At my workplace we were hyped up for a special announcement during a company meeting. this is after, literally, years of layoffs, offshoring, cut after cut to benefits, and restructurings. Morale is incredibly low.

The big announcement is they are giving everyone one extra day off around a national holiday as a reward. We already have "unlimited" PTO but of course can't really use it. So their reward is letting us use a benefit we already supposedly had.

Stalling out on promotion has always happened. It can be explained almost entirely by two factors:

As you become more senior, the success metrics for your role change significantly. Mentoring only goes so far because there is a large element of self-awareness and a willingness to change. Some people never recognize this and many never successfully adapt to what seniority entails. It is the career equivalent of trying to raise a Series B with a Series Seed pitch deck.

There are a much smaller number of senior roles than people who can be promoted into them. Above a certain level promotions are highly competitive. You are being stack-ranked against everyone else that can do the same job and tenure is only an input into that calculus to the extent it gives you unique domain expertise. A successful strategy for avoiding hyper-competitive promotions is to create a new promotion-like role that doesn't really exist. However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit, and these opportunities only exist at specific moments in time.

Raises, on the other hand, are largely impacted by complex financial and economic considerations. Many companies could do much better at this but even then I think employees significantly underestimate the network of opportunity costs that must be considered.

There's no reward for loyalty any more, and it's caused everyone to job hop (at least while that was possible), including me. At the time, employees complained about it, and in the same breath refused to give out any promotions and/or reward employees. Or they'd reward them with some shitty voucher.

The world has literally become the people vs corporations. There is no soul in working any more.

The fact that 1 in 4 white collar workers are not getting raises or promotions might not be a bad thing. As white collar workers get older they frequently stop optimizing for money and start optimizing for time, flexibility and other things and be totally OK with no promotions as the trade-off.

I personally find the US setup where often the longest serving and oldest workers would be earning the most, strange. Even when those oldest folks are clearly past their prime and themselves admit so.

There are always exceptions. I worked with a fantastic colleague who was a highly knowledgeable technical expert and a capable PM, always punching above his weight at work. One day in a chance conversation with him I was shocked to hear that he wants to retire soon because, now that he is on the wrong side of 90, he is not that interested anymore. My jaw dropped -- I never paid attention to his age. But I suspect many folks in the last quarter of their productive life will be happy to slow down. My 2c.

> No Raise, No Promotion

They forgot the “More work, Constant threat of Unemployment” part

I've sort of reached this point, because I've reached the highest point for an "individual contributor". I do not want to be a manager, and don't think I would be good at it. But at most companies, once you reach a certain point, that's the only way to move up. And I've seen people who are good engineers get promoted to managers where their skills are less beneficial.

Thankfully, my company is pretty good about still giving me raises.

Would it be wrong to flip the narrative and say "3 in 4 (75%), don't feel this way"?

Not trolling, genuine question.

When you're asked to deliver 2x performance for +20% of salary, you sometimes need to take a step back and see how the others would fare.

I'm pushing 50 now and I hit the wall almost 10 years ago. No real raises, new opportunities pay less. Inflation has been ratcheting down on me constantly, and my family has to make continual changes to stay in the black.

ALDI is great though!

If I can just hold at this role for 6 more years, I'm happy. I chased promotions for a decade and regretted all but the first two, which brought me to this level.

There's a larger issue with that though: At some point, successful engineers _need_ to become examples or leaders if we are to continue exponential growth. If you are happy discontinuing exponential growth, then that's fine.

Years of experience don’t correlate to output in all careers. Surgeons and engineers get better over time. This might not be true for all jobs. Meanwhile, management is naturally capped because every manager necessarily needs people to manage under them, so there’ll be 1/N^y managers at the yth level of the org. Unless loyalty ought to be reward for its own sake, it’s not clear why 100% of workers should get promoted indefinitely.

I’ve been in the industry for 40 years. This has always been a complaint. Always. It is not new.

UNIONIZE

There is a handover premium that you pay when you churn which often exceeds whatever savings you think you might find. Inertia and institutional knowledge are two of the biggest drags, not to mention morale, hidden costs recruiting fees, ramp time, and customer relationships.

It's fake bottom-line thinking that optimizes a few items while ignoring second and third-order effects.

Innumeracy with a finance vocabulary.

I want to view this from the other angle but have a hard time.

Lets say your company breaks even. There's a savings jar, people's salary are being met, everyone's happy, and idk, you bought your first yacht or whatever.

