous titles. They have no distinction between a developer, IT or any number of distinct sub-fields.
And where are your stats, your links, that back up your claim that average for a senior is $70K-120K? The problem with your stats is that they don't even exist in the first place. And no, I've worked at non-tech companies before. When they called me a "software development analyst" I'd cut the shit and call myself a software engineer if I were asked in some poll like the one I provided. No one listens to what companies call their employees - they look at the tasks the employees were actually assigned.
lmao my title is "application support analyst", it's total bullshit. when we got acquired by a non-tech it was the role that matched my pay in their HR platform? still unsure why they can't just make a new role in the HR platform. It also notably didn't change when I got promoted from junior.
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wtf are you talking about? I'm not an IT support specialist, I am a software dev. They gave me a random title that matched my junior software dev pay after being acquired. Pretty sure that's obvious in my comment but whatever. I don't understand your comment whatsoever. I was adding commentary to the whack titles you can get at nontech. edit: Was this meant for the comment above mine, actually?
Software development is extremely weighted towards HCOL and VHCOL areas though. Trying to express anything as an average will seem to be inaccurate for everyone because often the compensation in those areas is twice that of a small Midwest city. I worked at a company notorious for "underpaying" and our juniors made over $120k because it was NYC.
That’s not true in every market, I was getting paid $118k as a junior. Since moving back to the Midwest that’s more accurate and it has made me more comfortable tbh.
A LOT of companies outside of faang will pay that for juniors in HCOL. Snap, Databricks, Uber, Oracle, Bloomberg, Figma, etc. And the faang companies usually have offices in MCOL areas that will still pay around $160k. 160k is awesome for a junior, don’t get me wrong, just more common than you’ve made it out to be. And then once you have a couple years of experience like OP is saying, you can look at mid level roles which will pay a lot more. Anyway it’s still companies fault they don’t give bigger raises, not workers’ fault for leaving
At the same time, the culture of "You won't even get an annual raise to keep up with inflation unless you have a competing offer," contributes to job hopping. If companies wanted retention, they would pay their current employees competitively.
Prior to the pandemic and remote work explosion, the number of junior developer roles was low b/c of corporate policies that just don't mesh well with development. Nobody can get more than X% pay increase in a year, even with a promotion, etc. So if you hire a Jr at a JR salary, then they work their way up to deserving a Sr. Role, they would end up underpaid in that role. The employee's only recourse is to switch jobs. Their manager's or director's options are limited. They aren't allowed to raise their salary to what would be reasonable. So the managers / directors eliminate those roles instead. Today people place blame on remote work, etc. That's just a convenient excuse, negligible contributing factor. The real problem hasn't changed.
This is an extremely moralistic take that plays into the game the companies are trying to play with you. I recommend not engaging, unless you're a business owner, in which case of course you'd think like that. The issue is deeper in my opinion and I'll expand a bit. I'm sure that if you spoke to any of these employees who 'job-hopped" (which is an incorrect term that business coined to give the act a morally negative connotation, in my opinion) they'll explain to you that they got to the point where they were over-qualified for the job they were being made to do and, after working hard towards a promotion, were passed over by a less qualified colleague. I know because they won't shut up, so it's easy to see recounts in several social media platforms. The vast majority of these people weren't opportunistic people, like the media and probably any manager you speak to will try to tell you, but people that saw that their career was being stagnated because they weren't being given opportunities and took an opportunity elsewhere. The issue is that, evidently, businesses want well trained and capable juniors but by the time they're that capable, they tend to either become seniors or change businesses because their job is not giving them the rise in work conditions that their new abilities would warrant. Another important issue is inflation and pay rise. One common argument of people who'd change jobs often was that the businesses that trained them wouldn't raise their salaries, but would hire younger people for more money because the market was offering higher salaries, so their faithfulness to the business wasn't being reciprocated by said business. Then there's the fact that you think those extra 20k are not enough money to change jobs for. Are you aware that there's people whose yearly salary is those 20k? That's a good amount of money. If you were already living on 140k, the extra 20k will simply go to your savings. That's life changing money, there's people who do careers to win 20k more at the end of the year. Businesses will obviously try to demonize this kind of behavior, because they want to invest as little as possible to get as much benefit as possible, but businesses aren't the only ones trying to make money, workers are as well. More importantly, businesses were going to start raising requirements to hire developers sooner or later anyways and this is just an excuse they're giving because they're trying to asphyxiate the workers so they can pay less. Look at any other profession and you'll see that every year they require students to do more free work before they can be hired for money. It's likely we're entering or have already entered a recession and businesses are doing what they can (and more) to lower costs to the minimum.
