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Comment by southphillyman | Hacker News Reader

Hate to say it but I think if you have to ask for a raise you're probably not going to get it (or won't get as much as you want). I've seen companies let bonafide rockstars with the most domain knowledge in the group walk over money. I just don't get it. It's like someone in the HR industry made up this rule and bad companies stick to it for whatever reason. I'd go as far as saying the majority of the attrition I've seen has been money related, and all of my decisions to bounce have been motivated by money.

Companies will spend $100k+ on Christmas parties, sport box suites, and other marketing/sales related things but won't give a critical piece of the team an extra $25k or whatever? Just mind boggling.

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The thing that makes me think the system is broken is how they'll avoid larger raises at all costs even if it means losing great engineers with lots of domain knowledge.

The cost of replacing this is immense to an organisation, even if they can hire a similarly skilled engineer they've:

1. Had to absorb hiring costs 2. Search in a competitive market for talent 3. Distract team members with another round of interviews 4. On-boarding costs whilst the engineer absorbs all the lost domain knowledge. (This is the big one).

Once all that is taken into account it's probably getting close to a full yearly salary of the engineer they just let walk. I still feel it takes a good 3-6 months for an engineer on complex domain projects to really feel comfortable regardless of their seniority.

It's definitely broken. It doesn't help that a lot of the cost of hiring is born in externalities - it's difficult to measure the cost of the time spent screening and interviewing and thinking about prospects, or the cost of the extra 15 or 30 or 60 minutes of Googling/reading the codebase/chasing bad ideas that the rest of the team has to do to replace having that knowledge sitting next to them in the form of a person, or the technical debt accrued when the next thing you build is implemented in a slightly worse form than it could be.

This is spot on. The argument is probably that the 100k will benefit "everyone" where as the raise only benefits that one person. Where in reality that raise most likely has a much better ROI.

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