Sadly, this is how our industry even if we're in the top employees. For a while, I was telling people that I worked at a place that didn't act like that... And then they started, too.
Now, I just decide if I'm happy making what I'm making. If I'm ever not, I'll change jobs.
I'm completely over working full time salaried jobs. I'm probably working my last full time job for awhile unless a company pays me way above market wages. I'm contract only.
I get benefits through my wife's job so what's the point?
just to play devil's advocate. Why should you get paid for time at all? Why not only for value delivered? You dont pay the grocery store based on how long you're in the store or how long each item took to shelve. You pay for the value delivered (approximately the goods in your basket).
So why should you get paid for hours that deliver no value? Or to make it a spectrum, why should you get paid a fixed rate for hours where you deliver less than the fixed rate of value?
Propose a good way to measure that. I tend to agree with you, but in so many companies, what you deliver often gets impacted by so many other decisions that the final 'value' of a project is minimal, but it's because of decisions outside your control.
If people only paid me based on the value they got out of what I delivered, many would find a way to weight the measuring to leave me short. "Hollywood accounting" springs to mind - blockbuster movies somehow lose money.
Just to be clear about the discussion I am referring to the value _deliver_ not the consumption/utilization of said value.
to continue the analogy When I buy an apple from safeway, I pay $1 irrespective if I eat it.
in almost all cases, what you deliver has no value on its own. it only has value in the context of business operating a certain way.
to your apple analogy... you might pay $1 whether you eat it or not, but if you had no intention of eating it you wouldn't buy it in the first place. You had some expectation of doing something with it - eating it, cooking it for yourself, cooking it in some other dish to sell to others, etc.
Yeah that does get tricky when a job says "OK, you gave the value that you ought and it only took you 6 hours? OK, then give me more value in the next 2 hours, but without additional compensation."
I actually agree. As a salaried employee, most of the time I look for a jobs that I barely have the requirements to get my foot in the door. That's the only way I can learn. If it takes me 12 hours to do a task that would only take me 8 hours if I had the experience in that technology, I don't mind working 12 hours to deliver 8 hours worth of work.
The few stints of contracting I have had, I knew close to 100% of the technologies I am working in. If not, I wouldn't bill for learning time.
This is why I'm big in favor of Universal Health Care. I'd like to do that too, but I need the insurance. And I've not got a spouse that can help with that :(
I've taken the same approach as well. Rather than measuring my success through performance ratings, raises and promotions, I've jumped off that treadmill and now focus on what I want learn based on my long term career goals. Build a resume that gets you the roles you want in the future.
And I'm saying this as someone who has had very good performance reviews in the past.
Luckily, so far, it's been both more money and relevant experience. I stayed at one job too long between 1999 - 2008 and then I started being more aggressive about my career and salary
Probably within the next two years, I'm going to max out what I can make by job hopping - I'm okay with that- I'm actually okay with what I make now.
Then it's going to be about what looks interesting, a decent rate, commute, etc.
I just don't understand why anyone likes the status quo of your insurance being tied to your job.
Well the ACA is still a thing now, but I don't think I could charge enough to make the difference in the amount of pay be worth the benefit cost. Maybe if I were single?
It seems like software salaries really cap out at like ~150. I don't see how jumping around jobs is going to push you past that, unless the new skill you learned was a PHD.
And that's really, really the top-end, if you're insanely qualified and insanely experienced. I spend a lot of time on StackOverflow (who among us doesn't?) and of course I see the targeted want-ads in the right rail; most of them include salary information and it's usually around $80-$120, so they're thinking $120 is for the most qualified of the most qualified.
True. In my market - a major metroplitan area not on the west coast - I'm seeing salaries for hands on coders and architects maxing out at 150K for an FTE.
As a W2 contractor (meaning you work for the contracting company that pays the employeers share of employment taxes), I'm seeing rates up to $90 an hour.
If you assume 2080 hours a year - 80 hours holidays - 120 hours PTO - 120 hours between gigs, you are at $158,000 a year.
But the few times I have contracted, I have always gotten more than 40 hours a week. I'm just now at the point in my career that I could get top dollar contractor rates when I start back looking.
Let me clarify that those numbers are for W2 contractors. You're basically still working for another company. I'm not referring to 1099 contracting where you have to pay an additional 6.2% in SS up to $127K and 2.8% in Medicare.
