Employees Who Stay in Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14784900 - July 2017 (535 comments)
Employees That Stay In Companies Longer Get Paid Less - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928008 - June 2014 (198 comments)
The only time this would maybe not apply is director/VP level roles, though if you're switching at that level you presumably have a pre-existing relationship with someone near whatever role you're trying to move into.
Fuck HR. 12 months is nothing for actual deep learning. I've seen job hoppers come through my company and it's obvious most of them don't get very deep in the work and just move on instead of becoming a real expert in the system. It's one thing not to hold it against them, but it's something else to say count it as an advantage at such short intervals.
In fact, what I observed is that people are constantly looking for place with better pay, regardless if he/she ACTUALLY finds one.
A better research should provide insight on the total compensation over the entire career, work-life balance, impact, satisfaction and so on.
Now let's see what is better.
A Cisco-like or Nvidia-like unicorn lifetime achievement is what everyone hopes for when they sign up for a Silicon Valley startup, but you can see the misery index rise when the stock is underwater and it make take years, a decade or more — or never — for those stock certificates to even be worth the paper you'd print them on. I've been at a number of startups where you can walk away after 2 or 5 years partially or fully vested and your options are not worth optioning.
Some people are indeed early Cisco millionaires. Many others only get in after the stock tumbles and are just really grinding away for salary.
Nvidia will also eventually find its natural limit. Joining Nvidia in 2024 is totally different than having joined it in 2014 when this article was written.
YMMV on this, widely.
There is no guarantee that your current stable job will not suddenly come to an end for many reasons. Outside of a few rare companies, there is absolutely no reason to stay, if they are not paying you market rate.
If you're not one of those people at your company or there isn't a high chance of your equity being worth something in the future, sticking around isn't going to lead to more money.
I'd also note that in many of the cases I've personally seen, those people actually did leave at some point but came back, sometimes even multiple times over the years. They were valuable enough to the company (or at least were perceived to be by leadership) that they could pretty much come and go as they pleased.
Today such people get accused by someone, and promptly fired. Later they reappear as consultants.
I'll play devil's advocate on this one. Are they investing more into their work or do they care less because they'll be gone in a year anyway?
Take the pay increase vs the equity every time. Plus by changing 5 times, I diversified my equity on more companies and ensured something hit at least a little.
Not taking RSU’s in these tech companies is a very bad idea financially, I like to think of it as equivalent cash. You can always sell your RSU immediately to get cash. But another advantage is when you individually invest in stocks, you rarely have a large fund into 1 stock, you probably diversify into index funds. This gives you consistent returns but leaves no shot at making a fortune. In my experience RSU’s as by default are fully invested into the 1 company you’re working for, give you that outsized return opportunity. Just ask employees at snowflake, NVIDIA, Tesla. Heck even MSFT RSU’s have doubled in value every couple of years and Amazon had insane growth from 2010 to 2022, where if you had gotten equivalent in cash you would be more than 10 times poorer than someone who just held Amazon RSU’s. Yes putting large amounts in 1 stock is risky, but not nearly as risky as you make it sound to be.
Never put your savings into the stock of the company you work for. If (as happens) the company goes bankrupt you can be out of a job and all your savings at the same time. The only exception is if you have reason to believe you will be CXX - at that level (or one below in some cases) your stock owners is published to shareholders and they look for high levels to show you have your personal wealth on the line for the company - and you also have enough power to do something about it. (most of us don't have enough power for anyone to care what we think). Stock options are the same as any other stock: don't put your net worth into it.
I have long ago learned that until the money is in my bank account it isn't mine. Sometimes the promised $$$ arrives, sometimes it does not. But always I want to see the money.
I would rather have some options in several companies than a lot of options in one to increase the chance that some of them will be valuable. That approach does require you to buy the options, whereas staying at one company means you can delay the purchase
If all the companies you work for have similar likelihood of doing exceptionally well, you've paid 4 years and gotten either one lottery ticket worth X (strategy 1) or 2-4 lottery tickets each worth 50%-25% of X. When you don't already have "enough" money, 25% of X is still life-changing, and if you can get 2-4 shots at it instead of 1, that can be a very workable strategy.
This is not true at all. My current company is privately held and has RSUs. Over the last two years there has been a single buyback and it was at a fixed closed market price and we were limited to selling 10% of our vested RSUs. Lots of startups flipped to RSUs with no plan to go public or be bought out in the last few years.
Additionally, even if your company is stable RSUs are frought with issues like what happened two orgs ago where a blackout period started and our stock went into a 30% free fall during the blackout and never recovered. We ended up getting a tender offer, the company sold to private equity and unvested shares were clawed back
Yeah I’d agree for a more risky venture, cash is better (unless you are in a gambling mood), I’d disagree that being true for FAANG or any of the 100 billion + tech companies (Airbnb, Uber, snowflake, Palo Alto networks etc)
At the cost of losing a minority of job-hoppers they retain the cheap majority that:
- finds job interviews exhausting, or is anxious about being rejected
- dislikes conflict or negotiation
- has good relationships with colleagues they don't want to lose
- has a comfortable commute or WFH arrangement they don't want to change
- is proud of becoming an expert / go-to-person in some part of the business and doesn't want to lose that source of social capital
- is proud of product or service they have made a big contribution to and wants to "see it through to the end"
- believes leaving would place an unfair burden on other team-members or would be disloyal to a manager they consider a friend
- (US only) cannot risk losing healthcare
It's the same reason why your phone/insurance/whatever provider puts up the prices year-after-year: although some people leave, enough people simply put up with it that they make more money this way. "Do nothing" is an easy choice and companies are banking on enough people making that choice.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Sure, many people when they're young are geographically flexible. But that's less true as you age and are tied down by a house, spouse's job, kid's school, daycare, etc.
If you have to come into work, then all those details depend on your job location. You can't just change job locations. Again, this works for some single young people who rent apartments in NYC or SF. But that will always be a subset of job candidates.
This is why the trend towards remote seems inevitable. There are just too many incentives for too much of the workforce to require it. Long term that
Of course these things have always been true, but since remote work became prevalent I think people have realized how shitty of a situation it is - especially when you're not compensated for it. In fact you are actually compensated LESS since you arent job hopping.