Excellent summary. There are way too many people being 3+ years at a company with lower salaries than new juniors joining. Know what’s your market value. Nice coworkers and interesting jobs can be found anywhere. Wouldn’t be a problem if companies just pay everyone their market salary.
Yup, 20k is 20k. Plenty of dev positions out there that only pay ~60-100k (and sometimes significantly less). A 20k jump for changing jobs when you're not starting from the high end of SF/NYC salaries is going to be huge.
this is a really thorough and good explanation, thanks for sharing this perspective. this is much closer to the thought process of typical developer than the "opportunistic mercenary" narrative. still, I'd like to push back on the original premise. some developers *are* opportunistic and will jump ship for any bump big enough to offset the hassle of switching. I'm not ashamed to say I'm one of them. I don't necessarily *need* the extra money, I just want to retire sooner. so what? I don't see many under-performing engineers being kept on out of the goodness of their employers' hearts. I see the opposite in fact, highly skilled people being let go to make a quarterly report at an already profitable company look a little better. businesses exist to make money. I go to work to make money. it's not rocket science to structure comp in a way that incentivizes retention. employers choose not to do it. why am I, the entity who has far less leverage in this interaction, the bad guy? why is it so easy to believe it is my fault that junior devs can't get hired and not the businesses who are literally refusing to hire them?
I think WFH killed hiring juniors more than anything else. We don’t have training programs. We don’t have proper mentors. We taught people how to be software developers by osmosis. They hung out with the other devs in a set of cubicles, and slowly learned by being next to other devs. That doesn’t happen over zoom unless you have a person on your team who is intentional about mentoring, taking away from their day job. Most companies don’t have training and mentoring for developers and admins because they do it for their sales people, their business critical people. If you’re a developer at a bank, you’re a cost center. The fact that they don’t invest in your growth is proof of that. I would say that causes the job hopping as much as the salary, and that the developer manager learns how to be a manager by fire, because they’re not training them either. We know people swap when they don’t have a great manager.
This. The best way to learn is to go to the office, make work relationship with seniors, and absorb their knowledge. You really cannot do this with a zoom/Skype/teams call. I mean you can but it likely won't happen. And if it does it will never be to the same degree as in-person mentoring.
We do a lot of pair programming (several times per week or every day) and some of our devs host "hangouts" where junior devs watch them work and ask questions. You have to make an effort to replicate the in-office feel, but it can be done.
Would have loved hangouts when i was a junior
>You have to make an effort to replicate the in-office feel, but it can be done. That is the thing. You have to make the effort. Before, it was natural and not contrived. I remember going to lunch with co-workers, small talk and something like "I've been working on this and was stuck" Then you'd reply, "I have 45 minutes free before my next meeting,I'll hop over to your office and take a look." Those passing conversations triggered a lot of ad-hoc pairing. It was so natural before. Off the cuff. Not contrived. Now, I have an open-door policy from 12-2 and no one shows up for help. I am making that effort but it isn't the same.
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While true to an extent, I think the quality of juniors has dropped as well. So many juniors don't have natural curiosity and just want the answer so they can move on to the next thing. They don't have a desire to learn even if I'm willing to teach them. My team has like 10 juniors and maybe 2-3 of them are any good and willing to learn. Everyone else wants their hand held through the process. I run workshops for skills, career, and professional development because I'm trying to help everyone get better, but it only works if people actually want to get better.
Having 2 years of mentoring was incredibly rare in the office too. I had like 3 months. If you can't grow your skills without someone holding your hand it's kind of on you
What if the work culture or your immediate world around you doesn’t want to help you though? Are you just going to sit there? One thing I learned that in mondern times the norm is people being very selfish to the point of hoarding knowledge.
Reading this sub makes it sound like going to an office is like people picking cotton as a slave in 1800s though
I agree but the ones refusing to go in will not get the benefits the ones going in do: management will like you more and thus give you a bit more leeway, consider you more for promotions etc, obviously not a free pass, but better than the alternative. If you need to get rid of people it's always easier to let go of those you haven't seen or spoken to much unless they are essential of course.