150 might be the 90-95 percentile in some places, but it is absolutely not the ceiling. There are niches that pay above that if you're willing to acquire the skills needed to get those jobs. Machine Learning, big data, and cloud engineering are all niches that can get you close to $200k. Those jobs are not available in every city, but they're not exclusive to NY and SF.
The other path to higher salaries is specializing in a particular technology that enterprise companies pay handsomely for. Salesforce is one of those, as is Sharepoint.
150k? Not in Silicon Valley. My base is 200k and my friend just got a job with a $300k base, but he's on the principal architect level. With bonuses and stock comp, we make a lot more.
You would be wrong. I am a regular backend coder. I'm good though, but most of my coworkers make around the same as me. My friend is very talented which is why he makes that much. He has an unrelated MSc (he's from India), but he's a principal engineer. The point is 150k is not a barrier whatsoever, at least in Silicon Valley.
These conversations should really be about overall easily-liquidable compensation (RSUs count, options don't) rather than base salary. At the big tech companies, $150k is a medium-to-high base salary, but most people are making much closer to $200k or more in overall compensation.
This x 1000. Learn and grow. When the market is rewarding you for that personal growth and you know you’re definitely adding more value. Move. Life is too short to be working at a place that does not reward growth.
I'm not sure how this stands up if you control for the the obvious selection bias. After all most people aren't going to switch jobs unless there is a substantial pay hike.
Much of the data could be because people who are significantly underpaid can and do switch jobs and get a big salary bump to market rate. But once someone is at market rate, it is difficult to find a job that pays super market rates, so they stay put.
The authors don't provide any longitudinal data to show that serial job hoppers get paid more over the long run. They provide anecdotal hearsay, and a questionable extrapolation from statistical data.
Over the long run, we are all dead or retired. If someone maxes out by job hopping for the first 10 years of the career and then just sees cost of living raises and someone else stays put and maxes out at the same salary in 20 years. The first person still comes out ahead.
Not to mention more than likely that person who stays put in technology is more likely to see their skills get stale and be less employable.
The performance appraisal process at most workplaces, sadly, is nil. You have to be your own advocate. Been there a while? Time to take the boss aside and say something like "You know I've been here for " + time + " " + plural(time_units) + " now and I've learned a lot. I've accomplished " + " ".join(accomplishments) + " and I have a much greater understanding of the business' inner workings and the role I fill here. I think a raise of " + specific_amount_or_percentage + " would be appropriate."
This triggers an in-depth review, which consists of the chain of command asking themselves "Do I like this guy?", "Can we afford it?", and "How much of a pain in the ass would it be if this person quit?"
I work for the government (for now). We write our own performance evaluation annually (a simple Word document template), with a list of projects completed, and a list of systems that we maintain (and associated maintenance tasks). We also have a section for personal/professional development to keep track of training, education, and self-improvement. It is nice to reflect on what I have done over the past year.
That being said, the performance review is basically a formality. We have 5 steps in each pay grade, and I have never seen someone miss a step after each year. Someone could be sitting at their desk reading their Kindle all day and still get their 5% jump every year. In addition to that, nearly 100% of promotions are based on tenure. You will probably go from a level 1 --> 2 --> 3 --> Senior every year, and supervisory/management positions are only opened upon the incumbent's retirement (to be filled typically by the most tenured person to apply, regardless of fit).
It is not a good system. Lots of people stick around who should receive the boot, and the wrong people are placed in supervisory/management positions simply because they have been there for a while.
This story is the prototypical example of why I'm cynical about government and its ability to effectively use tax dollars. When people say that taxes should be raised, I would generally agree if the government agreed to match the the tax increase with an efficiency increase.
I used to work for the state of Kansas and we had most of this, except we didn’t get raises, nor were non-performers culled out. We probably lost a month of productivity each year due to the work and anxiety the process caused, yet the process had no bearing on anything.
Possibly had a bearing on compliance stuff that wasn't relevant to anything you were doing. Having to have an annual review may be some legislative requirement that makes little sense for what you're doing. (or, at least for the level of time/effort involved).
I'm with a contractor to the government and it's much the same minus promotions. You write your review, you have a meeting with your manager, you are handed the standard COL raise that everyone receives and you repeat every year. I agree, it's not a good system. Those which should be promoted or fired aren't. Those which show initiative and intelligence are often worn down year after year eventually leading them to read their Kindle all day or finding a new job. There is little incentive to do anything other than the bare minimum here and I suspect that's the case for many of these types of workplaces.