Also when a family has/needs two parents working, Spouse A's next job becomes limited to locations that do not require Spouse B to also quit, and vice-versa.
I have a pet theory that dual-incomes are one cause of movement to urban locations: The family needs to be in a location with enough overlapping opportunities in each person's role/field.
I wish, but not in my country. Remote here means 2-3 days/week WFH tops and that's it. Nobody offers more. Meaning you're still tied to the location of your employer as you have to come regularly in the office.
It boggles my mind that employers don't see the advantage of employing people remotely nation-wide as that gives them access to a wider talent pool outside their area making it a win-win. But no, old-school boomer MBA managers want to see buts in seats in the office, otherwise to them it means people are slacking off as they can't possibly imagine motivating people to work if they're not within physical reach.
We also need to post pictures of the employees pretending to have fun at barbecues, teambuilding events and sitting in cramped open space offices on yoga balls wearing headphones with coffee mugs with nerdy memes on them. But it's ok, there's a weekly fruit basked, employee organized sports events and you can bring your dog to work. Totally worth spending 2h per day on commuting.
I just don't get it, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Is it me the one being unreasonable, or "is it the children who are wrong"?
The average cost of living for a 4-person family in SF is ~$350k [1] (I'm guessing that's pre-tax, and probably the job is also paying for 100% comprehensive medical & dental insurance for the entire family) and my spouse wouldn't be able to work (and even if she could, low chance of her also getting a $200k job offer at the same time!), and I'm not gonna willingly decrease my standard of living and my savings rate ...
I mean, I don't mind if that's their budget, I always mention that it probably makes more sense to hire someone local, but ... why even bother interviewing senior non-SF-based candidates in the first place?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/27/how-much-money-family-of-4-n...
People don't quit jobs, they quit bosses.
Not as much since Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) became law over ten years ago. Anyone can get minimum essential coverage, with a subsidy if income is low enough (as it would be when out of a job), regardless of pre-existing conditions.
Both saw a limit on the time someone could be at the company and still be promoted. The C-Suite people really felt if people were at the company for more than 5 years, they were no longer viable candidates to move up because they had become to "accustomed" to the corporate culture and would develop a sense of apathy with pushing their departments or employees to greater success. They have now opted to hire outside executives or managers to try and keep the ideas and approaches fresh so to speak.
I remember my director at the time wanting very much to move up into an executive position and had been at the company some 15 years. He had been a director for some 7 years and had already been passed over twice before for an executive position. He recruited me for a senior dev role and had stood up an entire cloud computing team to take on specific work the company was having a hard time getting done quickly.
6 months in and he pulls me into his office after our 1:1. He tells me he's putting in his two weeks and loved working with me and wanted me to come with him to his new company once he gets set up there. He told me his bosses boss told him she knew his aspirations of moving into an executive position, but it wasn't going to happen here. She told him in no uncertain terms he had reached his ceiling at this company and should move on if he really wanted to be an executive.
Same thing happened at another company. The VP of the company had been in that role for some 10 years and had been passed over at least three times for the CEO position which he wanted very badly. Many of the managers had told me he has just accepted he wouldn't get any higher than VP, but had no aspirations of leaving the company. This unfortunately created a huge choke point in the company because now managers would be at the company for a certain amount of time, and then know that's as high as they were going and leave.
While I agree with your point, I feel like there is some amount of time threshold you can cross where the corporate apathy can take hold and your value starts to decline. It seems that way the higher up the ladder you go.
I often wonder if my lower pay is because I don't job hop, because of my disability, or if I'm just a piece of shit.
As GP said, it's a rational strategy for them. I personally have lowered my expectations of salary growth over the years, and would be happy with some of those other benefits GP listed in the mean-time.
Now, this is solely based on my own experience, which of course might not apply to your specific field of work and disability type.
What I mean is, most large companies have a voluntary self-identification form at the end of their job application. And I tend to get a lot more responses when applying for roles where I am invited to disclose my disability.
On a funny note, recruiters always want to confirm that I indeed have a disability, but they can't just reach out and ask "hey dude you sure you didn't click on that button by mistake?".
Instead, they always send this very P.C. email that reads like "Here at [insert company name] we pride ourselves on bein inclusive and bla bla bla. You informed us that you had disability, and we want to make sure that we can accommodate you and make you feel welcome. If you need any special arrangement, please let us know".
To which my response is always "Yes I do have this thing, and no I'm fine thanks".
My disability has fucked up a lot of things in my life, but it's boosted my career.
For me having a shit boss, or a company who is crappy in a million other ways isnt a big deal. I can be flexible, in where and when and how in a way others cant.
IF having a good boss or sane hours matter to you, changing jobs is a risk.
> or lack of new skillset
Job-hopping is a powerful way of ensuring that your skillset remains current. That's 80% of why I do it.
Ambitious employees "know" that switching jobs will give them the pay they're looking for, because they see those numbers right on the job postings. What's less obvious is that a current employer might really value an employee's skills, and would be willing to match or exceed the competition - if they just open up the conversation.
IME it's not even (always) any kind of rational decision on behalf of management to "stiff" people. If you have a happy employee making a wage they're satisfied with (+ annual COL), then these conversations about TC may not even come up at all. It's easy to just turn on autopilot here.
If you like your job, but you're not happy with your TC, make sure you're letting management know. It could be that everybody could end up happy. Even a good manager might not be doing this for you until/unless you advocate on your own behalf.
I've had 50% pay raises that were nearly matched by the current employer. My last manager literally said the words, "What if we offered you a big bag of money to stay?". I left.
Now I work at a place where people stay literally until the die, 10, 15, 25 year tenures. My coworkers are mediocre. I'd say it's a mixture of laziness and sometimes maybe just incompetence.
It's a two fold problem. Employees that stay this long do not progress in their careers or learn new skills. I've learned next to nothing in my 5 years here. Employers that don't create churn in their workers create numerous problems. If we didn't hold a monopoly in our field, I'm sure we would have been bought out and had mass layoffs by now.