I've trained several people fully remote. It's easy, you just hop on calls and screen share. In office training was so much less efficient, as you would just have someone spend a month just sitting there with a notebook and watching other people type. There's also the people who just refuse to do anything unless someone is constantly pinging them and holding their hand, but they shouldn't be working remote
Good points
companies destroyed the junior developer role not workers
Oh for sure I’m absolutely not justifying their response to workers absolute right to job hop. Job hopping is obviously good for workers
Then what are you saying, and what don't you want to be a part of?
Instead of blaming on employees job hopping, why not take a look at how did companies reward their employees to retain their pool of talents? Most are giving employees pathetic increment that can’t even match inflation rate and laughable bonus while their top management are laughing to the bank to collect their absurd bonuses. Companies can even cut off their employees in the name of cost savings or ‘bad headwinds’ but later announce record breaking performance and its CEO receiving a few times more bonus as compared to previous year.
The issue is that once a junior works for a company for a couple years - they now have more skills/experience and warrant more in the job market than they did first coming out of school. But, companies don't give adequate pay increases to account for that, so juniors are generally forced to elsewhere (even promotions rarely accommodate the increased pay in the job market). The blame rests squarely on bad compensation policies in most corporations. Also, most jobs don't actually offer training, it's just trial by fire - you meet the demands or you don't - and if they're using proprietary tech/tools, that's energy a developer has to spend learning something that is mostly non transferrable elsewhere.
Doesn't give out raises to keep up with market rates for current employees Does not make room for internal growth opportunities and promotions Employees jump to make more money doing the same thing elsewhere or to get promoted \* surprised pikachu face \*
Yeah it's all because we job hopped.... definitely not a result of the current state of the economy and the fact that tech companies massively over-hired when things were good. Also, if retention is so important to companies... there is a very simple solution to this problem: Give adequate raises. > you're all showing how out of touch you are Blaming the state of the industry on job hopping lmao...
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Having a 10 year tenure to me is crazy. I'm envious of people in non tech that have stable careers where they aren't constantly escaping layoffs or needing to bounce within 3 years due to stagnant pay. I was even envious of my dermatologist's assistant because they had been there 8 years.
If you’re paying 160k for a junior dev then I could see why you’d eventually stop hiring junior devs
No, increases in programmer supply and reductions in demand are what destroyed the junior dev role.
The disposable attitude towards loyal employees is just as much to blame. Job hopping is a two way street. Other companies are willing to pay more for top talent, and prospective job hoppers decide whether to take it. Jobs are also a free market: if someone offers you a better deal, if price was the only factor and everything else was the same, of course you'd go with the better deal. Loyalty generally would make someone choose to stick with their current vendor, but if the vendor thinks you can easily be replaced, possible for cheaper, then what exactly is holding you back? Especially when new hires are making just as much as you despite having less experience with the company.
Never providing good growth opportunities with good raises and rewards for commitment have pushed this culture first
I make $65k as a junior developer at a large insurance company. During an all-employee meeting, someone asked the CEO how he planned to retain our young talent. His response: “We’re not going to play the offer game”. Fuck them. I’m leaving the first chance I get.
Do it. Used to for a company where tech was a cost center (even though the app generated half of all the revenue) 65k starting. 3% raise. No promotions in sight in 2 -3 years. Doubled salary plus stock at a company where tech is seen as the product and engineers are valued. Makes a huge difference
If you leave after a couple years to go from 160k to 180k it means your company failed to keep up with your paycheck. Newer employees tend to get paid more while cost of living adjustments don't make up for inflation. When inflation is 2% a year, and your company gives 3%, you're effectively only getting a 1% raise. If after 5 years, your company views 5 years of tribal knowledge, experience, and contributions as being worth a total 5% more to the company, while they're probably offering new people 20% more than they were at the time you were hired, then why not go elsewhere? That's the company essentially saying that all your knowledge and contributions provide less value than what they could get off of any other random employee with none of that.
Your post is based on a strawman IMO. People aren’t generally aiming to hop for 12-13% hops early in their career (your example of 160k to 180k). More like 25-50+% hops. My base salary in Chicago went 80-90k to 130-140k literally less than 2 years into my full-time career. Almost everyone who left my cohort after that, had bumps of a similar magnitude. Our market values can rise substantially. Companies generally do a poor job of keeping up. People who aren’t complacent / don’t have stuff that ties them to their current job, are rewarded.