Shouldn't you calculate expenses on the assumption that people will get a salary increase? Or is that a weird thought? Is that just a fixed variable, and when someone asks for a raise you can say "sorry, our budget is tight"

I have a feeling many Founders/CEO's aren't honest about expenses and earnings. If my company made a million and someone earns on average 50k, then I can hire a lot of people with that money. If they all cost 60k (big promotion imo), then I need to hire like they'll earn 60k.

Maybe this is all bs, but I feel like a lot of founders can pay but won't.

I was at my previous company for almost 10 years, I had annual promotions and I roughly 4x'd my annual income in this period, which averages to about 15% of year-on-year pay increases. Part inflation, part growth in skills.

Virtually all of that happened in the first 8 years. In the last 2 years I also stalled and saw minor inflation corrections of 2% a year, so I quit.

In my experience it had everything to do with me. In the first 8 I was very hungry, and always willing to take on something more or different. In the last 2 I was very much set on just coasting and doing what I was already doing, and it translated in them paying what they had always paid me, plus a little for inflation correction.

I think the truth is usually that if others don't stall and you do, that the solution probably sits with you as well. That having been said, I think now with AI the value-add of an employee sees so much pressure, that I think stalling will be a major trend.

Hold on. This is just geometry. Unless the number of top slots is growing, the cap will be fixed.

not getting laidoff is like a promotion now

It may be better for workers to stick to six month contracts at a good hourly rate. Note that there must necessarily exist a clause in the contract that requires an early termination of the contract by the employer to result in 50% of the wages for the remainder of the period being paid immediately to the worker. A worker may terminate the contract early only for a documented medical reason, failing which the worker owes 50% of the wages for the remainder of the period to the employer. All of this together is meant to everyone honest, transparent, and non-exploitative.

Kind of a silly article. If you're working in education administration or local government then why would you even expect career progression? These are not growth industries.

Big tech owns a big chunk of the job market. So, the job market is not a market but a centralized system were big-tech has all the power to shape it.

Unionizing is just part of the fighting back. Only splitting the big monopolies can bring back competition and healthy salaries and promotions.

Monopolies are bad for consumers, but they are also bad for employees when that monopolies control most of the jobs of the industry.

Promotions are not worth it. You get a better salary bump by switching jobs. That's it, that's the whole story. Saved you 15 minutes.

Not sure about stall but it sure feels like employers are capitalising on this sense that everyone is keen to hold on to their job

Isn't it a natural pattern in empire? Everything grows, there's a huge administration class employed who manage to live in relative luxury from the profits, then as relative power and influence recedes, those jobs are the first to get cut.

It's an international market and everybody's using the same skills and tools. It's insane to think that 6 digit salaries would forever be sustainable when the rest of the world is doing the same stuff.

Developing tech to knock down barriers also paves over moats. I think the west is going to be in for some very trying times in the coming decades. The UK is a fascinating place to look at in this regard.

This has been true for at least since 2008.

The only times Ive gotten promotions was to get hired elsewhere. Better title, more money.

Its well known that retention budgets are laughable or nonexistant, and new hire budgets are well stocked. That means that if you want to grow from what youre doing, you gotta leave.

So three quarters are on the way up? Doesn't sound too bad.

Increasingly exhausted GenX'er here... I'm just happy to come into work these days. I no longer have any desire to push for promotion and early retirement is a very tempting goal right now.

My eldest is now 18 and starting to to into the workforce and my youngest is still about 3 years from that.

if (and thats a big if) we dont have a GFC part 2 in the next 10 years I'll be fine I think... but jeez Trump/AI is making it hard to get there.

This has been the case for most of Gen X's career: there was very little mentoring, very little succession planning and career shaping. Instead Boomers (who came into an economy where these things, along with pensions, etc. still existed) took over early and have stayed in leadership roles longer than previous generations. A look at congress provides a template.

The youngest baby boomers are in their early 60s. I doubt it will make a difference in tech, but traditional industries, or what is left of them, should see a lot of senior roles open up as baby boomers begin to retire. Then, as they begin to pass away, a lot of their accumulated wealth will pass to their heirs as well.

The baby boomers have been a serious "clog" in the system at a lot of levels. It will be interesting to see how things play out once they're no longer actively involved.

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Interestingly, I've heard that job hopping no longer pays better than staying in place. I can't say if this is true (and no matter what's true, I'm sure that people have anecdotal exceptions!) but it would be quite discouraging if so.