- The company has a limit for how many times you can leave and come back. For example (last I checked), Intel is 2, Apple is 0.
- For large companies, internal transfers can be diverse enough to make someone happy with a change. Although, pay raises are more limited.In my vicinity the trend seems completely opposite - HR is trying to get a smoother rehiring experience for employees they lost due to their high turnover.
This might be because the talent pool of people willing and able to do IT jobs in my country is very small, so you run into the same people over and over again in this field.
A risk adverse person, or even rational one, may avoid still avoid positive EV gambles.
I just struggled through this list for years. First, internally - then I announced my intent to leave.
People raised some of the points in a caring way. I have so many trust issues I don't know if I was being gaslit or if they truly believed it. I started to wonder who it served when I saw the patterns.
Anyway, don't believe the bastards. If you're willing to work, good people will teach you what you need. Find them.
Don't waste your time places where you aren't happy and valued
You could subsume all of these points into "moving house is hard", but the details matter. We moved across the country for a job for the money and even with an empty nest it was dauntingly difficult, the hardest thing we have ever done over 4 decades, and we didn't have to worry about money!
- In a sea of jobs with on-call, workaholic hierarchical reward culture, and night/weekend work, a company may pay less but offer work-life balance that a 30k pay bump in New Corp may not outweigh the risks. - Visa statusOne day my boss "forgot" to bring up a very small raise I had negotiated with the CEO (who signed off on all raises personally), failed to see any urgency in fixing the situation to restore trust and gambled on me being one of those people that don't find another job. He seemed very surprised to be wrong.
My raise from switching jobs was about 50% - and I got to work with people who hadn't given up on improving things half a decade ago.
I really believe if your career goal is to peak a lot higher than just middle-management or senior software engineer, and earn the pay that comes with those higher positions, you need to stay on the same company and even same project for much longer periods of time (I would say 5 year absolute minimums). If I look around at the careers of Distinguished Engineers and senior principal engineers, or VPs of Engineering at FAANGs, etc., these people always have massive chunks of time at the same company, often many years on the same product even. If they have changed companies a few times in their careers, it’s after a string of promotions and delivering big things. It is really hard to build a portfolio of high-level impact with 2 year stints.
If you're nihilistic and believe all employers are rotten, then jumping ship every 2 years might be a decent game strategy, but I tend to believe that good employers do exist and are just somewhat rare. So if you find a unicorn, I would recommend holding onto it.
I got laid off three times last year, and that already looks pretty bad on a resume, but then seeing a bunch of jobs beforehand where I was only there for two years makes a lot of employers really hesitant to move forward, especially in 2024 (ten years after this was written).
At this point I'm happy enough to just sit my ass down and stay at my current place; I didn't realize how much I valued stability over anything else until 2023 came along and became the worst year of my life.
Problem is, my part of the company isn't in Houston, so qualified employees are hard to find. So we need to hold on to people, which is hard when we rarely hand out raises. I do my best to train up my guys, but I know that they're probably going to move on in a couple of years. My goal is to make an enjoyable environment so that they'll come back eventually at a higher pay rate.
My best worker - the one I'm training up to be a lead - is the lowest paid member of the team, and I can't do anything about it. It sucks.
From my experience, I don't think this is the case. In your twenties it's definitely true, but when I look at the highest paid people (in their later career) it is not true that they did this.
I think the reason is that as you progress up a leadership structure, stability becomes increasingly important and candidates who have exhibited short tenures in roles are passed over because it is assumed this behavior will continue. It's highly damaging to have a VP leave an org leave after only 2 years in the role.
I have never quit a job without a major life event forcing me to (spouse getting a job, moving, etc.). I've had great experiences everywhere and I'm probably underpaid for it. I have no regrets. I'd prefer my lifestyle and job satisfaction to money.
Or I could be a sucker and 100% wrong.
I don't change every two years, though. I usually go about 5. Even then, I don't change jobs for the purpose of getting a pay increase (that's just a nice side-effect), but more typically because I've learned everything that I'm going to learn from a the job and need to move to a different one in order to learn new skills (or sometimes just to work on something fresh).
My big learning from employer hoping as a JavaScript developer is that it’s risky. There is a universal assumption that the people who do that work fall below an accepted baseline of delivery and maturity compared with other developers as qualified by the amount of tooling and hand holding they require. That said many employers will not invest much in these employees and thus expect them to jump ship.
The other side of that coin is that employees see this too. Those who tend to be more competent and have a really good situation with their employer tend to be the people that stick around knowing they are missing out on pay raises by moving around. For example if I get to spend half my office day watching movies and working on side projects in a stable company with no stress that potential raise from the next employer might not be worth it.
Along with layoffs the company killed the cupcake budget. (Mind you the stock is sky high and they’re raking in cash.)
If a company doesn’t think your decade of commitment to making them money merits a fucking cupcake, it goes without saying you’ll get screwed on comp.
I suck at leetcode so maybe that's why I'm just not cut out for this. As long as I'm making $150k+ and can WFH I'm not exactly confident I could go out and interview and get something better.
My work history isn't great because I tried job hopping and was a co-founder at a few startups. I quickly found a few 6-8 months stints really made me look radioactive even with around 5yrs of experience.
I'm open to advice here, but I don't blame people who are optimizing for consistency and a stability.
I've tried doing a good job and asking for raises, they never match market rate.
Too be fair the last 3 startups I worked at failed financially but still.
I would love to go work somewhere for 5-10 years. It's just hard to find these days.
Everyone crooned on and on about all the "boomerang" employees and long tenures during interviews. I realized after joining that the employees were coming back after being laid off!! WTF!?
They were absolutely over the moon to get me and have been blown away by my work and are remodeling a new office for me and queuing me up for bigger projects but I can't leave my eggs in this basket. This will be my shortest tenure ever at under a year.
An old CIO friend is creating a new Principal Architect role for me now at another company. I will dive into that startup for 3-5 years until it is acquired.
The employer gets labor at a lower price, and the employee gets lower volatility.
