I would find out that we are offering up to $95k for the equivalent job I have but I was told that $85k was the highest they could go for me “per policy” and I meet or exceed all the qualifications required in the job posting.
In the last few years we’ve had a rash of hiring fresh college graduates at higher wages than people who got the exact same degree, from that exact same school, and came to work for us four years ago.
So after four years the existing employees are making less than the newly minted graduate walking into a supposedly lower level job that they are being asked to help on-board and train. The Sr Analyst with four years experience is making less than the newly hired Jr Analyst.
Eh, advertising a job in Colorado requires that you include the salary range. It’s been fantastic for my job hunting.
ETA:
And this is one of the reasons so many younger people have taking a hardcore job-hopping approach. If starting a new job doing the same thing pays more than staying in your current position, it’s a better financial decision to jump ship, all other things being equal.
I think we’re finally seeing the final effects of the Baby Boom. We’re switching from a surplus-worker environment to a surplus-job environment. Employers have spent decades being the gate-keepers to employment, but we’re seeing now employees are the gate-keepers. It’s not going to change back, because our demographics aren’t moving that way.
Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last. I’m retired. In my experience it really wasn’t HR, it was their legal advisors. Employment law, in trying to do good things, got fucked up. And HR departments are their deputies. Double indirection is a pretty crappy management mechanism.
I like to tell this story, altho it is out of date. Not that long ago, you’d mail in a resume (it is still considered polite to bring one to the interview), I was at a symposium, and one HR (yes, as Mighty_Mouse says- all white females) said that that resume should be on good bond paper to show that you care, and any resume on copier paper would be shitcanned. Another HR boss said that Bond paper showed you were sucking up and shallow, and she tossed all of those.
Now- how would you know how to make them happy without knowing that weird peccadillo?
Well, the problem is HR thinks they’re following employment law, but actually not. We’ve had to send our Legal to straighten out HR more than once. Hence HR becoming more about on-boarding new employees instead of finding them.
The fact that Colorado had to actually pass a law making it so, just emphasizes how screwed up the whole process is. Something that seems brain-dead obvious to the rest of us is so heavily resisted by employers that the government had to step in and force the issue. It’s nuts.
Yep. Companies spent decades treating workers as disposable, while still demanding “work cultures” that tried to get the employees to commit to their businesses without constraint. But now that’s come back to bite them in the ass. The younger generations have figured out that if the company has no loyalty to you, you have no loyalty to them. They make their decisions based solely on their own best interests. And the companies hate that!
I’m that annoying guy posting jobs with ridiculously broad salary ranges (I have one up now with a $93k spread) because we’ll hire a kid right out of school or someone with decades of experience, adjusting their responsibilities and job level and our expectations accordingly.
Part of the problem in IT is that HR often just throws a laundry list of tech as ‘must haves’ which are just crazy. My kid has rejected applying for a number of jobs he would have been perfect for because he doesn’t meet the required skill set because he doesn’t have experience with some tech like React or NoSQL databases. Stuff that’s easily learned on the job.
When you see an ‘entry level’ job that lists a requirement of knowing four different languages, SQL, full-stack developer, UX design and cloud development skills, someone’s HR is off the rails.
I remeber when Java first became big, there were job opening for developers who had to have 5 years of Java experience - when Java had only been a thing for a couple of years before.
Back in the day you could just ignore that and submit a resume anyway. My son tells me that the first screenings are now almost always automated, and no one can get their resume through to an interview without ticking the boxes, which almost no true entry level workers would be able to do.
Another trend is the demand for experience. There are almost no jobs being posted for programmers that don’t require at least two years’ experience. And some places only hire new engineers from co-op programs, going around regular recruiting entirely.
I chalk this up to the decline of standards in college. I can attest to interviewing college grads in Computer Science who could not answer basic technical questions such as “What is a stack, and how does it differ from a queue?” That’s a first-year question, and I have had graduates from engineering schools fail it. So when the degree means very little, you fall back on experience and the ability to ask references whether you can actually do the job.