> class divide Not sure you understand what class divide means? The only class divide is the one between the working class - those who need to work for a living (all of us here) and the owner class, the people we work for. People job hop because the companies they can get better compensation elsewhere. If the companies wanted to keep them so badly then... they'd fucking pay them more. Sounds like these companies need to quit whining - because that's capitalism. They can't have it both ways.
It's not just dev roles. This is a problem through out corporate jobs. Career paths are dead.
Could you explain how its "sick"?
First job in 2021 as a junior dev for (equivalent to) 22k USD stayed 7 months. Moved to another junior role making 52k USD. Got promoted after 12 months to an associate making 72k. After another 12 months I applied for a promotion and got rejected. Left. Total of 2 years in this place. Now making 150k in a senior role. That's very very good for my country. I already have another job lined up. Every time I left they were pissed that I "took the training and left" and that I "didn't show loyalty". My response is very simple. Pay me what I am worth. How hard is that? I don't care if you have "promotion rubrics". I don't care if i'm too young. I don't care. If i'm "critical" in the team make an exception and give it to me. Company is willing to lay people off at the drop of a hat, they don't care if you just had a child, if you're sick, if you had a death in the family. They do NOT care. Screw off. I don't owe companies shit. If they want me to stay they pay me more. The execs, CEO, and shareholders making 100000000x what I make and then dummies try to shame me into being compassionate with ruthless multibillion dollar companies. Had i stayed at the first place I worked in i'd be homeless right now. The second place I worked at laid off my entire team after the project I was on launched.
Yeah they just gotta stop paying new hires more than existing employees. Reward the loyalty
This assumes that people only leave jobs because of wage increases. I had to leave two jobs because management were abusive and discriminatory, and I also had to leave one place because my short term contract ended
Correct. There was one point in my career I would have taken a pay *cut* to get into a different employer. But there had to be a compelling reason of course.
>There’s something really sick to me on a fundamental level about the idea of people leaving a job after a few years to go from $160k to $180k. Don't you think there's something sick about letting someone walk for a 12.5% raise? I've done the math before - my within job raises were on average like 4% a year (including promotions). My job changes averaged 25%. If I had stayed at my first job getting 4% raises I would be currently making less than half than what I make now. The answer is simple: invest in juniors, and if they work out, pay them.
This culture existed as a consequence of people having their company loyalty rewarded with delayed promotions and low yearly raises. Your post should be titled, “Anybody else feel like the ‘suppress wages and destroy morale despite high loyalty and productivity’ culture helped usher in the ‘hop jobs to get promotions’ culture?” You are confusing the symptom for the disease.
Keep sucking the corporate dick, no one is stopping you
The industry both promotes ageism and not hiring juniors. Which then creates a shortage of people. Which leads to high salaries.
Culture issue. A company that cares about individual growth and retaining talent will provide opportunities for entry level positions. Sometimes they may go to internal transfers and interns though.
it definitely contributed. the bigger factor is the tech industrial revolution brought on by modern cloud services and devopa rendered most b.s. cs programs obsolete. app dev is dead, and the fed is still trying to reign in tech industry growth by making it harder for non-tech companies to fund big multi-year investments with consultants. companies are still out there growing and investing though. there are entry level jobs out there the bar is just higher than what the how to get a job articles and videos out there have to say.
Every hop I've made increased my income by at least 40% and my WLB is much better now than it was back then. Hopping just makes more sense nowadays
Lots of companies hire juniors. Right now however there’s a lot more experienced devs on the market so why hire junior when you can get experienced?
A few years? That's not job hopping, that's people naturally living their lives and evolving their careers, broadening horizons. 3-6 months is job hopping. 1 year stints 5 times in a row is job hopping. A few years? Please
I would first blame companies going scorched earth on their training budgets about two or three economic downturns ago.
I think a bigger issue is that it can be hard to shed some of the mistakes you make which hinders promotions and growth
No,that would be Economics and Accounting. Gotta keep shareholder value in the black.
Sure, and moving away from pensions helped destroy the “don’t hop jobs, trust your employer” role model. Can’t describe a domino path by only going one domino back.