If you want the best price, you have to do the work to keep buying and you have to do the work to keep selling, only way any market can work.
why isn't this a better explanation: High performing, "desirable" or "skilled" employees get enticed (i.e. rewarded) for jumping to a new employer. Average schlubs do not.
explanation from TFA:
Why are people who jump ship rewarded, when loyal employees are punished for their dedication? The answer is simple. Recessions allow businesses to freeze their payroll and decrease salaries of the newly hired based on “market trends.” These reactions to the recession are understandable, but the problem is that these reactions were meant to be “temporary.”
My theory:
- low performers can’t
- mid performers can and do
- high performers can but aren’t comp motivated beyond a certain point
Some people enjoy making big changes and shaking themselves up, and that's fine too, but don't confuse that with some sort of inherent superiority.
neuroticism measures "the tendency toward negative emotion". Stress in the face of uncertainty is a good example of a negative emotion that can be exaggerated in some people. Negative emotions also correlate to less success in social and job situations.
So that at least seems to imply that they adjust for that. Specially the line where you can get a 1% raise or a 10% new offer.
As a hiring manager, three 2-year stints would be perfectly reasonable for an L5 candidate, but five 2-year stints I would be very concerned about hiring an L6 expected to drive long-term architectural directions.
Ultimately I think the "learning or earning" advice is better. When you are young you should chase your interests and prioritize personal growth and finding out what you are good at. The primary heuristic should be whether you are learning quickly, and are you surrounded by people and structure that help you with that. Later on in your career when you have more personal responsibilities you should prioritize earning, and hopefully you have built a foundation of strong and deep expertise that qualifies you for more senior positions. Of course if you can get both, that's great, but you also need to be careful because a lot of things you learn at the best paying companies have limited applicability outside that bubble.
For example, we still have the equivalent of early Medieval English right of "socn" ("soke") — the right to withdraw our loyalty from one lord and grant it to another. We're not "tied" to our corporate overlords the same way that serfs were through strict infeudation.
A recent court case threw out most of the nonsense non-compete clauses also helped beat away or forestall the rising threat of "you can't leave with what you know... I'll make you unemployable." But that was a threat to modern day "sokesmen."
One can even establish themselves as their own freeholder by incorporating, say as an LLC, or remaining a "freelancer" like the errant knights of old.
In other terms of what I consider "corporate feudalism:"
• Do you wear any "corporate heraldry" (logo'd gear like t-shirts, hoodies, polos, backpacks, laptop stickers, etc.)
• Do you participate in any "corporate jousting?" (benchmarks, competitive bakeoffs, panel talks or meetups)
• Do you have or retain any intellectual property you've created during your employment, or was it all work-for-hire and assigned away in perpetuity?
And don't get me wrong. I am somewhat of a big fan of the medieval period and feudalism. In a way there were more freedoms under feudalism than we realize.
Certainly we had far more free time.
I just find it an interesting mental exercise to spot the commonalities and the differences of then and now.
This will translate to always thinking about your place in the market and gives you a lot of skills to avoid being taken advantage of.
Nevertheless, after job-hopping a bit, in my twenties, I stayed at my last job for almost 27 years.
I have found that money isn't everything. I know that's basically heresy, around here, but it's been my truth.
It’s a gamble though and I needed to play hardball when negotiating with the owner for the new salary to properly reflect my new position. That only worked because I was more willing to walk away than he was.
I’d honestly recommend doing 2-3 years stints in the early 20s and then progressively longer but only if the company had room for growth and ways of to get into difficult projects where you both learn something and deliver actual quantifiable benefits to the company
I think past a point (roughly ~senior SWE level) it becomes hard to develop deeper expertise in a series of two year stints.
I’ve seen folks go from new grad to staff in under 4 years at FAANG. They just had a favorable relationship with their manager. It’s a ton of luck. You don’t get to entirely choose your manager and company trajectory in most cases.
Almost everyone in SV is overqualified. I’ve rarely met anyone who I felt was incapable of doing the job adequately. Often when I felt that way, it was someone who was “distinguished” in the way you’re mentioning… which speaks more to my point. It’s about your relation with management and your luck in said relation.
That only happens at Meta and i'm dubious they could do the job of staff at any other company.
By contrast, a place that has expensive employees is going to see their time as more valuable, so there's a direct monetary incentive not to waste it and the cash flow exists to do things. Doesn't always work, but it dramatically improves the odds.
probably relevant detail is that I did contractor work for backend/server stuff for those gaming companies. And the two studios in question have each published the biggest games in their respective categories in the world(which basically means they both have infinite money)
There is no such thing as a good employer who doesn't pay their workers competitively.
While this may not be your intent, your post sounds a lot like a manager narrative that "sure, our pay and benefits leave bit to be desired, but we have a great culture and we're well managed". That's not a thing. A great culture is one where everyone is paid enough to live comfortably, and when the company does well financially, workers do well financially. The primary measure of managing well is paying your workers well.
The things management does besides paying their workers simply do not have enough impact on workers' lives that they can "manage" well enough to make more difference in an employee's life than a 20% increase in pay, let alone a 50% increase in pay as you describe. Beyond behaving at all in an appropriate manner, i.e. not verbally, sexually, or physically abusing your employees, your actions as a manager simply don't impact workers' lives as much as that much money does.
And in fact, other attributes of management are correlated with pay in my experience. The company you describe, that pays well but is otherwise terribly managed, is not one I have experienced. In most cases, a company that pays well is great to work for in other ways, and a company that pays worse is terrible to work for in other ways. The management mindset that is stingy toward workers doesn't stop at pay.
I instead suggested that there are bad employers who pay above market rates as a way to compensate for problems with employee retention. Sure, they'll run out of money doing that eventually, but you'd be surprised how long a business can cover up their mistakes with such a strategy, especially with the right funding partners behind them.
If you have not had the misfortune of working for such a business, that's great, but I believe there are plenty of comments here on HN to support the notion that such businesses not only exist but are fairly common in any industry touched by Venture Capital or Private Equity, and I have seen many even suggest that their higher financial compensation ends up not being worth it in light of the added psychological and physiological toll.
No matter what story your resume tells, social connections will usually be a louder signal.
