I wonder about this. Is the outcome "changing employers gets the best raise" due to the fact that most people don't have the confrontation and negotiation skills to ask their current employer for a raise?
As someone who has had over a dozen different employers, here's my alternate take on this.
I've asked for raises, knowing I was producing much more than co-workers who made much more than me. They assumed I would not do anything but suck it up and get paid what they gave me. I interviewed elsewhere and got offered much more money. If I came back to them - at best they offered the same amount. At worst they said "bye!" (One place offered me less and then a day later whipped out a non-compete and tried to threaten me with it, but I ignored it. They did later attempt to sue me, unsuccessfully...) But at that point, they know I've got one foot out the door - do I really want to stay there knowing it took an actual job offer elsewhere (which is not trivial to obtain) before I went through on my intentions to leave the company if I didn't get the raise I felt I deserved?
In general, employers believe things based on what most employees will do, and convincing them otherwise is not trivial. Generally it takes an offer in hand for them to get serious, and by then, you've already changed the nature of your relationship. At that point, I've always found it worthwhile to just make the change (with a disclaimer that, as a technical worker, I enjoy the change, the new skills I'll learn, the pay raise without being promoted into management...)
I agree. HR's job is to pay you just enough to keep you there, not what you think you deserve.
Many years ago at my first job, we had a cohort of thirty programmers that were hired at the same time and went through training together. We all started at the same salary, and it was expected that we would be promoted at the one-year, two-year, and four-year points to Programmer, Sr. Programmer, and Programmer Analyst.
I was just coming up to the four-year mark, and had worked between 100 and 120 hours a week for the past four months to code a project from scratch, by myself. It was something that my manager had neglected until the last minute, and it would have cost the company millions to reschedule its deployment. I got it done, and it went live with no glitches - not a single problem.
When it came to review time, my manager apparently did not support my (almost automatic) promotion. I was told I didn't have enough time at my current position. I pointed out that I had an extra six months worth of overtime in the past few months alone.
An ex-coworker called me that week about another job, which came with a 34% raise from my current salary. A couple of days after I gave notice, the promotion and a 10% raise came through. Too little, too late. It was a shame, because I loved the work I did there. It was a fast-paced environment, and I learned a lot.
Are you sure you ain't me in 2009? Same situation.
That behavior from the manager and the low raise gave the message: You didn't value my efforts, and when given notice to leave, you showed you value me so little. Bless your heart!
This goes hand in hand with the steady evisceration of on-the-job training and professional middle management that has happened in corporations over the past few decades.
As boards took more control of companies and their management, the best way to control a company was to gut the middle management level and implement more top-down executive management structure.
Hence the cultural phenomenon of "middle manager" becoming a derogatory insult.
Middle management use to be where companies were largely run from, with middle managers carefully cultivating and training staff to be systematically promoted throughout the structure. Hence how back in the day the kid in the mail room could make it up to senior management.
My step dad did exactly this. Got his undergrad, started at mailroom level, and was basically shoved up the ladder to senior sales exec.
However, middle managers, being the guts of the business, acted as resistance to the will of boards, so they were systematically gutted out, and then a micromanagement top-down system was implemented.
Middle managers are now primarily only under pressure to produce numbers, and have had all autonomy and efficacy ripped away from them, and have no ability, will, or understanding of how to cultivate staff, only squeeze for numbers.
This is why voluntarily offering someone more money who isn't demanding it with threats just won't happen. It's also why the main staff source comes from outside the business, because there are no mechanisms for internal promotion.
It can happen, but it's not the way the system is designed. Companies now buy staff experience rather than train it themselves.
This is a relatively new way of doing business, it's very young and yet workers have been conditioned to believe that this is "just the way it is" as if corporations always behaved this way, as if it's a tested and proven model, which is kind of hilarious.
It's also why companies and managers still behave with the leftover sentiments of expecting company loyalty from staff, even though they've systematically gutted every factor that earned that loyalty and are now perplexed why the longer this model lasts, the less the staff are willing to buy into it.
The generation raised by the people who were part of the old system were conditioned by their upbringing to behave like the employees in the old system: respect your employer, be loyal, trust your management knows best, etc.
The next generation raised their kids with the knowledge that the company can and *will* fuck you up, down, and sideways at every chance they get. We were raised with stories of secretaries who worked for 40 years for a company being fired when they were diagnosed with cancer. I saw my mom's company try to get rid of her when she was diagnosed with MS.
That generation has now raised the new batch of incoming staff.
This very, very young megacorp management system is increasingly being challenged and tested, and it will be interesting to see what the next iteration is, because this one has depended for years on a cultural indoctrination of workers that is well past its best-before date.
I spend a lot of time listening to middle aged managers whine about young workers, and advising them on how to get them to perform. It's amazing when I reframe things for them and they are finally able to grasp that this new batch of staff have a totally different set of motivations than they did as new staff.
Well...some of them get it. Some of the just prefer to keep bashing their heads against the ever more sturdy wall of reality that they can't manage these young people the same way and just keep whining that they're selfish, lazy, and entitled and expect the situation to get better...through, idk, magical thinking and amping up the bullying that's making them underperform in the first place?
