Flat Pay Prompts 1 In 3 In IT To Consider Jump 608
CWmike writes "Companies have cut salaries and training, held back on bonuses and piled more work on employees in response to the economic downturn. These tactics may well be pushing many IT pros to go job hunting, Computerworld's latest salary poll has found. More than one third (36%) of the 343 respondents to a recent poll said they are looking to move to a new employer in the next six months. And 69% reported they had not received a pay raise in the past six months. The poll was conducted during the last two weeks in September. For employers, the warning could not be more clear. As the economy improves, the most able IT workers may leave for something better."
Re:No problem, we'll just ship more jobs overseas (Score:2, Informative)
Mrs. Fiorina, Welcome to Slashdot!
Even when the market was "good" this was true. (Score:3, Informative)
I never once got a raise I was promised. All any employer ever did was blow smoke up my ass in the performance reviews. I never once got a salary increase that I didn't have to quit my old job for. Once or twice jumping ship for better pay got the rest of the team members *their* promised raises though.
Outsourcing and visa abuse (Score:2, Informative)
Re:As the economy improves??? (Score:4, Informative)
Obviously you've never been a farmer or lived near one.
Re:As the economy improves??? (Score:3, Informative)
Lockheed Martin generally does/did their raises in February. I've always assumed it was pretty much industry standard. Or at least at the end of the FY.
I too did not receive a raise in the last 6 months, I'm not worried at all, our raises come in December.
Re:As the economy improves??? (Score:0, Informative)
Real median household income is up quite a bit since 1990, actually. Don't let the facts interfere with your politics, though.
Re:As the economy improves??? (Score:4, Informative)
Every company does them at different times, although annual is common. ALso, end of the fiscal year is meaningless in calendar terms, a fiscal year can as easily end in July as January.
Re:As the economy improves??? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Raise in the past 6 months? Try year. (Score:2, Informative)
** - Survey of 10000 people with 1 respondant
Re:Flat pay isn't my concern. (Score:2, Informative)
I think I work for the same organization as you. Tomorrow is my last day.
Nothing about that bump indicated to me that it would make me any more valuable to the organization. I was at 120% utilization last year, which meant that I worked an average of 48 hours per week on a billable project. My bill out rate was 2 times my internal cost. They gave me a 1% raise and told me I had to do the equivalent of 100 hours of paper work on my own time to justify why I should get a promotion.
Instead I took 3 hours to go through an interview at a competitor where I will get a 25% raise, up to a 30% bonus, AND overtime.
It began to seem to me that all the hoops to jump through for promotion that they'd implemented under the auspices of "best practice" were really just ways to keep you from getting a raise. This recession stuff isn't going to last forever and companies need to remember that it is far cheaper to retain good, ambitious employees than to hire replacements for the ones that leave.
Re:As the economy improves??? (Score:3, Informative)
No. If 9 make $1k, then the median income, the one for the "in the middle" earned, is $1k. If the first guy's income doubles and the other nines' are halved to $500, then the median is now $500.
You're right about the mean and total, which is the reason the median is more representative. But the median is more representative.
Re:As the economy improves??? (Score:0, Informative)
Ahh yes... typical liberal reasoning. The stimulus didn't work. Why not? Clearly it wasn't big enough. And every time it doesn't work, the next one will have to be bigger, because clearly the last one wasn't big enough.
Because we began with the assumption that the stimulus worked, no matter how badly the economy gets after the stimulus, it would have been worse without the stimulus. Thus, we get back to our original assumption: the stimulus worked.
Sorry, circular reasoning is not strong evidence of anything. If you want to prove assertion A, you cannot start by assuming A.
Re:As the economy improves??? (Score:5, Informative)
Only if he was dumb enough to not claim the money he invested in the company as a write-off. See, the money he would use to pay those fictional employees is NOT taxed at 90%, even in your scenario. In fact it's taxed relatively little, likely just the half of Medicare and Social Security tax that corporations pay on employee compensation. And the portion of it he spends on physical or service related costs of his business isn't taxed at all. The only way he's going to suddenly be out 900k is if he was taking that much in personal income one year, then turning around the next year and putting his personal assets back into the business.
If anything, raising personal income tax would be an incentive to invest more. If the choice is between taking an extra million in personal income of which 90% goes to taxes, or rolling that million back into tax-free investment in the company, the company is a much better option. Today you can take that million in extra income and pay only 30% in taxes, so it's a lot more appealing.
Basically, your argument is ridiculous, based only in fiction, and you appear to have such a loose grasp on the American tax code that I suspect you are overdue for an audit.
Re:They don't seem to have a problem with CEO pay (Score:2, Informative)
Whoosh, Whoosh, Whoosh, Whoosh
Go watch Office Space then come back and re-read his comment in proper context :)
Re:As the economy improves??? (Score:1, Informative)
Consider a country with ten people, one making $1M and nine making $1k.
The one making the $1M also happens to be an entrepreneur who likes to create businesses and hires the lower-income persons. If the first guy's income tax is increased to 90%, then he can't create those new businesses. Now you have a man who USED to make 1 million but had to close-up shop because the heavy taxation made it impossible to survive, plus 9 laid-off people living off government welfare.
But the government has no money due to poor fiscal policy (overspending), so it has to borrow the Welfare from China. That's the situation in the USA today. Not quite that bad, but trending in that direction with current policies.