Some of them, though it's hard to become really good friends with a coworker after only three months of a remote job.
At the jobs that I stayed two years at I definitely made lots of friends
> Did you maintain contact?
For a few of them, the ones that I got close to (generally the people that were as geeky as I am about bizarre CS concepts). That was immensely handy to get job referrals, and it's in no small part why I was able to land my current (very decent!) gig.
In most places I've worked, people generally like me ok (I hope), and usually I will develop one or two pretty close friends as a result if I've been there sufficiently long.
> In those three jobs you were laid off from did any of your coworkers also get laid off?
Yes, though in the more recent laid off jobs I sadly didn't know people well enough to get them to give me referrals or anything.
> No matter what story your resume tells, social connections will usually be a louder signal.
I mostly agree, but only to a certain extent. If you can make it to the interview stage, a good referral and social contacts can be great and really helpful, but the problem with short stints is that you're considerably more likely to fail the initial screening by the internal recruiter.
I get it, I don't really blame them, you can't go into super thorough detail on every resume that's submitted, so they have to look for red flags to immediately filter out stuff.
It's extremely hard for me to lie (or even do anything even remotely dishonest) during job interviews. I believe that omitting important details is still a lie, plus I think I have a mild form of autism that makes it so I have to be overly precise in my language which means that I get into really specific detail when it's really not called for (as I'm sure anyone who's read my longer HN comments has figured out).
I'd probably be better off if I just shut up more during interviews and let them assume things.
It goes up 20% each switch, but there still has to be a ceiling where the company can just hire 2-3 young people for the same price.
Consider someone making $60,000 getting a 10% raise vs someone making $200,000 getting a 5% raise.
The first will get $6,000 more per year, the other will get $10,000.
These days you also have to look at total comp as well.
My first job I was an entry level developer. If I had stayed there for 25 years earning 3% raises each year... my salary would have finally doubled last year. In real life, I left there after ~2.5 years, and left the next job after 2.5 years, at which point my salary had already doubled.
Of course staying in the same company, I'd likely have moved up some and gotten some promotions with meaningful raises along the way. That company was pretty small but... I know that a lot of colleagues at that time stuck around and are VPs of some sort now, as the company has shown consistent meaningful growth. Early on, though, there was little room for growth in the short term at such a small company.
My largest raise staying at a company was going from $9.05 / hour to $13.05 / hour. That's 44.2%. Ha! But realistically since being salaried, my single largest raise was a couple years ago during the inflation rush, where I got 13%. Often changing jobs would land me 15-20%, and I could generally do that every 3 years without any obvious negative consequences. Assuming a more conservative 12% at 3 years intervals (with 3% in the years between), after 24 years I'd be at around 4x my original salary after 25 years.
Comparing 4x to the 2x from my first example, I've come out double. Factor in possible promotions and maybe it would've been 2.5x vs 4x which is about 50% more. If the promotions came with substantial pay raises, it would start to favor staying put. Personally I haven't seen any promotions like that because I've always been valuable as an individual contributor, and less so as management. But individual results may vary. We're looking at "on average" though.
I later found out when I was leaving I made ~55% more than this person.
Also of note, 50% more of someone's salary is less than 50% of your own. If you make 200k and someone makes 100k, they need a 100% raise.
If you have been at a company for a few years getting promos and stock refreshers is always a struggle due to limited budgets and internal politics. On the other hand if you "boomerang" (quit and come back after a year or so) you will automatically get a higher title and a fresh new hire stock grant.
Most FAANG total compensation dips in year 5 due to 4-year vesting schedules, and refreshers for existing employees being lower than nee hire grants (assuming stock price remains flat).
But do I today have more RSUs earned cumulatively than a brand new hire at the same level? I would say yes, but only because of promotions and bonus grants -- Based on levels.fyi (grain of salt), my stock compensation is comparable to a new hire one level up.
I decided to work in higher education after a WILDLY successful short career in sales. I lost over 80% of my compensation annually to make that switch in the first year.
And I did it because the time off benefits, pace, and stability are much better for my mental health and well-being.
If you feel like you are compensated appropriately for what you're doing, don't worry about gaming the system. Just be happy with your life. Have you ever read The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham?
I see what you mean, but I don't think the parent commented about career success, but just specifically pay. I agree with what you're saying in that there are other valuable things besides pay from a job.
FAANGS are unusual in that they actually do reward productive employees.
I'm the top performer on my current team. After 3 years of no raises, I threw a bitch fit, and after a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit, I ended up with +6%. I have 0 stock or benefits because I am a contractor, which is a whole other load of shit I could complain about.
Other FAANGs will likely match. That's how comp went bonkers the last four years (and is normalizing now). People were leveraging their unvested stock appreciation in negotiations for new offers.
(Netflix and Meta in particular have said they'll beat any other offers from FAANG).
Now if you're already at Meta and got a huge grant at the low, then yeah you're probably topped out for a while but congrats on being pretty rich :)
tbh when I'm on the hiring side, this is why I consider a long tenure in the same role at a company a... not really a red flag, but maybe a yellow flag, something to talk about in an interview.
Hate to say it, but lots of long-tenured employees are in this situation. They remain at companies because of interia. Processes have been built around them; they have tribal/domain knowledge which is poorly documented and not readily replaceable; they may be functionally a "C player" but they have additional value they bring via historical context ("Oh, this bit of weird nonsense code? Yeah, I remember we hacked that in right after the acquisition in 2017, we don't need it now...") It's a real concern that someone coming from a situation where they only do ~4 hours of actual work per week might not be able to handle a new job where they have to provide value through other means, i.e. shipped code.
It's not a total disqualification of a candidate for me, obviously, but it'd certainly be something I'd ask about.
1. Ambition is more a product of social mobility than product delivery.
2. Success is more a product of prior established salary than personal goals.
From an economics perspective these seem weird to me for two reasons. The goal of economics is always to redistribute resources to a more desirable pattern.
