Everyone I know is leaving
Staying is structurally a pay cut, and remote work quietly removed the ceiling that used to hide it.
Three people have left the agency since April. All good, all people I liked working with, all going to jobs paying a great deal more, and all three going-away parties were on a video call, which is its own small sadness.
I had six recruiter messages last week. Not a record. A colleague counted 11.
Something has clearly happened to the market this year and I don’t fully understand it, so what follows is a person thinking out loud rather than anything like analysis. But there are a couple of mechanisms in here that I think are real, and one of them explains an awful lot about how the last decade of my working life has gone.
Staying is a pay cut, and nobody decided that
Here’s the bit I’d never properly thought through.
An internal pay rise is benchmarked against what you were paid last year. There’s a budget, there’s a percentage, there’s a review, and the whole apparatus is built around adjusting a number that already exists. Even a generous employer, acting in good faith, is doing arithmetic that starts from your current salary.
An external offer is benchmarked against the market, right now, for the role they need filling today.
In a flat market those two produce roughly the same answer and nobody notices. In a market that’s moved 15 or 20% in 18 months, they diverge enormously, and they diverge without anybody being unfair to anyone. Your employer isn’t underpaying you out of malice. They’re anchoring on a number from a different year, which is what the process is designed to do.
An internal rise is anchored to what you were paid last year. An external offer is anchored to what the job costs today. Nobody has to behave badly for those to diverge.
So the person who stays takes a real-terms cut relative to the person who moves, every time, structurally, and the only reliable way to be paid the current price is to be hired at it.
I find that genuinely useful to know, and slightly grim, because it means loyalty isn’t rewarded by the system so much as tolerated by it.
Remote quietly removed the ceiling
The other thing, which I think is specific to right now.
A San Diego agency used to compete for developers with other San Diego agencies. That was the pool. Salaries were set by a local market with local costs, and there was a ceiling everybody understood and nobody had to justify.
That ceiling has gone. Not because anything was announced, but because last year every company in the country proved it could employ people who weren’t in the building, and having proved it, several thousand of them started doing it deliberately. So a developer here is now being offered Bay Area money, and increasingly money from companies that don’t have an office anywhere at all.
Which is straightforwardly excellent for developers, and I’m not going to be mealy-mouthed about that. People who were being paid regional salaries for national work are getting paid properly, and a lot of them are people who couldn’t move cities for family or health or money reasons and were quietly penalized for it for years.
It’s also very hard on small agencies who cannot match those numbers, because their clients are local businesses with local budgets and there’s no mechanism by which a firm of surveyors in Bakersfield starts paying San Francisco rates for a website. Both of those things are true at once and I don’t think either cancels the other.
The cycle that does the actual damage
The part I’m most wary of, and it’s the part nobody’s talking about internally.
Three people leave. The work doesn’t leave. Clients don’t reduce their expectations because you’ve had a difficult quarter. So the work redistributes across whoever’s left, and everybody absorbs a bit more, and the absorbing is invisible because everyone is competent and nobody complains immediately.
Then, four or five months later, one of the absorbers is exhausted and takes a call from a recruiter they’d previously ignored. And now it’s four people, over the same work, and the load on the remainder goes up again.
That’s a self-reinforcing cycle and it doesn’t need anybody to behave badly at any point in it. It just needs the vacancies to be filled more slowly than they’re created, which in this market they will be.
Am I choosing this, or am I settled
The honest bit, since a post about everyone else leaving is really a post about not having left.
I have not applied for anything. I could, and I’d probably do fine, and I’d almost certainly be paid more. So what’s the reasoning.
Some of it is real. I like the variety of agency work: I’ve touched a dozen businesses this year and learned something about each of them, and I don’t think I’d get that on a product team. I like the people. I have an unusual amount of autonomy for someone at my level and I know exactly how much that’s worth because I’ve had jobs without it. I’m not a cog anywhere, which matters to me more than I’d have predicted at 25.
And some of it, I suspect, is that leaving is effortful and staying isn’t, and inertia is very good at presenting itself as contentment. I’ve got a good chair and I know where everything is.
I don’t have a clean answer. What I’ve decided to do is put a number on the non-salary things, actually write it down, and then find out what the market says. Not to leave. To find out whether I’m choosing this or just sitting in it, because those feel identical from the inside and they’re completely different situations.
Anyway, if you’re one of the people who’s gone or going: genuinely, well done, take the money, don’t feel bad about it for a second, and don’t let anyone frame it as disloyalty. That framing exists to save the employer a conversation.
And if you’re staying, which I currently am, it’s worth being able to say why in a sentence that isn’t “I haven’t looked” 🙃
Added in September. I wrote all of that in June, meant every word of it, and handed in my notice 11 weeks later.
What changed wasn’t the reasoning. It was that I did the thing I said I’d do at the end, put a number on the non-salary parts, wrote it down, went and found out what the market said, and the answer came back in a shape I hadn’t allowed for. Not more money at another agency. One product, in-house, no timesheets, and a number that made my autonomy argument look a lot like something I’d been telling myself to avoid doing the exercise.
I don’t think the post is wrong. I think it’s an accurate description of the two weeks before you find out, which is a thing worth having a record of. So it stays up as written and this goes underneath it 🫠