> You forgot Response #4: Ok. I'll take your word for it; here's a raise. (Aside to other managers: this guy is a flight risk. Don't offer him any promotions, and start thinking about how we might replace him.)
This seems like a counterproductive response if the labor market is tight.
Definitely agree. The one time I ever got a significant raise required me to lobby unbelievably hard despite the fact that I was carrying the weight of my whole team and had to do an unreal amount of shit shoveling devops, web service, and data cleaning work in addition to all the machine learning work that was “actually” my job.
I was lucky that my direct manager valued me and guided me through the process of documenting my accomplishments in the right ways to present the case for a substantial promotion.
Apart from this one time, I have always been told the company can’t offer raises or discretionary bonuses beyond whatever the board grants for cost of living, and have to switch jobs repeatedly if I want to earn more.
I don’t get it. I feel like it must be some misaligned incentive problem with HR preferring to make executives believe turnover and constant hiring have to always be the norm, to justify their jobs, instead of cultivating a culture of long tenures by actually offering substantial raises or bonuses.
It happened to me at IBM. I got a 5% raise the first year, and 10% the next; both we're suprises. (And I was making good money for the area when I started, so I don't think they were trying to catch me up.)
My direct managers were awesome, but I ended up leaving for other reasons.
You are right about that. This is a slightly different situation, though. What you describe is scenario #2 up-thread. The person I was responding to was posting an alternative to scenario #3. I'm just saying that in a tight labor market a company adopting response #4 instead of response #3 is cutting off their nose to spite your face.
This seems like a counterproductive response if the labor market is tight.