Changing jobs

[TheJman]

TBH: If I have budgeted a certain amount of opex for a specific skill and that person comes in at two-thirds of it, I would still offer the amount I had in my mind - it's not like the employee is not worth it. I find it unethical if a proof of salary is required - in some rare cases I request a payslip as a proof of employment rather than anything else.

I really respect you for that, and from an employees perspective, thank you.

I agree that people lie on their CV's and getting a payslip definitely confirms that they are currently employed - from an employee's perspectively, I just feel that disclosing my salary before knowing what band of salary is being offered is a method of the company being able to potentially get someone "cheaper" (maybe someone who worked in a different province where salaries are less for example).

I think there is a middle ground, and I think, unfortunately, while there are employers like you and employees like me, there are also others who try to lie and/or take advantage of situations ....

 

[MagicDude4Eva]

When I say senior, I mean years of experience. So my hunch is that they have actually been working for 10 years - they just have nothing to show for it in terms of knowledge.

Over the last 8 years I have interviewed a number of candidates with 8+ years work-experience and with that one would think that if you are a developer for 10 years or a linux admin for 8 that you will have gathered substantial amount of knowledge to do your job effectively.

Two recent examples:
- I interviewed one Java candidate (7 years developing for some SME) and the guy was surprised when I showed him how to run Tomcat in debug mode and use Eclipse to trace through a JSP (he had never seen this before and System.out.println was his way of tracing through code).

- A Linux admin of 10+ years and being stuck in his same old ways would still manually download and install RPMs, refuses the use of yum for updates, writes his own monitoring scripts instead of using OSS products (Nagios etc) and copies and pastes the best answer from stackoverflow (without understanding what it does) to fix production issues. Instead of using automation (such as yum-cron) he would weekly check (via yum update) if patches are available and in the worst case would then do a complete server rebuild from the latest ISO.

Both people are currently paid >50K and I would hire neither for more than 20K (and both will still insist that I am a greedy/unreasonable employer).

 

[reactor_sa]

Over the last 8 years I have interviewed a number of candidates with 8+ years work-experience and with that one would think that if you are a developer for 10 years or a linux admin for 8 that you will have gathered substantial amount of knowledge to do your job effectively.

Two recent examples:
- I interviewed one Java candidate (7 years developing for some SME) and the guy was surprised when I showed him how to run Tomcat in debug mode and use Eclipse to trace through a JSP (he had never seen this before and System.out.println was his way of tracing through code).

- A Linux admin of 10+ years and being stuck in his same old ways would still manually download and install RPMs, refuses the use of yum for updates, writes his own monitoring scripts instead of using OSS products (Nagios etc) and copies and pastes the best answer from stackoverflow (without understanding what it does) to fix production issues. Instead of using automation (such as yum-cron) he would weekly check (via yum update) if patches are available and in the worst case would then do a complete server rebuild from the latest ISO.

Both people are currently paid >50K and I would hire neither for more than 20K (and both will still insist that I am a greedy/unreasonable employer).

Haha. Yeah, had plenty candidates come asking for huge salaries, yet without Google they were completely lost. 6 years of experience?? More like 2.... Scary ****.

I guess it works both ways.

 

[cguy]

Hi all,

So I'm in the position in my career where I'm not unhappy in my job, but I wouldn't mind having a look at other opportunities out there.

Problem is, I don't agree with these recruiters phoning me, and the first question I'm asked is what my current salary is. I don't feel I should need to divulge that private information, and that my offer should be based on my current salary, but rather what they value me at.

Have a read through this:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/ask-the-headhunter-never-ever/

How do others feel about this?

This topic has come up, many times before. The same people make the same idealistic arguments "They all just want to pay you 20% more", "it should be irrelevant", "but they're not giving you their salary, or the salaries of their employees", "giving away your information is putting you in a poor negotiating position", "it's private information", etc. None of these hold water.

"They all just want to pay you 20% more", "it should be irrelevant"
Yes, some companies may want to just pay you 20% more - deal with it - making policy decisions based on what a few ****ty employers may do is no way to manage your career. In fact, finding (and avoiding) the companies with this type of non-merit based policy is a plus for your career.

"it should be irrelevant"
No, your previous pay is very relevant. Your resume and interview provide only partial justification for the salary you desire and for whether or not you should be hired. Resumes can contain anything from exaggerations to outright lies, and many people can game interviews, or simply be very good at them, but be a terrible employee in practice. Salary history gives the best indication to a prospective employer of what your prior employer thought of you. Extenuating factors should be considered if the salary is very low, and a lot of weight should still be given to interviews and resume history - all of this, is what an employer needs to make the best hiring and pay decisions. I for one am happy to give my history - my last offer required that I give 5 years of salary history, which I happily gave, since it tells a great story - it really does tell a story (and holding out, tells a totally different story...).

"but they're not giving you their salary, or the salaries of their employees"
No, (not generally), but as a proxy, they should at least give you a range of what compensation is on the table for this position, which is more relevant - get this before even applying. If an employer is cagey about this, they're not dealing in good faith - look elsewhere.

