Except you rarely get inflation-matching pay rises, so the only way to prevent the annual erosion of your situation is the constant team growth and never-ending promotions.
I learned that the hard way a few years back, then got my act together and made sure I’m always perceived unhappy with salary - to pull that off, you need to be backed by delivering stuff and being seen. Do your homework, and ask for the recognition, that’s my tip.
I have noticed that recruiter outreach to me has picked back up. I'm pretty senior and they're offering me senior roles that could pay more. My current employer has benefitted from current events though so I'm staying put. But if I ever want to fuck off, I easily can.
I have a friend who is very junior. He got promoted but still fucked off to a new better job because his current employer treated him poorly.
I think people are gonna start remembering they can fuck off again, and we're gonna end up somewhere between here and where we were when the job market was on fire pandemic and pre-pandemic.
The prevailing engineer perspective is that this behavior causes the smartest engineers with options and ambitions will move on. Other top engineers will leave simply because they prefer working with other great engineers. Three years of small plays like this from management is enough to cause complete brain drain, as even those waiting for more vesting will lose optimism. It's one thing to have 6% churn from engineering/product in a year. It's another if you lose the most qualified and respected 6%.
2. If we wanted to use a number with authority we would probably use 6.5%, which is the US Buerau of Labor Static's number for 2022 CPI.
3. My level of precision (one digit) should have been an informal indicator that I was using a rough estimate.
I doubt that’s the case. The people deciding to lay off are just getting rid of 6% of their ‘resources’, they don’t consider that those 6% might be doing 50% of the work.
So 3 years on they’re just wondering why their engineering team is so useless, and thinking back to the good old times.
2. My comment described a process in which talented engineers self select to leave companies, and management only had indirect input on which engineers leave.
It's also important to note that wage inflation and the inflation of goods and services are separate and not always correlated. Just because milk and bread and cars cost more doesn't mean that the value provided to a company by an hour of an employee's time has risen by the same amount (or at all). I'd love raises that beat inflation every year, and for most of my career I've gotten them, but now that I'm not it doesn't necessarily mean the company is just trying to screw its employees.
Also, critical parts of employee retention include "keep the worker alive" and "keep the worker satisfied". If housing goes up 20%, the wage better increase by 20% as well. Homeless or unstably housed engineers are not productive engineers.
These are all very good arguments for why people making $15/hr should get regular raises to keep pace with inflation as a matter of course, not a very good argument for why someone making $200k copy-pasting JavaScript from StackOverflow should.
That's an unfounded assertion. I know plenty of software devs & other tech industry folks who cannot afford a house and are being squeezed by relentless rent increases (myself included). Many on the lower end of the pay range are a layoff away from homelessness.