One of the first things I look for in job interviews from interviewers and hiring managers is perception of bias. This is easily discovered by looking at what they want which can be some mixture of technical competency, charm/vanity, or communications dominance. Interviewers want to control the conversation, so just let them until the conversation concludes or I achieve communications dominance passively. I don't want to play games, but when there is noise in the inter-personal communication I have to be a little bit smarter than I appear. I just want a job doing what the paper says, but people are silly.
The second reason why its weird is that in the past I have been that 10x (or much more) developer because my goals are different. The only point of software is automation, which means if I can automate my own job then I don't have to do it either. I usually keep this to myself, because the goal is time maximization so I can do other things with my day while delivering superior quality work. If I told other people about it my peers would whine and I would be tasked to do things outside of product delivery to compensate for their whining. I am certainly not looking for anybody's adoration. I just want to do less stupid.
I am coming up on 10 years and I frequently help my newer peers avoid pitfalls we fell into previously. Historical context is useful. That doesn’t mean I live there.
Back in 2014 when this article was posted, it was probably more true. Lots of money frothing around and salaries were growing and growing faster than employers were willing to keep up with for existing employees (although even then, I had a job that gave me a substantial raise just to keep up with the market.)
The "job hop for a salary bump" conversations always seem to assume you are early in your career, where this works. My first job hop was for about +50%. My second one was for around +20%. 20 years into my career, job hopping does not seem to increase my comp at all. The plateau is real.
After a certain point, you have to change roles and/or move into management.
I feel like the ceiling for me is awful, since in Florida the cost of everything is going up, but companies aren't willing to pay competitive salary, despite boasting about it, they all seem to pay standard / average pay.
FWIW I'm actually coming out of a 3 year hiatus making 50% more than the FAANG position I left in 2021.
You probably won't be CBW2 for your entire career so you'd get a new celling.
Just because you are a good software engineer doesn't mean you are good at finding a new job.
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.
Oh no, you tell them before you start looking that you feel like your TC is too low based on your contribution. You don't threaten to shop around, you just tell them your skillet has value beyond what they're offering.
It goes like this: either they come back with something to make you happy and everybody is satisfied, or they don't and you start applying.
But people don't always give employers this chance and just start applying first. Then when they go to leave things get weird with counter offers.
If you think your job sucks and you're ready to move on, there's no reason to bother with this approach. But if the only reason you're thinking of moving on is to increase your pay, it never hurts to ask first.
And, from what I've been told about Apple, the idea is that if you can't find something within Apple (since they literally do everything, even textiles!), then Apple probably just isn't a good fit, especially since it is possible to spin up a team to make something new internally.
The former is not controllable from the perspective of a labor seller, but the latter is. Whether or not the tradeoff is worth it is dependent on the seller and always in flux.
I would say the tradeoff is usually not worth it.
[1] https://hbr.org/2021/02/youre-not-paid-based-on-your-perform...
As a worker, I simply don't care if other people are paid well as long as I get paid well. This mindset of "it is not enough for me to succeed, others must fail" is absurd.
Generally, employees do want people who are more productive to be rewarded more, but are rightfully cynical about employers' ability to judge who is producing.
> So there will be 10% salary difference between a guy working 45 hours a week and a guy wo shows up in the office and has all day long coffee breaks.
Almost nobody should be working 45 hours a week. Certainly no one in my field.
It's telling that your primary example of performance is "time spent at desk". This sort of terrible mismeasurement is why employees are cynical about employers' ability to judge who is producing.
> [Unions in Germany] don’t protect one from being fired.
That's probably because they learned from the mistakes of unions in the US. Having to work with incompetent or straight-up drunk coworkers because they can't be fired isn't a great experience.
> Doubling salary over whole career… I don’t know if that’s a good deal.
"Only" doubling salary because you started at a higher wage is a great deal. Union workers are paid more than nonunion at every stage of their career, but how much more disproportionately favors people early in their careers.
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.
That's exactly why I was trying to guide you into a back door.
Agreed. I don't think I accused you of saying that--I just think that what you did say is easily twisted to support that narrative.
> I instead suggested that there are bad employers who pay above market rates as a way to compensate for problems with employee retention. Sure, they'll run out of money doing that eventually, but you'd be surprised how long a business can cover up their mistakes with such a strategy, especially with the right funding partners behind them.
> If you have not had the misfortune of working for such a business, that's great, but I believe there are plenty of comments here on HN to support the notion that such businesses not only exist but are fairly common in any industry touched by Venture Capital or Private Equity, and I have seen many even suggest that their higher financial compensation ends up not being worth it in light of the added psychological and physiological toll.
I'm not saying this situation doesn't exist. I'm saying it's far less common than the situation where you find a job that pays better because your current job is underpaying you.
A friend of mine did work for such a company. He stayed there for 9 months, and then quit without a job lined up, and it took him 4 months to find a job (partly because he was being much more selective about jobs). He a) still made more money in 9 months than in the previous year, and b) leveraged the higher pay history to obtain higher pay at all companies he worked for in the rest of his career. Having talked to him extensively about it at the time (and advising him to quit) I think he'd maybe work there a shorter period, but it doesn't seem like he regrets doing it.
So sure, these companies exist, but working for one is not necessarily a critical mistake as long as you keep your option to quit open (which I think is critical in any job, no matter how good--the ability of either party to walk away from the table is a key component of any free transaction in a free market).
It's generally true that you meet more people switching jobs every 2 years. You work with all the people that stayed and all the people that also left after 2 years. You end up on more total teams.
It's not universally true. If you stay in a place with higher than average turnover, constantly working with new people then you would be in an position to work with more people. Additionally, if you worked in a very centralized team in a very large software company you could end up working with more people.
Finally, the quantity of people you've worked with isn't the key metric you should maximize your professional network for. You ideally want in any 3 month period multiple people in your professional network whose recommendation will carry a lot of weight for an open position you would be interesting in taking that would give you a strong recommendation. After you've reached that level of baseline employment security then you want to maximize for people that will recommend better and better positions.
> The only point of software is automation, which means if I can automate my own job then I don't have to do it either. I usually keep this to myself
I'm sure most hiring managers would agree, all of this is strongly reinforcing my initial assessment that long-tenured employees in the same company and position are yellow flags that need to be handled with care :)
Economics is a social science that studies and attempts to explain the behavior of markets.
