[arpyzo]

My observations suggest that this applies far more to lower performing employees than higher performing ones since the barrier to change jobs is lower for top tier talent.

In effect this means that while companies that give paltry pay bumps that don't keep up with the market may successfully hold on to lower performing employees, they'll be continually churning through top performers.

[aleph_minus_one]

> My observations suggest that this applies far more to lower performing employees than higher performing ones since the barrier to change jobs is lower for top tier talent.

I think talent and the capability to market/self-promote oneself (I believe only for the latter capability, the barrier to change jobs is much lower) are mostly uncorrelated.

[downut]

EDIT: Grrr! This comment meant for the GP, sorry.

I think there is an unstated underlying assumption in this comment that "higher performing" implies "drop-in transferable technical/social skills" legible to the target interviewing entity. Maybe for software but for wide swaths of actually engineering (double graduate engineers in this family) I doubt that rather strongly.

The default 2 weeks vacation for the decades experienced new hire is a pretty strong tell.

[bb88]

But is this actually a problem for a company? I think most companies can only afford second rate talent with the top tier talent going to FAANG companies anyway.

What most companies are really looking for is undervalued high performers. And there's probably a lot of those still that haven't moved to the bay area.

I think MBA's these days have decided that they'll hold labor costs low by not rewarding high performers, and then hire whoever they can to fit their budget, but then have a yearly 5% layoff to hold their employee's feet to the fire.

And then those same MBA's get a bonus for keeping costs low, meanwhile enjoying their beach houses on the weekends.

Granted it sucks to be an individual contributor, but if you're a manager, you have incentives for cutting costs to the bone.

[aleph_minus_one]

> What most companies are really looking for is undervalued high performers.

I'm not sure about that, since very smart people often tend to be, well, "a little bit difficult to handle", in particular by bosses who got to their position by office politics instead of merits (as many do).

If companies were really looking for high performers, they'd create an environment where high performers can really flourish. Because in my observation there exist quite a lot of high performers who are "held down" by their current work environment, this would attract quite some potential high performers, including undervalued ones.

[jprete]

> In effect this means that while companies that give paltry pay bumps that don't keep up with the market may successfully hold on to lower performing employees, they'll be continually churning through top performers.

The same effect might even be partially responsible for the OP observation. I.e. the cause and effect might not be "job-hopping gets you paid more" but it might instead be "having a lot of skill gets you paid more and also enables you to job-hop more confidently".

[thayne]

Or maybe people who are better and more confident at negotiation and interviewing are also more confident at hopping jobs. But those skills may or may not correlate with the skills you care about.

Just because you are a good software engineer doesn't mean you are good at finding a new job.

[s1artibartfast]

why not do both? thats what I see.

Firms give paltry pay bumps as default, but will fight with competitive salaries to retain top performers.

Top performers get completive raises by going to their boss with an offer letter from a competitor.

[delusional]

General consensus among my colleagues and bosses are that anyone who comes to a routine salary negotiation with a competing offer is encouraged to take it. If you've been eyeing a different opportunity, then you're not going to find your current role engaging. The money is rarely enough to keep you for long.

[jcon321]

Would you really bring your boss an offer letter? Even as top performer it seems like a bad idea to take any counter offer.

[JohnFen]

> Top performers get completive raises by going to their boss with an offer letter from a competitor.

In my businesses, I've had employees do this a couple of times. Both times my response was "you should take that offer". Also both times, if they'd asked for a pay increase equal to what the offer represented, they probably would have gotten it.

Coming to me with an offer letter in an attempt to get a pay raise is a thing that I think speaks very poorly of the person. It's an attempt to extort me, their current employer, and it's showing great disrespect for the company they got the offer letter from (because the employee is basically just using that employer and wasting their time).

[barbariangrunge]

Job performance doesn’t really matter in tech. It’s all about interview skills and leetcode