"giving away your information is putting you in a poor negotiating position"
Perhaps a little, but not giving it away makes you seem like a low-paid opportunist... or someone who values uncalled for idealism over pragmatism. I promise you that in the eyes of an employer this looks much, much worse, and unless your really are a poorly paid incompetent fool with great interview skills and a bogus resume, being cagey with your compensation puts you in a far worse negotiating position, if you even manage to get an offer at all.

"it's private information"
It's really not. Employers know within a very narrow band, what you should be earning, your specific set of digits isn't something to value as "private" - they may have hired people from your company before - they've surely seen payslips from many other candidates, or even shared compensation statistics with other corporations, or perhaps they are large enough that even their internal statistics give them an idea of what they pay distribution should be for a particular skill set in order to ensure retention. The reason they ask you, is for verification purposes - if you are far below this it is surprising (and a red flag), if you are far above this, it is surprising too, and very much in your benefit do display. So once again, not giving your income only makes sense if it is far below average - so refusing to give this information is about as big of a red flag (and often, bigger) as actually being far below average.

 

[cguy]

Anecdotally, the only time I have ever been made a job offer that was less than (and in fact a decrease) a huge increase above my current salary, was when I was cagey about my salary - only after I saw how it went down, did I realize just how stupid I was to withhold it - I withheld it because I thought I was underpaid, and they simply concluded that I must have been very underpaid, and based their decision on that.

 

[SauRoNZA]

Over the last 8 years I have interviewed a number of candidates with 8+ years work-experience and with that one would think that if you are a developer for 10 years or a linux admin for 8 that you will have gathered substantial amount of knowledge to do your job effectively.

Two recent examples:
- I interviewed one Java candidate (7 years developing for some SME) and the guy was surprised when I showed him how to run Tomcat in debug mode and use Eclipse to trace through a JSP (he had never seen this before and System.out.println was his way of tracing through code).

- A Linux admin of 10+ years and being stuck in his same old ways would still manually download and install RPMs, refuses the use of yum for updates, writes his own monitoring scripts instead of using OSS products (Nagios etc) and copies and pastes the best answer from stackoverflow (without understanding what it does) to fix production issues. Instead of using automation (such as yum-cron) he would weekly check (via yum update) if patches are available and in the worst case would then do a complete server rebuild from the latest ISO.

Both people are currently paid >50K and I would hire neither for more than 20K (and both will still insist that I am a greedy/unreasonable employer).

Haha. Yeah, had plenty candidates come asking for huge salaries, yet without Google they were completely lost. 6 years of experience?? More like 2.... Scary ****.

I guess it works both ways.

Yeah it doesn't matter if you were washing dishes for 1 year or 10 years...at the end of the day your skillset is still washing dishes.

And that's inherently the problem in IT is that people are way too stuck in routine tasks and never get challenged, or they do get challenged but stick to tried and trusted methods (as per RPM example vs Yum) and in essence burn time/money for no good reason at all.

Inefficiency.

 

[jman]

This topic has come up, many times before. The same people make the same idealistic arguments "They all just want to pay you 20% more", "it should be irrelevant", "but they're not giving you their salary, or the salaries of their employees", "giving away your information is putting you in a poor negotiating position", "it's private information", etc. None of these hold water.

"They all just want to pay you 20% more", "it should be irrelevant"
Yes, some companies may want to just pay you 20% more - deal with it - making policy decisions based on what a few ****ty employers may do is no way to manage your career. In fact, finding (and avoiding) the companies with this type of non-merit based policy is a plus for your career.

"it should be irrelevant"
No, your previous pay is very relevant. Your resume and interview provide only partial justification for the salary you desire and for whether or not you should be hired. Resumes can contain anything from exaggerations to outright lies, and many people can game interviews, or simply be very good at them, but be a terrible employee in practice. Salary history gives the best indication to a prospective employer of what your prior employer thought of you. Extenuating factors should be considered if the salary is very low, and a lot of weight should still be given to interviews and resume history - all of this, is what an employer needs to make the best hiring and pay decisions. I for one am happy to give my history - my last offer required that I give 5 years of salary history, which I happily gave, since it tells a great story - it really does tell a story (and holding out, tells a totally different story...).

"but they're not giving you their salary, or the salaries of their employees"
No, (not generally), but as a proxy, they should at least give you a range of what compensation is on the table for this position, which is more relevant - get this before even applying. If an employer is cagey about this, they're not dealing in good faith - look elsewhere.

"giving away your information is putting you in a poor negotiating position"
Perhaps a little, but not giving it away makes you seem like a low-paid opportunist... or someone who values uncalled for idealism over pragmatism. I promise you that in the eyes of an employer this looks much, much worse, and unless your really are a poorly paid incompetent fool with great interview skills and a bogus resume, being cagey with your compensation puts you in a far worse negotiating position, if you even manage to get an offer at all.

