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Comment by RandomInteger4 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to lie; that type of thing -- resigning right after getting promoted -- seems like something from some alternate reality fantasy world.

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Why? Top performers are poached all the time. Plenty of people do excellent work in jobs they may not love. Both promotions and bonuses are usually tied to performance review cycles, and right after bonuses vest is the most popular time to leave.

It is entirely possible they weren't planning on getting promoted.

I was due for a performance review about a week before I handed my notice in at my old job. The review didn't happen because my boss was incapable of communicating with his employees and actually scheduling appointments with them, but had it happened, I was fully prepared to push for a payrise, even though it would only be a couple of dollars an hour, and for only 3 weeks.

You wouldn't turn down a promotion because you know you're about to hand your notice in. You act like everything is normal and you're going to be working at the company for the foreseeable future, right until the day you hand your notice in, which should be at the minimum notice period.

Otherwise what would happen if you decline a promotion, then your new job offer falls through? You'd be left looking like a prize dick.

I had a similar thing happen, except the company was acquired and we thought we were being laid off. 30 days after I started with my new employer, I received notice of being equated to a higher rank in the new company, and a very significant stock grant.

Too late though. :)

It's not that uncommon - promotion takes so long and has so many moving parts - you might as well interview somewhere else, since if it doesn't succeed you'll just be doing the whole thing again in six months.

I have an ex-colleague that was promoted 2 weeks after she resigned, just days before she left the country. The announcements came in the right order, first leaving the company and later being promoted. It puzzled lots of people, but this stuff happens.

One manager told me, he never tries to promote job hoppers no matter how well they perform.

They don't stay, and you end up wasting a perfectly valid promotion while some one who would stick longer with you could have got it.

Wouldn't that give incentive to not stay?

except that this doesn't work in a high demand market such as the Bay area right now!

Your old manager may have said that to encourage you to stay, but at the end of the day he will promote whoever needs to be promoted in order for that person not to leave. It is all very simple offer and demand at the end of the day.

I was once in a company where the CEO liked to brag that in this company everyone is fairly paid in regards to their competences. You can guess what happened next, we went to have a couple beers with colleagues one evening and started talking about salaries. We realized that we had salaries that didn't really match what the CEO was pretending. The laws of the market are simply too strong, you will always need to sometime pay someone a lot because of circumstances or because that person had another offer to match.

At the end of the day, companies benefit a lot from information asymmetry (they know everyone's salary, but you know nothing). They can claim a lot of things without you having the ability to verify it.

Doesn't that exacerbate the problem?

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