Are you in a union? Your description sounds very similar to my father's experience in the USPS. If so, are the problems you describe related to the fact that it's a government job, or the fact that it's a union job?
We've just moved from stack ranking to a coaching orientated "flag if there is an issue" system. Thank the gods. So much time is wasted in performance management; what counts is that people who are not contributing can be coached into success; or removed if they are really not suitable to the team (very rare - and the fault of the manager - me - who accepted them). Promotion is done competitively and on the basis of achievements, so high achievers have a chance to differentiate. What I think is : all employees must have goals for their year; those goals should lead to growth and development - project contribution is table stakes... just do your job! Issues that get in the way need to go to the goal register.
Most (95%) people want to do their fair share and be good at their job. Some years they do a little worse because of health or family issues, some years they hit it out of the park. The 5% who don't want to do this are always a problem and need to be catered for separately. High performers can get promotions. Appraisals are to determine these two things and share information.
"...all employees must have goals for their year..."
In all seriousness, this type of appraisal process always confused me.
What are some examples of measurable goals that a rank-and-file "Member of The Technical Staff" can come up with on their own, seeing as they likely don't have much choice re the projects they work on, the teams they are in, etc.?
360 (peer) reviews can be gamed so are pretty much useless or would be overly critical.
Inputs are company goals and a self assessment of how your current work aligns with them. Your manager then provides review.
Performance is a function of the business line. There is no carrot only stick. So I think promotions and good performance reviews are a function of how impactful your role is to some core business function. If you are not in a profit center then you have to justify how your work saves money overall.
They also encourage maladaptive behavior among and across teams. Stack ranking is particularly bad and I don't think companies have found ways to measure performance without inducing competitiveness. Exceptions might be multi-functional teams but these are more akin to a sports team where the best players get playing time and they completely ignore the farm system.
The entire process is a complete waste of time for all involved as it is not linked to anything. Not raises, not promotions... nothing. It's like the people in the adminisphere were told that they needed to do them to be considered a "real" company so last year we started having them shoved down our throats. This year the engineering team was told that we score too high and make the rest of the company look bad. Give me a bleeping break!
Joel Spolsky had an interesting (and, I think, accurate) take on the pointlessness of performance appraisals: the only possible outcomes are it can be neutral, or you can completely piss off the person you're appraising. If the appraisal is anything less than glowing, you're just going to demoralize the person you're reviewing: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/03/incentive-pay-cons...
I work in academia. Our performance review process is mostly a make-work scheme for HR. There are some forms for goal setting and reviewing how your goals/progress fit with organization goals (which are vague enough to be useless). In theory, HR reviews these forms, but that's doubtful because they don't have manpower or operational understanding to do it.
It changes every couple years, but the outcome is basically a rating of below/meets/exceeds expectations. No one is ever fired, and no one is ever promoted based on these reviews (IT staff don't even have a career ladder to climb). The rating will determine if your annual raise is CPI or CPI +- 1% so it doesn't really affect salary either. The occasional market review which can bump you from lowest decile of market to lowest quartile of market dwarfs the effects of the review ratings.
So it's basically pointless and most managers don't pretend otherwise.
Last month I was told I'd be docked a portion of my COLA because my time estimates were always longer than my actual work time. This was because management NEVER, EVER gives me anything close to a specification to estimate properly from. So, I tend over estimate.
Looked at another way, I was docked because I consistently outperform estimated time to delivery, which means the company actually makes more money off my work because we charge our customers for development work.
So, what do I think of performance appraisals at my work place? I'm actively looking for other work.
I also believe that performance appraisals, for anything but bottom rung employees, are currently done one way only. They should be done from both perspectives. The managed employees reporting to the managers boss. This way, ineffectual middle managers can be disposed of.
Makes you wonder, too - why do we put up with this? I thought we were supposed to be hard to come by and "in demand". Why do we allow them to kick us in the teeth like they do?
The issue in my case is that the opportunities are limited based on location. Workers in this town should be making MORE than average owing to lack of benefits that a big city has.
Theirs a reason they pay as little as they do. The 'good' talent leaves for higher paying jobs elsewhere. It's a self perpetuating problem.