Why are the anti-tax folks always so bad at accounting?
How come your entrepreneur can't survive on $100k, when his 9 countrymen survive on 1% of that? Why would he stop doing what he was doing to make 100x more than his countrymen because of high taxation? If I told you you could stop earning your 40,000/year income by working 40-60 hours a week and live of a government welfare check of $4,000/year, would you? Because in your scenario, you would do it for a $400/year check.
The government has no money because the last Republican President ignored warnings about Al Queda, then attacked a non-aggressor country (Iraq had no nukes, no ties to Al Queda, and was less of a threat than numerous other countries), lower taxes without offsetting long term decreases in spending (the sham lower tax rates = higher tax revenues has never proved itself). The last Democrat President left office with a surplus and a balanced budget, the last Republican President left us with two wars and a cratering economy. Clearly what we need are Republicans back in office to start a war with Iran.
Re:As the economy improves??? (Score:3, Informative)
Their hands
were tied
Fixed that for you. How does it feel to fail something that fourth-graders are expected to do correctly?
You're a dumbass. Note, that's "you're" and is not "your," just in case you got confused there.
Re:As the economy improves??? (Score:3, Informative)
Nice oversimplification.
Most income tax systems increase the taxation level in bands, so while he might pay 90% tax on everything over say $500,00 the first $10k might be free, up to 20k at 10% etc. Of course no country has anything like that level of taxation, although a 90% top rate was tried in the 60s in the UK and wasn't a total disaster. Most of the people who claimed they would leave didn't.
We have had this debate recently in the UK because the government wants to take away child benefit from people who own over a certain amount. The argument against it is that it creates a disincentive for people to earn more because they will then lose significant benefit payments, but it is of course nonsense. If you boss offered you a £1000 pay rise but you knew you would lose £1000 in benefits you would still say yes. It's a step on the ladder, hopefully leading to another raise next year.
Re:Guess what ... (Score:3, Informative)
I'd be cautious about showing another job offer. To many employers, that's a sign that you're ready to jump ship (maybe you are), and although they may make a compelling counter offer for the short term, in the long term you may find you're a marked man.
Absolutely. "I've had an offer from somewhere else, can you beat it" is the Joker, and you can only play it once. Depending on your situation, it might be worth it - but you need to be damn sure before you embark on the process and you *have* to be prepared to carry through with it (which is generally in direct conflict with why you might want to stay).
It's much better to show evidence of what the job market supports. IT Salary Surveys are a big way to do so, and so are anecdotes: "My old college buddy who has pretty much identical experience to me just took a job for $X," rather than, "I've been interviewing around, and I can make $X at this other company, they've extended me a job offer." You only do that if you really are ready to jump ship, and the counter offer had better be damn impressive to take the risk that you'll still have a job there 6 months later (when they have had time to find a replacement for you).
I've never worked for anyone who puts any stock in Salary Surveys when determining raises. They will do it for new hires (though not the kind of Salary Surveys you can find online, the ones that HR departments get), but never for raises. This often goes hand-in-hand with a "I'm never giving anyone a raise of more than X%" attitude, even though the salary being offered new hires is significantly more than X% over existing salaries.
Of course, this ends up with a ludicrous situations like the following (happened to me earlier this year trying to keep/hire staff):
Employees A and B are earning X while working in location P. Said employees have a great record and reputation in the company, and have been with it for 3-5 years (thus meaning they also had extensive experience with how the company operates and its environments). Company moves corporate headquarters to location Q. Employees A and B have to move because policy dictates that any employee must have a direct supervisor in the office they work in, and my job was moved to location Q. They are told they have to move as well or new people will be hired to replace them.
The budget for the new hires in location Q is approximately 1.6X - 1.9X (partially because the existing employees were underpaid and partially because location Q has a higher cost of living). However, I am told in no uncertain terms that I cannot offer employees A and B a raise greater than 1.15X (and even that was a struggle), even though I know (and have explained) that both would happily relocate for a new salary of 1.5X, plus relocation assistance totalling about 0.1X.
Thus, I was forced to let two extremely good people go, along with all their acquired knowledge, and spend _months_ short-staffed while trying to hire replacements (couldn't believe how hard it was to find decent people - recession my arse) who ended up being paid ca. 1.8X and with the associated losses in productivity due to a) aforementioned period of being short-staffed and b) the new employees taking the normal couple of months to become really useful.
The root cause of this madness seems to be the unerring and genuine belief that basically all employees are trivial to replace and there is no productivity lost during both a) the short-staffing period after people who couldn't get raises decamp to other employers and b) the 2-3 month training period before new employees become genuinely useful.
Re:As the economy improves??? (Score:4, Informative)
I speak as someone who lived in the BFMONW rural Midwest America for close to 10 years. I was surrounded by family farms whose children were exploited by their parents for labor both hazardous to their immediate as well as long term health. All the while they were provided an inexcusably poor education which all but guaranteed their career choices were limited to unskilled labor or semi-skilled trades. Given the economically blighted nature of such an area this generally meant they were very often forced to continue working on the farm or sometimes fork it as a start to their own.
I also speak as someone who rescued his wife from such a life. I'd watch the insults. I very much do care when children are exploited for labor to the detriment of their future. The issue is far more personal than you would've ever imagined. I would never suggest that the parents don't care about their kids, but I would very much suggest that they can be short sighted and lack understanding about the consequences of their choices about them.