I've coached several of my female friends in how to ask for a raise. Often they'll complain that they're not making enough but are scared to ask for more. I'll tell them "your boss might say no, but they're not going to fire you". Of course, if your boss does say "no", it's a good opportunity to ask what progress you need to make to get the raise you want. You then have a concrete roadmap for getting where you want to be. For the guys on here, encourage the women in your life to speak up. Often they just need someone to tell them it's okay and that they're worth it.
I don't like this advice personally. If you want more money you need to change jobs. Asking what progress you need to make to get the raise you want is normally just going to get you strung along doing extra work for nothing.
I've been in exactly this situation, and there is a positive side. When you do what was asked, either you get what you want, or it becomes clear that you're being screwed. Once you know you're being screwed, it's much easier to move along.
Where I used to work, this was a polite way for competent people to say "promote me or I'm leaving."
You get them to tell you what you need to do, some concrete thing, and then you do it. Once it's done, if you haven't been promoted then it's a good time to find another job, I think.
Uh, while I realize the most common method for getting a raise in Silicon Valley is to switch jobs, the idea that it's the only mechanism or the most desirable one is very bizarre.
It also seems to imply that wanting more money is somehow mutually exclusive with wanting to continue working in your current job and/or for your current company.
You're also demonstrating another classic weakness in engineers, failure to recognize social capital. In asking for that information, you put management in the position of articulating their expectations, and when you meet or exceed them, it pressures them further to agree to a raise.
Management isn't just running some simple equation to determine your salary, they're exercising their own judgement as to what you're worth to them and what will keep you working there productively. That judgement can be altered through psychological means.
There are many managers who do not care about pressure from subordinates. Subordinates are worthless to these managers. Management's job is to translate pressure from executives into something vaguely resembling what they sycophantically instantly promised said executive when asked about its feasibility. They don't care about the peons that are actually implementing it, it's all about how many political points from "important people" they can win themselves.
Obviously this is not true everywhere and perhaps it's not true even generally, but one should consider this before they put in years of work with only vague notions of an abstract raise sometime in the future.
Nobody is talking about years of work on vague promises, and nobody is talking about the environment you describe in which no one would want to work.
Your weird worst-case scenario does not invalidate the point that there are tactics that can be used effectively in the general case. Life doesn't work like code, strategies don't need to secure against all conceivable threats.
>Nobody is talking about years of work on vague promises, and nobody is talking about the environment you describe in which no one would want to work.
I was, and the GP mentioned it.
I have worked at a 20-person "startup" company where otherwise intelligent engineers did work for years on intangible promises of wealth, often pulling 70-80 hour weeks, strung along by already-super-wealthy investors/managers who would drop hints about "something special" or "a piece of the pie" down the road if only said engineers could accomplish absurd request x by date y.
People need to be aware of the reality of this circumstance. The advice here is directed to people who are already too scared to ask for a raise; how long do you think it will take such inexperienced persons to recognize that they've already met the "Criteria for Raise" checklist several times over and still don't have a raise?
I've also observed an interesting phenomenon: people want to believe they have good leaders and will often make excuses for them. "Oh, they had to pass up my raise this year because the economy has been real tough, yeah, it's alright, I just need to be a 'team player' and next year I am sure they will reward me for my loyalty and sympathy". This actually happens. People should be talking about it, especially in a thread about people who are too intimidated to even ask about fair compensation.
I resigned after only seven months (things got progressively worse...) to get away from that ridiculous culture. They were on the verge of canning me for refusing to participate in their silly abuse. They replaced me with another engineer equal in naivety to the rest of them.
No, he didn't. He mentioned getting a roadmap, that doesn't imply years, it may not even imply a year.
That said, I'm afraid your worldview is so cynical and alien to my own that I don't think we can have a productive discussion. I simply cannot place myself in the shoes of someone who will assume everyone seeking a raise will behave so ignorantly.
>In asking for that information, you put management in the position of articulating their expectations, and when you meet or exceed them, it pressures them further to agree to a raise.
Haha. I'm sorry, but I've watched people who believed this get milked for years and years.