I read an article just the other day about a group of IT workers who attempted to form a union - that didn't go well. I'd be all in.
Cost of Living Allowance. It's basically the bare minimum of raises that one can get. If that's all the company was planning on giving you to start with, then you're working for a crappy company.
I'm all in favour of a regular informal discussion around what aspects of the job are being done well and what could be improved.
But I suspect you are talking about something more formal, something tied to salary increases.
I think such appraisals are damaging to the relationship between employer and employee. The only benefit is for the company in that they make it clear that you can't have maximum marks on everything (which is fair enough), but then tie that to salary increases. "Well, we would have given you a bigger pay rise, but you didn't get top marks on this particular skill." Or similarly, evidence to get rid of someone you wanted out.
Yeah my firm really emphasizes the importance of feedback, but insists it happen via formal reviews which then drive compensation. Which is idiotic. You'll never get genuine feedback if you tie it to compensation because the feedback will be driven by how much the reviewer wants the reviewee to get a raise. So basically by how much they like the person. It's a stupid system that gets almost nothing right.
This is how it works places where I've been in my career. Without getting into details, they have a few set scores and there isn't much of a range. Unless you get all top marks—no raise. If you receive less than average—no cost of living adjustment.
Typically what you'll see is 2% increase a year if you're a moderate/good employee. It takes a special effort to not be, and it's basically impossible to be above that in their books, and especially in most roles.
They also often tie specific job titles to salary grades, so there's a black box facing you in terms of what your manager is allowed to pay. Couple that with yearly culling of the fleet and you've got a pretty tough space to navigate if you just want to advance at your role.
You either have to be promoted to receive a raise, or be hired in at a higher rate.
Each person with line-management responsibility seeks feedback about each of their reporting employees from three other people at the company who they work with – a cross-team mix. Typically three questions - what areas have they done well in, which areas do you feel they could develop further, and what is your overall experience working with them.
This feedback is anonymised, reviewed in terms of personal goals identified at the previous review, and a new set of goals is generated for the next period during a review meeting with each team member.
There are no objective metrics, and the focus is on helping employees to identify and improve any areas they want to work on, with peer feedback used as a tool to help identify those areas and understand if they are engaging in behaviour or practices that might be positive or negative without realising it.
This works pretty well, tends to lead to constructive criticism that can be tied to actual steps to be taken to improve performance, and removes the pressure of having to work to an arbitrary metric.
Sadly, they don't exist where I work currently. There is just the occasional 1:1 which aren't very productive/helpful and are more shoot the shit vs performance appraisal in style
I am quite happy with the process at my current enployer, I just want to share the metric used at a former employer (only for a year, though, in fairness!)
We were judged by the number of lines committed to our CVS.
They realized that was probably not the best of ideas when a colleague and I checked in 1M lines of comments just prior to our review.
I think that, in most cases, the annual performance appraisal "dance" is a CYA for companies that might have to go back and justify the firing of a low performer. Unfortunately, some of the managers (especially the low-middle managers) haven't learned to read between the lines and recognize that the performance appraisal is actually just a formality and try to actually use it as a club to beat more performance out of people who are already overburdened.
I have never gone through the same performance review process two years in a row. And despite all the tweaking and rejiggering, and employer changes, none have ever been able to capture a meaningful metric for performance. Nor have they ever resulted in a salary increase that meaningfully competes with moving on to another company.
The only positive thing I can say about it is that it's less stressful than the interview process, which is my only reason for staying somewhere that I'm not particularly happy.
The only meaningful self-appraisal is "can I make more money doing the same work for someone else?" And the only meaningful goals are "build my resume to make myself a more valuable employee for any company, not necessarily my current employer."
It has always been a waste of time to require the employee's participation in the review process. We are perfectly capable of appraising ourselves, and when we do it, we are always doing it in the context of the whole job market, and not just one company. But no one is ever going to admit "my goal is to jump ship for your leading competitor within the next year and get 20% more pay for doing exactly the same work." We will happily tell the current employer "I plan to increase meaningless metric X by Y% of completely subjective measurement units this year." We might even put that on our resumes, and pretend it's not bullshit in an interview.
It's pants-on-head stupid. Just hire managers that know how to assess the performance of their reports for whatever it is they specifically do, and trust them to do it to the best of their ability. The amount of cargo-culting used to prop up those who are completely incompetent to assemble a working team and keep it humming is ridiculous. Eventually, these companies are going to have to promote more tech workers into tech management, because they'll be the only ones that actually know what good tech work looks like. Slapping on the same performance appraisal process used by the sales department from the top-down just isn't going to get around that.