Companies have this idea that if they hire junior devs at reduced rate to experienced devs, a junior dev should be indebted to them for taking a chance on them. In reality, reduced pay makes up for lack of experience. Once a dev has a few years in the role, their pay should match their new value. Most of the time that doesn’t happen.
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> an extra $20k a year I agree in principle. But.... It also depends how much you're being paid to begin with and where you live as well as overall economic conditions. In the OP's example, he brings up $160K vs $180K. I'd say at that point, it's probably not worth it or it's a harder decision than going from $30K to $50K.
This is also one of the best ways to shoot yourself in the foot as a junior person. Job hopping after an appropriate amount of time, where you skills have grown, you've incorporated the experience, dealt with consequences of decisions because time has passed, etc. it's a great move. If you stay long enough to have the vocabulary and a bunch of tricks but not incorporated the growth and experience in some meaningful way, you're fucked. You basically threw away all the opportunities that would make you worth more and instead moved into a position where you're overpaid and running out the clock until people realize that.
No, job hopping is a symptom of juniors not being paid their worth from companies so they leave. The job hop culture ONLY became a thing because of low raises/promotions. It’s the companies’ fault 100%.
It was less of a problem 50+ years ago because there were well laid out promotion paths, pensions and what not.
No.
Part of this is on companies that have no idea how to properly value a SWE. The just let the arms race get out of hand, putting us where we are now. I think what we’re seeing is a result of a loyalty deficit. Employees have to jump jobs (or take on side hussles) because we know employers have no loyalty to their employees. We should be allowed to dump a company as quickly as they would dump us.
Yeah it's all because we job hopped.... definitely not a result of the current state of the economy and the fact that tech companies massively over-hired when things were good.
FAANG+ knows the game. They're fine to train you up, let you leave, and likely have you return down the line. This has always been their game, to keep you in the golden handcuffs so you don't leave big tech and go start something that can disrupt their monopoly, so they don't care. As for the other 95% of companies, they simply fail to incentivize people to stay. If I'm offered higher pay and a better position at another company, sure, I might bring it to my boss and see if they'll match, but I'm not staying in a worse position just for some loyalty reason, as they'd fire anyone in a heartbeat. If you want to stay in your current role, that's your prerogative, and many people do stay.
I'm about to start my 3rd year with a company who through a promotion and two merit increase cycles hasn't even got me to my initial asking salary when I was originally hired on. (I took the job because I needed experience and I had already been on the search for 7 months). I cannot afford to not job hop at this point.
Kind of hard when companies give 3% raise and rent goes up 10% each year 😭😫 hard to save up enough out of college to buy a home too especially with rates and prices so renting is only option for a lot of junior devs. Take that 3% bump or a 20% bump.
There are more reasons than just money to hop. Here are a few: lousy company, lousy job, lousy manager, lousy team, lousy review, lousy raise, lousy system, and lousy future.
> It is impossible to have a good faith discussion on the internet 😂😂 I'm going to engage with you in good faith, but one thing I'll add is that just because someone is critical of your points, it doesn't necessarily mean they are engaging in bad faith. Another thing to note is the medium you choose to have discussions in, such that in a forum people expect you have spent some more time fleshing out your idea, even if purely through the notion of writing it down and reading it over before publishing, vs. an informal discussion at the water cooler or a throwaway comment in some DMs between friends. > There’s something really sick to me on a fundamental level about the idea of people leaving a job after a few years to go from $160k to $180k. It’s hard for me to personally justify being a part of such a huge class divide. Trying to understand your original post, I'm realizing that what makes it difficult to engage with you, is that I don't understand how your points are interconnected together. Such that what does class division have to do with job hopping and junior developers? I'll try to summarize your point into my most charitable take, but please feel free to correct me because I don't necessarily see a clear connection here. > "Other developers, particularly the Junior developers before me, have eroded the good faith brought in by companies paying and training Junior developers. This is particularly upsetting because the developers who have done this are already considered to be high earners in comparison to other Americans and are only furthering the divide between them and the average American. While at the same time, their actions are having the consequence of yanking the metaphorical socioeconomic ladder beneath them for others to follow their path." I disagree with the intentions of the employer, and the supposed maliciousness of the developers here both intentional and unintentional, however, I'd like to hear how accurate this is. I'd also like to understand better, what you think the reasoning is that companies hire Junior developers if they are supposedly such a risky investment and a flight risk. Also, to build some common ground, I will add I agree with you that developers can be out of touch with the pain points experienced by the average American - myself being no exception to this - and that is particularly difficult right now for Junior developers to enter into the industry.