>Management isn't just running some simple equation to determine your salary, they're exercising their own judgement as to what you're worth to them and what will keep you working there productively.
Versus what someone else who could do the same job would get.
The point is that, all other factors being equal, switching jobs as an engineer is the easiest way to get a raise. People tend to take the path of least resistance.
A common in-between approach in academia is to get yourself made an offer by another university, then approach your dean and explain how you love it here and want to stay, but you have this very tempting offer at 20% higher than your current salary, and wonder if they could at least come close to matching it.
Could you do that in tech to boost salary without changing jobs, by getting an offer and then asking your employer to match it? Or is the act of looking for outside offers going to get you a black mark? In academia it usually isn't, partly because it's often done with the tacit approval of your dean, if you do really want to stay and the dean agrees you're worth significantly more on the open market than your current salary. He/she might want to offer you a raise, but be constrained by policies and budget authorizations, while you presenting an outside offer opens up a separate retention-package process that frees up the ability to offer terms outside the formal advancement policy.
When I spoke to my supervisor, he said this is acceptable as long as you don't do it too often (matching a 30% higher offer once every three years was the figure quoted). However I expect this might vary greatly depending on your specific industry and company structure.
Easiest by what metric? As nknight said, I don't think switching jobs is easy at all. Maybe you mean easier by less social-conflict? But I would think that the "I would like a raise" discussion would be easier than the "I'm leaving" discussion.
It's not easier because your boss has vastly more practice than you do. They're having this discussion with most of the people who work for them. They know how to string you along with carrots off in the sunset that you're never going to reach.
I've seen it done many times. When you set these goals that would be required to get a raise, you're going to want to set definite terms so you can know if you achieved it. Your manager is going to want something more fuzzy. They'll claim this is actually helping you because it gives you more ways to accomplish the goal. In reality, it means they'll always have a way of saying you didn't meet the requirement if they want to (they usually will).
Personally, I never ever work for someone else with the promise of compensation later.
Really? Easiest for whom? I find switching jobs painful and stressful, and my largest percentage salary increases have come without switching employers.
And how is that the point anyway? danssig didn't say anything like that, he just said "If you want more money you need to change jobs.", and assumed the strategy in question would be blindly applied by an ignorant worker and result in exploitation. Do you have some insight that allows you to discern he meant something vastly different from what he said?
This is just because you don't do it enough. I used to hate it enough that I once sued a company to try and make them not lay me off. Now I change every 16mo-5 years and I love the interview part. I would never stay anywhere (besides my own company) for more than 5 years as IMO it makes you appear not very sought after.
>and my largest percentage salary increases have come without switching employers.
I find this very hard to believe. All companies have caps on how much of an increase you can get per year, per performance raise, etc. When you move it's mostly dependent on your negotiation skills (which get better the more they're used). The biggest raise I ever got in a company was during the dot com bubble (they were afraid we would leave). I got 28% (massive, massive exception to get this. Performance raises were the highest you could normally get and were capped at 15%). I moved to another company a few years later and more than doubled my salary. My latest move brought me another 40%.
>and assumed the strategy in question would be blindly applied by an ignorant worker and result in exploitation.
It is easiest for a lot of people. I know someone who did this a lot and ended up with an extremely high salary just a few years after dropping out of school. He would look for different companies after 1-2 years of working at his current one, apply, and try to get a better salary. It got to the point once where the companies he was working for were bidding for the person with the companies he applied to. This wasn't at Silicon Valley, and wasn't with startups, and he never quit his current job unless he had secured a better job.
If they give you meaningful business goals and you meet them, be sure to put the new accomplishments down on your resume. Bam, your market value just went up. Someone out there will likely be willing to pay at the new rate. This is ideally - but not necessarily - your current employer.
Most of my friends I've given this advice to are not engineers and aren't in a highly competitive position where they can easily "just change jobs". For engineers, changing jobs often works to increase your salary, but there's something to being said for staying at one company long enough to build something great. There's more to life than just money.
"They're not going to fire you" isn't always true. I have known one person who has been fired for asking for a raise. The exec involved only needed to do this once, because it was talked about among employees for years and probably dissuaded a hundred others from asking for raises.