I worked for one company for 9 years, and had 13 different managers in that timeframe. Never once did the same person do my annual performance appraisal twice. The worst, though, and the one I'll never forget, was when they brought in a new guy in December to be my latest shiny new boss. Well, my daughter was born a month premature the next month, right during performance appraisal time. So I was in and out of the hospital dealing with the stress of a 3.5-pound baby in the neonatal intensive care unit when he insisted that I dial in, from the hospital, for my performance review. Of course, he didn't know anything about me (we'd met less than a month ago), but he gave me a scathingly critical appraisal anyway, just to make sure I knew who was calling the shots around here.
We just finished our first year of formal performance appraisals (self-review, review by manager, etc).
The best thing I can say in favor of the current system is that the managers I know realize that it's a mess/work in progress. It seems like the poorly aligned official standards are being duly ignored for now. I'm not a fan of subjective evaluations, but they're better than completely random "objective" ones. We'll see how it goes in a year or two.
How is it a mess? Line engineers and managers had opposing goals (maximizing bug counts fixed, minimizing bugs--and those are terrible metrics even without the mismatch), individuals had goals that had no relation to their work, or which they had no power to affect.
Team leads had to give feedback, but there was zero structured discussion about standards: I had to ask a manager how to translate my evaluation of a developer into a numeric scale.
My manager had to stack rank 5 people on a 1-5 scale. This was theoretically not just ranking "first" through "last", but ranking from "exceptional" through "unacceptable".
We have some form that we and our direct supervisors fill out and discuss. Supposed to be quarterly, but we haven’t done it in a year. It has literally no effect on anything. There are no raises based on merit and you only get fired if you do something egregious or funding gets cut. We get cost of living increases. The perils of academia...
As always, this is my single-sample personal view, so please don't mistake this for anything beyond that.
It's true, we do place a lot of importance on complexity and impact, which are fuzzy metrics, potentially inconsistently defined, and can be subject to circumstance. Yes, engineers do suffer the temptation to game things by releasing their work prematurely and not committing themselves to supporting it. And yes, not all managers know how to set expectations appropriately, occasionally resulting in disappointment and confusion for their employees.
However, that's the individual's perspective. Promotions serve the institution first, and the individual second, and I'd like to offer the institutional perspective.
Promotion to senior engineer is a big freaking deal. Once you are Senior, you've effectively been given the keys to the kingdom. It's the industry equivalent of tenure. Want to transfer to a team? No problem, your manager knows they're going to get someone who's been through hell and is able to deliver. Want to join another company? Great, "Senior Engineer, Google" is an indisputable mark of quality, you'll at least get an interview.
If there's one thing I've learned in my time here, it's that false positives are way more costly than false negatives. Hire someone who can't do the work? Enjoy six months of trying to grow them plus however long it takes to get them to leave and release their headcount. Promote someone who isn't indisputably good enough for the title? Enjoy watching them fail to meet expectations cycle after cycle, trying to grow them, only to watch them leave out of frustration a year later.
Yeah, it kinda sucks as an individual contributor because proving yourself is difficult and subject to external forces. That's torture for the sort of ambitious overachievers that tend to be drawn to this company. However, the thing that makes your career growth difficult is the same thing that makes the work so challenging and the work environment so pleasant.
Also, there are some recent developments the author didn't mention, and I presume he left after this was put into place. A lot of focus has been drawn away from the rank of Senior. On paper, things used to be "up or out" until Senior, even though that wasn't really applied in my experience. Now it's only "up or out" until L4, one promotion below Senior. Plus the Senior promotion process is getting streamlined somewhat, although time will tell how that plays out.
EDIT: And then there's money. Managers have enough leeway that overachieving L4s can make almost as much as an L5, so it's not like the lack of a promotion is impoverishing you.
EDIT EDIT: To give some more context on the process itself:
For non-promo candidates, we do mutual reviews. You list the colleagues you'd like to review you and list the projects you've worked on and your contribution to them. Then everyone comments on their colleagues' assessments.
Managers then get together and have a powwow in which they agree on who in their groups are giving exemplary performance at each level, and people are calibrated as above or below the models for their level.
