The fourth going-away call
Staying is a pay cut nobody decided on, and remote work quietly took the ceiling off a local market.
Three people have left the agency since April, and last week I gave notice, so at some point somebody is going to be organizing a fourth one of these.
All good, all people I liked working with, all going to jobs paying a great deal more, and all three parties happened on a video call, which is its own small sadness. You can’t stand near anybody. Somebody’s audio always goes right as the toast starts.
I had five recruiter messages last week. Not a record. A coworker counted a dozen. And the number of people quitting their jobs hit a record this spring, which I went and looked up because it seemed unlikely that this was just us.
Something has happened to the market this year and I don’t fully understand it, so what follows is a person thinking out loud instead of anything like analysis. But there are a few mechanisms in here I’m fairly confident are real, and one of them explains the last decade of my working life better than anything I’d have arrived at on my own.
A percentage of last year
An internal raise is benchmarked against what you were paid last year. There’s a budget, there’s a percentage, there’s a review, and every part of that apparatus exists to adjust a number that already exists. Even a generous employer acting in complete good faith is doing math that starts from your current salary.
An outside offer is benchmarked against what the role costs to fill today.
In a flat market those two produce about the same answer and nobody notices. In a market that’s moved 15 or 20% in 18 months they pull apart, and they pull apart without anybody being unfair to anyone. My employer isn’t underpaying me out of malice. They’re anchored to a number from a different year, which is what the process was built to do.
So the person who stays takes a real cut against the person who moves, every time, structurally, and the only dependable way to be paid this year’s price is to be hired at it.
The counter, which I’ve made out loud in a meeting and half believed at the time, is that a company matching every outside offer is running an auction against itself, and the people who never look end up subsidizing the people who do. Fair enough. That’s an argument for benchmarking everybody against the market once a year and paying them accordingly. It isn’t an argument for the anchor. I’ve just never worked anywhere that does the first thing.
I find the whole mechanism useful to know and a little grim, because it means loyalty isn’t rewarded by the system so much as tolerated by it.
We’re a very in-person team
A San Diego agency used to compete for developers with other San Diego agencies. That was the pool. Salaries got set by a local market with local costs, and there was a ceiling everybody understood and nobody ever had to defend.
The ceiling is gone and nothing was announced. Last year every company in the country proved it could employ people who weren’t in the building, after a decade of telling us it couldn’t be done, and having proved it, a few thousand of them started doing it deliberately. So a developer here gets offered Bay Area money, more and more often by companies that don’t have an office anywhere at all.
Which is straightforwardly great for developers and I’m not going to be mealy-mouthed about it. People who were paid a regional salary to do 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 got quietly penalized for it for years. In April last year I wanted “it can’t be done” taken off the table before everybody forgot. It came off the table and took the ceiling with it, which I’d have bet against.
It’s also hard on small agencies who can’t match those numbers, because their clients are local businesses with local budgets. There’s no mechanism by which an ecommerce store in Bakersfield starts paying San Francisco rates for a website. Both of those are true at once and neither one cancels the other.
The work doesn’t leave
Three people leave. The work stays exactly where it was. Clients don’t lower their expectations because you’ve had a rough quarter. So it redistributes across whoever’s still here, everybody absorbs a little more, and the absorbing is invisible because everyone is competent and nobody says anything right away.
Then a few months later one of the absorbers is worn down and takes a call from a recruiter they’d spent a year deleting. Now it’s fewer people over the same work, and the load on the rest goes up again.
That’s self-reinforcing and it needs nobody to behave badly at any point in it. It only needs vacancies to be filled more slowly than they’re created, which in this market they will be. I’d like to say I’m not part of that. I’m exactly part of that, and the two people I’m leaving it to have been on my mind more than anything else this month.
Choosing it or sitting in it
I’d have told you in April that I wasn’t going anywhere, and I’d have meant it.
The reasons were real ones. I like the variety. I’ve had my hands in nine different businesses this year and learned something about every one of them, which I don’t think I’d get on a product team. I like the people. I have more room to decide things than somebody at my level usually gets. I know precisely what 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.
The trouble is that “these reasons are real” and “these reasons are why I’m here” are two different claims, and inertia is extremely good at presenting itself as contentment. I’ve got a good chair and I know where everything is.
So in May I did the dumbest possible version of thinking about it. I wrote down every part of this job that doesn’t come out of payroll, one per line, and put a dollar figure next to each one. What the autonomy is worth to me per year. What the variety is worth. What it’s worth to work with people I’d choose to have lunch with, and what it’s worth to never be a cog. Real numbers, in a text file, feeling ridiculous the entire time.
Some of those numbers came out large, which I was quietly pleased about. Then I added them to what I’m paid, compared the total against what two conversations told me the same work costs to hire this year, and the gap was bigger than the whole list. That was the decision. It took an evening, and I’d been not doing it for about a year and a half.
If you’re inside a job you haven’t looked away from, do the list. Not to leave, and not as a negotiating tactic, both of which are worse versions of it. Write down what the non-salary parts are worth in actual numbers, then go and find out what the market says, because “I’m choosing this” and “I haven’t looked” feel identical from the inside and are completely different situations to be standing in. And notice that whether you can do any of it at all is mostly a function of how much room you’ve got, which is the same thing I was going on about in January. Somebody with three months of runway and somebody with none are not having the same conversation with themselves, whatever the internet says about knowing your worth.
And if you’re one of the people who’s gone or going, good for you, 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 an employer a conversation.
I’ve kept the list, in a folder with the date on it. I’d like to open it again in a year or two and find out how much of it still holds, partly because I suspect the answer will say more about the market than about me, and partly because I’d rather find out I was wrong on purpose than notice it slowly. My guess right now is that most of it holds. My guess about this market has not been good so far.