I can the frustrations from a hiring mangers point of view. It does take resources (mostly time) to interview, offer, on-board, and integrate a new team member.
However, companies expect and want loyalty from their employees and offer next to nothing in terms of retention. If companies wish to get a better ROI on their hiring decisions they need to begin offering market-competitive raises. A 5% CoL adjustment is borderline insulting. Why would an employee choose to stay when all it takes is a few interviews to make a 15-20% pay jump?
I can't imagine that having to hire a new bunch of people every few months to replace the job-hoppers is a better investment than offering a realistic raise.
I think raises lose effectiveness if someone is a lone job-hopper with no serious investments anyway (house, car, family). An appreciable raise would be $5k, and surely you can onboard someone, ignoring their salary, for less than that as long as you aren't purchasing new equipment. Money is just not an effective cure for boredom.
You really don't want bored people on your team long term. Often technical debt goes unrealized for years, which a bored programmer is likely to produce more of. A dedicated hiring manager is not going to be paying off technical debt directly.
You really don't want bored people on your team long term.
Most commercial programming work is boring. But that’s because most work full stop is. There are things that aren’t fun but need to be done anyway. That’s why it’s called “work” and you are paid a salary for it. You could be sweeping the streets or mining coal or packing meat. Most programmers don’t realise how lucky we are that there is even a fraction of our work that is actually so fun we’d almost do it for free...
5% CoL is insulting when CoL goes up less than that? Maybe what you mean is that raises when you are promoted are not high enough?
During your first 5 years or so you'll probably get good raises as you gain experience and increase the value you provide to the organization. Past that, unless you're top 5% and negotiate well, you'll probably stagnate a bit in the pay department (stagnate at a very good wage, that is). In my experience, at least..
5% raises are insulting when a company bemoans the hardships of not being able to retain talent.
I get stagnating in pay raises after 2-3 years and receiving decent increases up to that point, but how can a company complain about retaining talent when they don't offer anything past the 5% in the first place?
It just seems strange to me that companies want the option to fire off employees at will, but also hate seeing employees take advantage of that ('job hop').
Maybe a 2 year contract with built in raise structure (assuming improvement based on pre-defined metrics) would be a better solution than at will employment.
Whatever the solution may be, it doesn't seem like many people are satisfied with the current system. Especially from a hiring management perspective.
However, companies expect and want loyalty from their employees and offer next to nothing in terms of retention. If companies wish to get a better ROI on their hiring decisions they need to begin offering market-competitive raises. A 5% CoL adjustment is borderline insulting. Why would an employee choose to stay when all it takes is a few interviews to make a 15-20% pay jump?
I can't imagine that having to hire a new bunch of people every few months to replace the job-hoppers is a better investment than offering a realistic raise.