Always be reevaluating, though, the situation could change in a couple years. But until then I sleep well at night knowing I'm paid near top of market at a decent company. Not worth chasing those last couple percentiles, personally.
Changing jobs sucks anyway.
hah to be fair..2014 was early in my career. So maybe it was due to me rather than a sign of the times.
this is called "up or out", maybe 10-15 years ago my little sister had this same setup at Mckinsey but she's not there anymore. The idea iirc was if you haven't been promoted in 2-3 years then you're better off leaving and trying somewhere else so you get let go. I haven't heard of that setup in a long time.
I'm not sure if you are joking or not. This doesn't really make sense to me. Can you explain?
More passive, more avoidant, low confidence.
Depression undermines basically everything that helps initiate complete a negotiation. This is on top of any impact to actual work product.
I don't know. I try to maintain empathy, even for the most despicable -- but that doesn't mean their actions need to be tolerated.
Is that a realistic take on the situation?
To be honest, none of the stuff I've worked on I've gotten comfortable within a year. At Oxide I feel like I understand maybe 30-40% of the stack at the moment after 18 months?
What about having an SP500 index fund (or other broad market fund) compose the majority of your life savings? Or your city/county/state government’s pension fund savings?
There's also different concepts of weath. A medieval villein or sokesman might own 120 acres of land. A knight might own a whole 1-5 square miles of land (600 - 3,200 acres). Even a cottar might have 30-40 acres of land.
So what percentage of us are "land poor" these days in comparison? Almost all of us. Most land lots are about 0.2 acres in size in the U.S. "Not even big enough for a garden croft" a medieval bordar would have scoffed.
Meanwhile, there were urban burghers who did invest in various ventures increasingly over time. Yet "coin" was, admittedly, a tiny percentage of medieval wealth.
Sadly, today only about 3/4 of Americans even have a retirement account, and the median value is only $87,000 as of 2022. None of us are living like barons.
As soon as that dual income want kids and can afford it on a signal income in suburbia, they'll take it most of the time.
Just my .02
“Probability of job loss is strongly monotonically declining in tenure,” with job-loss probability falling from 15% for first-year private sector employees to 5.8% after twenty years [1].
(If you’ve ever had to do lay-offs, you know that it’s easier to lay off the new guy than someone with deep ties to the team.)
[1] https://www.princeton.edu/~ceps/workingpapers/171farber.pdf page 31, Figure 16
In the US, during a period of insane stock price appreciation, yes.
People who joined in Dec 2022 got massively screwed though, so it's not really reliable cash.
I've never worked in game dev, but at least in NYC I was being interviewed by Rockstar Games for a pretty senior-level position a couple years ago, just to find out that it maxed out at considerably less than my previous job. I didn't continue the process and I just assumed that it was standard in the games industry.
We also live really far away from eachother, so that might be a factor as well. I'm based in Stockholm, which is _very_ different from NYC.
As I said, I've never worked game dev, but people who have here told me that they are pretty brutal, expecting you to work a lot of extra unpaid hours. It would not surprise me if Sweden has better labor protections in this regard.
Could probably get higher if I made an effort getting a fang role but not really interested in fang.
Lots and lots of companies have completely embraced remote work. You are not hearing from them because once they embraced it they found people better than you [1] who'll work for a tenth of the price. In other words, offshore.
Put another way, you're only seeing Office-work positions, because once they grasp that the job can be done remotely, they grasp that you're expensive.
I know, I know, soooo many reasons they should pay more to get you. On the other hand the entire manufacturing industry figured out "remote manufacturing" means cheap labor...
[1] obviously I'm speaking generally because I don't know you. But statistically it's likely to be true.
I know the companies in my country, they don't offshore because offshoring has additional overhead and costs they can't afford(small and medium companies), so they mostly prefer local workers they can tap on shoulder, and preferably German speaking.
And those few companies who do offshore(mostly banks and other large enterprises) already had offices abroad, no need for the pandemic to convince them.
I’ve walked the path. Developers won’t develop anything good for $200k, but they will if you give them attention, care, events, and hope. I literally have to refrain myself from giving higher raises, because I’ve made people rich in the past and they’ve stopped being motivated. The more you pay them, the more they have the thrill to play competition.
(Please watch me if I don’t give them fat equity for the exit event, God, they deserve it).
That seems to be the Silicon Valley investment paradigm. Needed for attracting VC money. Otherwise, the users never gave a sh*t about those, they still don't. The rest of the tech world did not operate under such a paradigm either. I also suspect that it will also end in SV as the zero interest economy ended and the investment landscape changed. Now profitability is being valued instead of unprofitable infinite growth that may or may not be profitable in the future.
In recent years, I've worked for clients that didn't give me the information I needed to do my job and then were mad when the work was delayed. Every pay cycle I got paid and every night I went home and slept like a baby.
Contrast this with early in my career when I was at times struggling to make rent. My managers at that time weren't bad so much as unmemorable: what I remember is being unable to sleep because I was worried about how I was going to make ends meet.
The things employers do besides pay their employees usually just don't have the impact on workers' lives they sometimes think they do. Outside of egregious outliers like verbal, sexual, or physical abuse, there really isn't much a manager can do that's going to impact their workers as much as stable pay and benefits.
Worst job I ever had paid about 60% of what I usually earn, and I was told of by the manager for pointing out that there were compilation errors in our master branch (at this place, anything pushed to master was automatically deployed into production, with zero testing. The only reason prod didn't burn that day was because the pipeline crashed when it couldn't produce the jar file)
(Well, prod did burn that day, it burned every day at this place, but none of those fires were because of the non-compiling commit in question)
There were a lot of other problems at this place, but that was the day I handed in my resignation.
But I still would've hated every second of it. At 10x I definitely would've tolerated it for longer, but only by steeling myself with the thought that if I work 12 more months, I can basically retire afterwards.
Out of curiosity, how long did it take from hiring day to resignation for this to become apparent?
Maybe it was worse before the ACA but it sure isn't a picnic after.