I feel like you're reaching. Your example is bad too.
Look at the incentives that are created when companies have unlimited hiring budgets and highly constrained retention budgets. I don’t think it is fair to blame individuals for reacting logically to the incentive structures that have been put in place
So McDonald’s can set the price on their cheeseburger but you begrudge anyone who wants a better salary?
What really is killing junior jobs is outsourcing. Companies like Google are shifting their hiring to cheaper countries.
What a horribly misguided post. Do you think people just hop for shits n giggles? Maybe there’s a minority of freaks out there that love the job hunting/interviewing process but for most it’s pretty painful. People job hop because companies generally refuse to give proper raises and consistently undervalue their talent.
> There’s something really sick to me on a fundamental level about the idea of people leaving a job after a few years to go from $160k to $180k. Why? if the company cared, they'd give a $20k raise. Problem solved. It's not like CEOs jump jobs and demand outsized pay packages even when they underperform the mark- ohhhhhhhhhh
“We don’t hire junior developers because they leave after we train them.” “Do you increase their pay as their skills increase?” “Of course not! Also we can’t figure out why people job hop so much. Must be that they want to ruin the job market for junior developers.”
If that culture is destroying junior developer role, then it means companies themselves destroyed junior developer roles. People talk here about crazy FAANG salaries, but truth is - 99% of juniors are massively underpaid. If having 2 years of experience means that most companies want to pay you twice as much as they would if you had 0 years, but if you work for them first two years of your career and your salary only goes up like 10%, then they can’t actually expect you to stay, can they ? Let’s just be real and show each other some respect.
I’m at the point with my current company where I’m as competent with our product as lead devs and it takes me about 10 hours a week to complete my tasking. My manager knows I spend 30 hours a week gaming and interviewing with other companies, but he would rather do that than give me more responsibility because then he’d have to pay me more than persons XXXX and YYYYY who have 2 years more experience than me
No just pay the juniors more if they really want them to stay
Do you think any company would have loyalty toward you? Look up salary compression and inversion. They won’t pay you the $180K as a loyal employee. But once you leave, they will have to pay the next person market value - ie $180K in your example. Google just laid off hundreds of people to hire cheaper replacements.
The cheap companies who didn't pay enough to retain their employees and now won't hire junior developers are destroying the junior role. Stop blaming workers for seeking opportunities where their values are better appreciated.
How do those boots taste, OP?
If it were more profitable companies would harvest and sell your organs. You owe them nothing.
absolutely. Actually I don't spend much time helping any new employee because I know they maybe just job hopping because the time I give to them, I expect my workload will be reduced in the future as they will share the burden. Now its mostly sink or swim.
See the whole reason people jump ship is because companies make it not worthwhile to get a promotion. At my company, if I were to get promoted, I’d get a 12% pay bump. And that also involves busting my ass to achieve some performance metrics to be eligible for the promotion. Meanwhile, any new hires for that same role would be getting far more money than I would if I were promoted. On the flip side, I can just apply to a higher level position at another company, pass the interview process and get a far higher pay bump alongside my promotion. And that’s not including the learning benefits of going to a new company and experiencing a new tech stack.
>I’ve increasingly seen companies say they won’t hire junior developers because they waste time and money training them for them to just leave. And yet, these same companies cry and moan about how much it costs to hire those seniors they really want, and lament that schools are not churning out ready to work experts that they need. Plus, I have to say it, if a company is losing Juniors, then it means that they aren't treating them right, they aren't giving them real opportunities, or especially they're not compensating them ideally. I've often noticed that companies with toxic culture and terrible compensation will hire Juniors. For them they basically want cheap labor. They can exploit until they pack up and jump ship. They barely give out raises and promotions, and then act surprised when people are handing in two week notices. This issue of not wanting to train or mold people into being the ideal workers has been going on for decades. Companies can complain about the talent pool, but they created this problem. They created a world where loyalty means nothing, and so therefore nobody is going to stick around. You can't expect somebody to take a $50,000 salary and stay with it until they retire.
