It is a known fact that if your employer is not willing to give market rate comp, it is on you to get the market rate on the market.
But owners knows most of us are lil bitches who loath any discomfort or change. So he is able to attricion us.
If you can, you should be getting raises after 2-3 years per employer. They should he actually offering you more to keep you tbh but that’s a sorry for a different time.
Of course, if your employer isn’t giving out raises and prices keep going up, people who can get better jobs will engineer their own raise.
My boss told me if I try to leave they will pay me more. That just pisses me off. I do a kick ass job for them, I made myself a profit center. I have saved the company half a million a year. Throw me a bone, it costs you NOTHING.
I had a boss tell me this and it was because he couldn’t unlock the right budget bucket to pay me more unless I first indicated a documentable fact that I was leaving. Apparently his hands were tied above him…so I did it. I actually didn’t have a job lined up, but gave my two weeks, got a 20% raise…and then still left 6mos later for greener pastures.
But my rapport with my boss was pretty good at the time, so it was pretty clear when he said what he said that there was reason.
When I left my old job, a lowly shipping/receiving guy in a warehouse, my job panicked and offered me a pretty significant raise if I stayed.
After having been there about 5 years, I’d made myself somewhat indispensable, they kind of just kept piling responsibilities onto me, I absorbed a lot of a supervisors duties when he retired with no replacement hired for him, I had fairly minimal oversight and was mostly left to figure out how things worked on my own (which I didn’t really mind, it made the job more interesting and I was up to the task, but I definitely didn’t get paid nearly enough for the work I was doing) so I was pretty much the only one who knew how all of our shipping and receiving stuff worked.
Along the way I wrangled myself a couple OK raises, but not really enough to bring me to a proper living wage. I had asked a couple of times about at least getting a promotion in title if nothing else so that I would have something more impressive on my resume that “warehouse associate” which I’m pretty sure was my job title the entire time I was there despite effectively being a supervisor.
When they offered me more when I told them I was leaving, it pissed me off more than anything. If they’d just paid me that much from the get-go and kept on top of giving me decent raises to reflect the job I was doing there’s a good chance I’d still be working there now and never would have tried looking for another job. What they offered me wasn’t quite my starting salary at my new job but it was pretty close.
I could have left them really high and dry and just left, but I didn’t want to screw over whoever was replacing me too badly, so I wrote down instructions for everything I could think of that was my responsibility because honestly no one else had the whole picture, a handful of people there could do parts of my job but a lot of it, like I said, was stuff I had to figure out on my own. All of the business cards I’d acquired for different shipping companies, vendors, etc. and I gave 3 weeks notice and attempted to pass on as much knowledge as possible to my likely temporary replacement before I left. Last I heard, they went through several replacements within a few months of me leaving.
All your boss told you was that if they could, they would pay you less.
All hard work gets you is more work.
Sometimes. Hard work has done pretty well for me.
Already happening in the trades. Good luck finding an electrical company that isn’t booked out for weeks. There is way more work than can be done right now with electricians being extremely hard to hire. So if your electrical quote seems insane, that’s why.
I wish contractors were only out weeks. Every time I’ve had to have something done it’s been 3 months OR pay double as an emergency, your choice.
We keep having people come out, express interest in whatever project we need done, make a bunch of promises, then ghost us on getting quotes.
It’s really weird. Though it’s been about the same for like 15 years now.
I’ve become too old to be marketable in free agency so I’m stuck, but you better believe the day it’s financially viable to do so, and not a minute later, my happy ass will walk out into retirement and never look back.
I hired a 65-year-old guy last year. I knew he was older, but didn’t know his age until after he joined my team.
It was also a slightly new career path for him. He’d worked as an IT Project Manager for most of his career, focused on backend systems interacting only with other IT folks. Now he’s a Program Manager on a Product team so it’s not wildly different, but his stakeholders are significantly different and the way he works is different (focusing at a higher level than before).
And he is rockin’ it. I love working with him and seeing him grow into this role has brought me a lot of satisfaction. He is a great member of my team. He’s mentioned wanting to retire within 5 years and I’ll be sad when that happens, but I hope I have the chance to be his last manager and support him through when he makes that choice.
I’m not trying to minimize the challenges of changing jobs as you get older; the statistics speak for themselves. But I do hope that if you want that change that this anecdote might help inspire you. There are other hiring managers who will only care about what you can bring to the table.
Some of our best guys are in their 50s and 60s.
Some of our worst guys are in their 20s and 30s. Not inexperienced - just shitty workers and probably never going anywhere in their careers.
Then some of our best guys are also in their 30s and 40s.
Idk what you do, but don’t limit yourself. In my line of work, people with a shitpile of experience are very sought after
I’ve become too old to be marketable in free agency so I’m stuck, but you better believe the day it’s financially viable to do so, and not a minute later, my happy ass will walk out into retirement and never look back.
I was there too. Then the company came out with a buyout that was available for anyone with enough years of seniority.
The package was worth more than if I had worked until I was eligible for my pension, so obviously I jumped all over that.
Best career move I’ve made in 20+ years!
My company (megacorp that bought out another megacorp I worked for) appears to no longer do early retirement buyouts.
Every year they whittle away a little more at the things that made it a good place to work. The past year has been especially bad.