Another side effect of the ‘laundry list of technologies’ mode of applicant seeking is that schools are now going lighter on theory in favor of exposing their students to more commercial stuff they can put on their resume. It makes their graduates weaker, but temporarily bumps up the percentage of hires which makes the school look better.
Can’t remember where I saw this, but it was a posting from a guy who saw a job ad that required 5 years of experience with a highly specialized program. That he wrote. 3 years previously.
Honestly I’ve been hearing the same complaints about IT jobs for 30 years. And I suppose it’s where we “MBA People” have an advantage over “Tech People”. Tech People often focus on systems and don’t like human interaction. So they apply to these online postings thinking they need to check all the boxes. I mean for all you know, resumes are picked at random out of that thing. I worked at one company where I helped with hiring and no one could even tell me how to access any resumes submitted online.
It’s always better to network your way into a job if you can.
I think the main problem with tech jobs is that unless you are building products for a software company, I think tech workers are looked at like a commoditized collection of skills to be used and discarded as required. it’s not a job like a lawyer, accountant, doctor, civil engineer, or other professional where people view you as someone with a cumulative x years of expertise. What I usually see are middle managers trying to get a java or python or whatever developer with 10 years of experience building some esoteric middle-office banking system but they want to pay a rate more appropriate for 2 years.
The funny thing is, when I asked my wife the question she got it right even though she has no education in CS at all. “If I stack dishes, I put them all in a stack, and if I need one I take it off the top. If I have to get into a queue, the people in front of me go first, because they were there first.”
There are technical differences in implementing stacks vs queues, and performance considerations and such, but not knowing the difference means somewhere along the education path they were so confused they couldn’t even come up with an analogy.
I think young people may be doing themselves a disserve with that strategy. And this is speaking as someone who changes jobs every 1-4 years.
People say “work isn’t family” and “there’s no such thing as loyalty” and this is true. If you truly have a better offer, it may make sense to take it. But every time you change jobs, you need to build relationships, learn how things work, and establish a track record. Particularly as you rise up the ranks.
It’s not just having the right skills and experience. At my firm I haven’t been on a billable project in like 5 months. Usually we start thinking about whether we should let you go after 1 month. And the past year has been tough for my firm. We’ve laid a ton of people off and had some major leadership changes. But I think the main reason they keep me (at least for now) is that when they start having conversations around who to keep and who to let go (which they’ve had several that I know of), I built relationships with senior management who speak up on my behalf. I have people actively looking to me to either work on their projects or help them sell new work.
So it’s not really a matter of blind loyalty. But some manner of mutual loyalty has been established and it would be foolish to squander that for a bit higher salary or a better title.
That said, the economics might shift at some point or some fantastic opportunity presents itself where a move would make sense. But for now I’m ok where I’m at.
Which is great for you. Who are there more of, you or the people laid off, after sticking around for less pay but more security?
Not trying to be combative, just pointing out that your own anecdote proves my point. A ton of people might have made the same choice as you, to stick around for mutual loyalty, and they were put out of work.
Although I agree wholeheartedly with @msmith537’s anecdote and the concepts it illustrates, I’ll also suggest that that outcome depends crucially in working for a couple-hundred person company (max) and at a job with fairly high personal visibility.
If you’re one of 50 grossly overworked and underpaid payroll clerks in a 100,000 person company your fate doesn’t really have much personal component. Even if you’re well known as an unusually valuable employee to your supervisor, that counts for next to zero when there’s no way for someone in your role to create positive visibility higher up your food chain, and even your great grandboss is a powerless nobody whose continued existence depends more on random luck than deliberate corporate decision-making.
Here is a horror tale of big corporate decision-making and lack of loyalty tied to lack of good logic. Its from a year-plus ago, but I first learned of it just recently.
The author is quite famous within the software development community as a guru’s guru. Held major positions at Microsoft and several other major software companies. Big wheels know and respect his name. A deep and wise thinker; not merely a propeller-head’s propeller-head. And yet …
I think the important words there are “mutual loyalty” and I don’t think that exists anymore , at least not in many places. If it did, you wouldn’t have the situation where the person working there for four years makes less than the new hires - if nothing else, it would work more like a different type of job, where if starting pay goes up everyone’s pay goes up.