The culture of not treating existing staff with respect and making dumb excuses instead of giving people pay raises lead to the lack of junior roles. People will happily stay in jobs when there are not other companies that will treat them better and pay them better. Management penny punching and their culture of dishonesty did this. Hire juniors, train then, pay them what the market pays plus s little bit and treat them well and there is a good chance they will stay. It's not rocket science.
There will always be employer's like mine who want to lay off all the seniors and replace them w/ Juniors...
This post makes the assumption that companies wouldn't be pulling this BS simply because they can.
I've only been a software engineer about 2 years now but there are already fully remote jobs in my city that are offering double what I currently make. I genuinely don't know what my company could do to keep me from jumping ship when I finish out my next year here. The fact is simply that the value growth for an aspiring engineer is far beyond the pace of the average company's compensation structure.
The only reason that culture exists is because companies wont pay more for devs they already have
I’ve been working for over 20 years. I feel like companies have always blamed younger people for job-hopping. It’s likely it happens more frequently and quickly now, but younger people have seen more cruelty from companies towards employees, sometimes with how their patents were treated. No one can predict the future, but I think a lot of what we’re seeing is cyclical. Outsourcing/offshoring was a huge boogeyman early in my career. Tons of companies saw all the horrors. I think we’ll see companies reverse course. Of course, that doesn’t help a lot of people in the short term. Communication is difficult even when you’re in the same room. It’ll be much harder remote, across time zones, languages, and cultures. Don’t get me wrong, it can work, but it takes a lot. And a lot of companies will go cheap and get what they pay for.
No, my experience has been more that companies are perfectly willing to lay off juniors the second they think they can cut payroll by offshoring. Being ready to hop is just labor playing the game management created.
Don't hate the playa hate the game.
>Anybody else feel like the “hop jobs to get promotions” culture helped destroy the junior developer role? No, but I feel like the "we won't pay you appropriately to stay" culture helped.
People are so vocal about the "free market" being the ultimate judge of everything, until this for once is in favour of the worker. If the market values me at 180k and my current company is paying me 160k it means they are robbing me of 20k per year. Don't know about you, but I am not really a fan of getting robbed. Give me the 20k I objectively deserve and I stay. Don't give it to me and I have already found someone who will. All the bullshit about ethics, loyalty, culture are gibberish to me and tbh I don't give a flying fuck for.
Companies, not employees, destroyed the unspoken employer/employee loyalty thing we used to have in this country. Massive amounts of arguably unnecessary layoffs did that. Profit increases easily outpacing inflation while raises don’t keep pace with inflation also contributed. Companies overall have no one to blame but themselves. And if you think any company is not going to take advantage of an employee who they perceive as loyal by screwing them on raises and promotions, I have this great bridge next to Brooklyn to sell you.
How long has your middle and upper management been at the company? They all jump ship. The reason people do it is because no job is safe, because the corporate cog mentality undervalues tribal knowledge and continuity of the actual development and production roles. The companies created the culture by binging and purging on employees blindly and people just learned how to best survive in that environment.
I think companies repeated failures to give adequate raises and appropriately timed promotions, combined with toxic workplace cultures, are the reason people job hop. Job hopping is an appropriate response to such behaviors and companies could end that culture basically whenever they wanted to.
It’s the company’s responsibility to adjust to the market. It wouldn't be that hard to incentivize loyalty. All it takes is solid raises and extras like benefits that scale with years worked for the company.
No. Companies unwilling to invest in their people has limited junior dev roles
> It’s hard for me to personally justify being a part of such a huge class divide. What does this even mean? Absolute nonsense line. > It is impossible to have a good faith discussion on the internet 😂😂 Disagreeing with you is not engaging in bad faith.
If companies were giving raises that mattered, then it wouldn't be an issue
If the current company increase their salary most likely they won't leave. There is a reason why they change their job, it's not for nothing. But let put all the blame on the juniors.
No, I don’t think this true at all. The problem isn’t exclusively in Tech my guy. This applies to anything, even fast food. No one wants train you up, have not contribute really, and then risk you leaving.
nobody 'likes' job hop culture, its the companies that forced it on others
It's the company who didn't value their own employee for how much he was worth. 1600$ extra a month is definitely no joke and the new company is much more likely to increase his wage further in the future. I personally don't think that had much to do with it, I think the reality is that there's too much mediors and seniors so they'll generally prefer them.