"it's private information"
It's really not. Employers know within a very narrow band, what you should be earning, your specific set of digits isn't something to value as "private" - they may have hired people from your company before - they've surely seen payslips from many other candidates, or even shared compensation statistics with other corporations, or perhaps they are large enough that even their internal statistics give them an idea of what they pay distribution should be for a particular skill set in order to ensure retention. The reason they ask you, is for verification purposes - if you are far below this it is surprising (and a red flag), if you are far above this, it is surprising too, and very much in your benefit do display. So once again, not giving your income only makes sense if it is far below average - so refusing to give this information is about as big of a red flag (and often, bigger) as actually being far below average.

Thanks for this insight. I guess it all depends on who you're dealing with - there are those who want to get away with as little as possible, and one needs to find an employer who values your skill set

 

[cguy]

Thanks for this insight. I guess it all depends on who you're dealing with - there are those who want to get away with as little as possible, and one needs to find an employer who values your skill set

Sure. There's this image of villainous corporations that permeates the discourse around salary negotiation. The reality is that if you give the number you want first, and be clear that nothing less would make you leave your current employment, very few companies will try to actually talk your number down, rather, they will decide whether or not you are worth that salary to them or not. Unless your salary is completely out of the ballpark low, you increase your chances of getting a "yes", by being cooperative, and showing that your employer was actually willing to pay you something vaguely in the ballpark (subjective, but you would be surprised at how wide the range tends to be).

In your example you gave the desired salary as 50k, and your current salary as 30k. Personally, I wouldn't blink at a 50k/30k = 67% increase, if the story supported it: was the previous company unprofitable? was the employer working for a friend or family? a startup? perhaps a cheaper area? different industry? perhaps alternate benefits like working at home? perhaps their prior employer is a well known *******? All of these are valid reasons for being paid less than the going rate, yet still being good enough to get your 50k. The problem is that without knowing what was being earned, there really isn't even a story anymore - or rather the story now appears to be one of some cagey guy who thinks that if you know what he earned, there's no way you would pay him what he is asking - i.e. if you don't even believe you can justify the increase to your target salary, why should the employer believe that?

So basically, caginess is a real turnoff for an employer - assuming that an employer does want to make an offer, and you weren't clear on the salary you want (or if they're one of the dodgier companies out there), what they will do is take your target of 50k, say that from 40k it is just a 25% increase, so therefore the candidates salary must be well below 40k (otherwise the candidate would have just stated 40k), so possibly 20-30k, which really doesn't put you in a better position at all if you were at 30k. Perhaps you could pull a fast one if your income was 10k - it's not bloody likely, but if you could convince them you're worth 50k, while earning 10k, you should be cagey about your salary, and you deserve the 50k.

 

[jman]

Sure. There's this image of villainous corporations that permeates the discourse around salary negotiation. The reality is that if you give the number you want first, and be clear that nothing less would make you leave your current employment, very few companies will try to actually talk your number down, rather, they will decide whether or not you are worth that salary to them or not. Unless your salary is completely out of the ballpark low, you increase your chances of getting a "yes", by being cooperative, and showing that your employer was actually willing to pay you something vaguely in the ballpark (subjective, but you would be surprised at how wide the range tends to be).

In your example you gave the desired salary as 50k, and your current salary as 30k. Personally, I wouldn't blink at a 50k/30k = 67% increase, if the story supported it: was the previous company unprofitable? was the employer working for a friend or family? a startup? perhaps a cheaper area? different industry? perhaps alternate benefits like working at home? perhaps their prior employer is a well known *******? All of these are valid reasons for being paid less than the going rate, yet still being good enough to get your 50k. The problem is that without knowing what was being earned, there really isn't even a story anymore - or rather the story now appears to be one of some cagey guy who thinks that if you know what he earned, there's no way you would pay him what he is asking - i.e. if you don't even believe you can justify the increase to your target salary, why should the employer believe that?

So basically, caginess is a real turnoff for an employer - assuming that an employer does want to make an offer, and you weren't clear on the salary you want (or if they're one of the dodgier companies out there), what they will do is take your target of 50k, say that from 40k it is just a 25% increase, so therefore the candidates salary must be well below 40k (otherwise the candidate would have just stated 40k), so possibly 20-30k, which really doesn't put you in a better position at all if you were at 30k. Perhaps you could pull a fast one if your income was 10k - it's not bloody likely, but if you could convince them you're worth 50k, while earning 10k, you should be cagey about your salary, and you deserve the 50k.

Thanks for this. There's always so many conflicting views out there with regards to this. Yours certainly does make a lot of sense

 

[KingMikel]

Just wanna add input here...

Last year I was earning R18500 per month, after fighting with my employer because I wasn't being paid enough. I had just under 3yrs C#, SQL exp at the time, had done massive things for the company, was providing valuable input into the new system design etc. HE basically told me I should be happy with what I have, as I'm lucky to be in that position.

I took that as a challenge to prove him wrong. It took me 6 months, but I moved to a place that doubled my salary, pays my cellphone bill and they pay overtime.

They asked me in the interview what I'd like to earn, and they gave it to me as my nett salary.

If they want you, and they're serious about making a good offer, they'll blow you out the water.