For promo candidates, the self-assessment is much more in-depth, and a committee of unrelated people get together and perform a similar assessment, except against a more abstract rubric describing expectations at each level.
You didn't really describe the process. At Google the process of performance evaluation is really simple, if you're not wanting to be promoted: you write a short self-evaluation consisting of up to five projects. For non-promo candidates this is as little as five sentence fragments in a list. Then your manager and a group of other managers from various related and unrelated organizations sit through a meeting called "calibration" where they try to grade you as "meets", "exceeds", or "strongly exceeds expectations", or sometimes "superb" or "needs improvement" at opposite extremes. This happens twice a year, but the self-evaluation is only mandatory once per year. You can also solicit peer reviews if you wish but this is pointless if you don't want to be promoted.
It's an interesting perspective, but seems a bit out of place here. I would think it would have been more fitting as a reply to the thread from yesterday (which is still on page 2 ATM).
How is "up or out" enforced? If someone is consistently performing for their level but never seeks promotion, would they just be unceremoniously fired?
In my experience, it's not overtly enforced. At lower levels there's an expectation of growth, so not growing can be seen as triggering a "fails to meet expectations." If someone is underperforming managers start to try to help them out and guide them, but after a string of "fails to meet" evaluations the focus shifts to motivation and compatibility with the company.
Almost nothing is unceremonious around here. Even employees who are on their way out are placed on performance improvement plans to give them a change to turn themselves around. I've never seen anyone fired: the closest I've seen is people leaving of their own accord to save themselves the trouble of going through the process.
We are supposed to set annual goals/metrics, but don't know what we're doing 3 months out. This was also the case at previous company. Pointing out the task is impossible doesn't seem to bother management. Success Factors seems to make half its income from this sort of thing, so I assume it's trendy.
There is a process managers are supposed to follow for promotions, which is good on paper, but it's pretty clear managers only do the paperwork steps of that and pick based on their own criteria. The one aspect of that that seems to function well is managers get nudged about people who haven't been promoted in a while.
Usual funding issues with promotions, but I think that's true everywhere.
It's just a bureaucratic requirement few people care about. A kind of game: I need to pretend I care and my manager has to pretend likewise. We fill in the forms, shake hands, and repeat this each year.
Code reviews are something that is completely separate, to me. They should not be considered in performance reviews, otherwise you lose a lot of their effectiveness (the one exception would be if someone was being toxic in their comments)
Not doing code reviews I guess works for very small companies. Code reviews are more for blind spot checks. And everyone had blind spots in a large system.
I like it. It is officially once a year, but reviewed quarterly. My dev manager never fail even if is to busy to say anything constructive. We both chose objectives, we scheduled the next appointment at the end of the current one. I basically have to talk about my performance and say what I think is good or bad with me, or managers.
Ultimately I think they are pointless at most companies since the raise/bonus pool is going to be defined by something out of your control. I have experienced mostly self defined objectives where the completion of those objectives are reviewed with a manger at EOY.
Part of the problem is that HR is a total afterthought at most tech companies. Just a few token people and the C-level who only cares about making the "100 best places to work" lists.
With the stack ranking system they got here, they make it unnecessarily stressfull. My boss and everyone else is so stressed out during appraisals week. And all this stress is sooo unnecessary.
I haven't been at the job I have long enough to have been through a performance appraisal yet, but every job I've had prior to this worked the same way: they demand that I set "goals" for myself early in the year and don't give me any specific guidance about what sort of goals they're looking for, so I put together a set of what I think are reasonable goals based on the priorities I'm aware of at the time (taking in to account that I know that new things will come up in the course of the year). Then my completely unqualified, self-serving, low-level middle manager looks at my goals, says, "these are bad goals", writes up a new, impossible set of goals based on the project-of-the-day (his goals, of course, are so vague that it would be impossible to ever say that he didn't reach them), requires that I agree to them, and then gives me a negative performance appraisal at the end of the period because I didn't achieve them (mostly because the priorities have completely changed in the last 12 months so that none of the ridiculous goals he made up for me make sense any more). But then, after my negative review, I get a standard cost of living increase, they keep me on, give me more responsibility, and then are genuinely shocked and disappointed when I leave for a better paying job.
I appraise myself - have I learned new marketable skills? If so? I jump to another job that will pay the equivalent of 3 or 4 years of raises.