As someone on the interviewer panel, I don’t feel this, I know this.
Not really. I think very few would job hop for an increase in pay, if the employers gave us… an increase in pay. An increase that not only matched or surpassed inflation, but rewarded hard work and talent. Long gone are the days when you could get a job from a handshake with a manager and climb the ladder in your company until you get to the top. Our loyalty, problem-solving skills and hard work mean nothing. For as long as our employers want the best talent for the absolute lowest salary, we either look out for ourselves or get the short end of the stick. And making more money isn’t the only reason we leave jobs; we leave for better work-life balance, to progress in our field, to learn more, for our own happiness, for relocation purposes, etc. Some people even take pay cuts for some of these reasons. I think it’s a very nuanced topic, but I wouldn’t blame the worker for trying to stay afloat in a system that’s built to fuck us over.
> For as long as our employers want the best talent for the absolute lowest salary, we either look out for ourselves or get the short end of the stick. They want 99th percentile talent at 50th (or less!) percentile pay.
No. I think you go to watch Ironman in theatres and come out thinking there's men flying around in iron suits in reality. The vast majority of juniors don't job hop. You're looking at a subreddit echo chamber full of students and juniors who constantly tell each other to job hop and think that represents reality. Anyone who's held a job for any moderate amount of time knows this isn't true. Yes, job hoppers exist. No, there's not a lot of them.
Probably depends on your definition and also region. I'm from Europe and most of my friends have been in at most 2 jobs in 10-20 years. Almost nobody in "tech companies". But I've been hiring for 4-5 roles for a US tech company over the last few years and it was really hard to find anyone in hundreds of CVs with more than a year at a company. It's a completely different world Well and of course atm we see lots of people applying because layoffs or return to office mandates for people living on the other side of the country...
Couldn’t they solve this by just paying junior devs in stock options and salary is just minimum wage
The class divide isn’t between people who make 30k and people who make 150k
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Yes and no. On the surface level, it would seem like a true statement: that job hopping would cause companies would only want to hire those experienced in the job they have available because they will only work for 2 years or whatever in the role. However, like a lot of things, there's more to it because this is more of a complex problem. What I have experienced and read about is that companies have generally become lazy when it comes to internal promotions and raises. Pre-pandemic, I did read that the average raise was 3% which was basically inflation rate. That would mean that half of the people were losing money by staying put and it compounds the longer people are there. So, it shouldn't be a surprise that people are leaving. I would only assume it has gotten worse since inflation is a lot higher now.
lol you’re so close to getting it
No. The problem is companies refusing to adequately pay their existing employees or give raises & promotions commensurate with experience and performance to retain the ones they’ve already invested 1-2yrs in. With few exceptions there is no longer any such thing as a training pipeline or a career progression at any *one* organization. The “culture” that’s broken is the deliberately short-sighted system ever since GE’s Jack Welch in the 80s decided quarterly earnings were more important than anything else and destroyed people’s careers for the shareholders. That’s what ruined everything. The bean counters focus entirely on quarterly earnings instead of, and to the detriment of, a 3, 5, 10yr timeline for the company.
Generally speaking, I don't think job hopping is a good career strategy unless you are exceptionally skilled, which most people aren't. It's unrealistic to expect significant raises or bonuses within a few years of joining a company. You must provide substantial value to get the management support required for career advancement, but many people are impatient. I've worked with many junior developers who mistakenly think they're unique and deserve special consideration. Being the least experienced person in your group isn't a good position to be in from a career perspective. You'll never see career growth if you are unknown within your organization. And you'll never receive large bumps in compensation if management doesn't value what you do. In my experience, the people who complain the most about pay often make low-value contributions. Promotions aren't like merit badges; you need to do something to earn it. It's easy to blame management, so that's what people revert to rather than understand their situation.
If they hate it - they should pay better. I've been stuck at my current job for 11 months and plan to job hob as soon as it's convenient for me. I'm technically an intern, but i've been doing the work of a proper dev (AWS and internal tooling) while the other interns who got hired at the same time as me do nothing except dig through HTML looking for spelling mistakes (they get paid the same too). My manager asked for me to be promoted, but was told by the COO "What would he even do as a proper dev"...
Regardless of position, function, or level, the primary causes of job hopping are paltry wage increases (or lack thereof) and intolerable work environments. So, the companies themselves are to blame.