In my experience, when you apply on healthcare.gov, you simply enter your estimated income for the year you're applying - that's it, and you get the subsidy. Then when you file your taxes for that year, you either get more subsidy as a credit, or pay some back depending on whether you came in above or below the estimate you provided on the application.
The househpold income is voluntarily self-reported.
Most employers aren’t really providing much “healthcare value” when compared to simply going on the exchange directly.
Now the jobmarket is nothing that can be compared to the Bay area, for sure. For example many places more or less use the standard increases brokered by the union, even if you or the workplace is not unionized, with some skewing for being a high performer.
It's "business." Your manager isn't going to make a counteroffer, then wait a month and fire you. I mean, they might if they're a total D.bag, but I've not yet had that experience. And if I had, I'd already proven to myself and my manager that I could get a higher-paying job elsewhere. It'd be a minor annoyance on my side.
I don't want to give away specifics, so take these numbers with a lump of salt; the ratios are correct:
Went from $50k/yr [1]-> $80k/yr [2]-> $120k/yr [3]-> $205k/yr
[1] The company wanted me to stay and raised my pay to match the competing offers.
[2] The company wanted me to stay and raised my pay to match the competing offers.
[3] The company didn't want to pay that much, so I put in my two weeks and moved to a different company.
From my experience, I've found that requesting a raise without a competing offer often leads to a small or no increase in pay. However, when I've approached my manager with a better offer in hand, it has consistently resulted in substantial pay raises.
I also routinely get asked by managers for promo recommendations for coworkers thinking about leaving. IF they refuse to counter, then you should be asking yourself why you are staying.
You cant pull this maneuver more than once or twice, but it lets them know you are serious and wont just whine and accept token raises in future negotiations.
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).
If you have a market based salary view of the world, and an employee says they're actually worth more than what your merit/market system is paying them (and has proof), you should probably respect that.
The fact they're coming to you first is a risk in and of itself.
We are in total agreement here!
Leaving is exactly what JohnFen actually recommended to these employees.
I just choose not to play that game. It's unnecessary. If an employee can't just come to me and be straight about their compensation requirements, that's a problem.
It is no different than giving customers a notice of price increase or giving contractors an option to bid.
> Seems like honest communication to me.
Extortion is honest communication, too. The existence of an offer doesn't do anything to help me decide whether or not I can go along with a pay increase. It only communicates that the employee wants to threaten me into agreeing to one.
In my opinion, the better way is to ask for the pay raise without mentioning the offer. If they I don't give them the raise and it's that important to them, then they should just take the offer.
> It is no different than giving customers a notice of price increase or giving contractors an option to bid.
I think it's very different from that, actually. You can require a raise as a condition to stay at the company without trying to use another offer as a weapon.
Not at all. I've never intentionally underpaid anyone.
> then insinuate moral failing on their part for proving their worth
Also not at all. Presenting an offer letter from someone is not "proving their worth". My objection is the manipulation they're engaging in rather than just asking for what they think they should be getting.
> and left you poorer for it.
Only one of them left, and I was not left poorer for it at all.
I'm not sure why you seem so hostile here. I never dealt with anyone in bad faith, even a little.
At first I thought it was simply because it is presented as an ultimatum, but it seems like you have no problem being given conditions. Saying I want X to keep working here is acceptable, but the same exact statement with an offer weaponizes it.
If they have an offer they don't tell you about but have an otherwise identical request, is that less of a threat?
First, personally I’ve never asked my employer to match an offer. I just leave.
I do think the thought process makes some sense though.
If I feel I’m underpaid I’m going to look around to confirm before talking to anyone.
If I get confirmation I’m being underpaid then I’m going to wonder why. Here’s where I have a choice… I either assume it’s because you’re intentionally underpaying because you think you can, or it’s because you don’t understand what you’re doing.
I know companies understand compensation because I’ve worked in management and on compensation planning software, that’s why I don’t talk about it.
More naive people might give you the benefit of the doubt, i.e. think you just don’t know what’s fair. Those people give you a chance to fix it, and only then learn that you’re intentionally underpaying them.
It does speak badly of the person but only in the sense that they’re naive and think you “mean well” in some sense.
There are other explanations as well: for instance, just because an employee is worth a given rate to one company in no way means that the same employee is worth the same amount in another company.
> 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.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate your honesty here, But I don't think that's fair, and probably why you're getting push-back in this thread.
It's OK if you and others don't think it's fair. We just disagree on that aspect. I don't think it's fair for an employee to use that particular method. To me, it comes off as a kind of extortion to the current employer, and mistreats the employer who made the offer.
Others can, of course, have a different opinion. Nothing wrong with that. We simply disagree.
To make a little meta-comment: I am genuinely surprised at the negative reaction I've gotten from a few people here. I really didn't think I was saying anything all that controversial. Live and learn, I guess!
But then again companies typically do shitty things to employees all the time because the company has the leverage. You've probably witnessed some of that yourself.
Sam Altman and OpenAI come to mind.
So I guess I don't understand what's changed about the relationship when the employee finds leverage to use against the company.
That's exactly what they are doing, but with evidence to boot so you are on the same page.
Having an offer in hand is valuable to the employee, certainly! There's nothing wrong with getting an offer, then asking your current employer for a raise that would meet or exceed that offer. The issue I have is actually communicating that offer to the current employer.
Now, don't get me wrong -- I'd certainly never punish or fire anyone who did that. I'm just not going to give in to what I perceive as extortion, and what I perceive as being unfair to the employer who made the offer.
If someone asked me for a pay raise and I turned it down, I'd also explain exact why I turned it down. (This is hypothetical as I've not turned down a pay raise). I wouldn't think poorly of anyone for just asking for a raise, but I suppose I'd start to get annoyed if they did it daily when the reason that I turned them down was still true.
Also why do I want to stay with the cheap people? They proved to be unable to deliver market rates for my efforts unless I make a big scene about it. I don't like to do business with people like that.
No employers going to give you the maximum that they can afford without negotiation or a reason to. It's not being cheap, it's common business sense.
It's no different than price shopping between mechanics. You can do that while being clear on your intentions and not making any promises you can't keep