The note I wrote in 2021
The mechanism I described in 2021 was real, but I wrote it in the wrong tense.
I found it while looking for something else. It’s the list I wrote in May 2021 and said in “The fourth going-away call” that I’d open again in a year or two: everything the job gave me that didn’t come out of payroll, the autonomy and the variety and the people, with a dollar figure written next to each one so I could figure out whether I was choosing this or just sitting in it.
Every number on that list is wrong now, and not by a little. The whole thing was priced against a market that ran for about 18 months and then stopped, so reading it back is like finding a menu from a restaurant that closed.
I’ve had one recruiter message this month. In the week I wrote that post I had six. A coworker counted a dozen. And two of the three people whose leaving set the post off have been laid off since December, both from companies that were hiring hard when they joined.
So it seems worth going back to it, instead of leaving it up as a confident description of a world that lasted a year.
It runs both ways
The mechanism itself is real and I still think it’s the most useful thing to understand about your own salary. Internal pay is anchored to what you were paid last year, and an outside offer is anchored to what the role costs to fill today.
I didn’t say, because I hadn’t thought about it, that the anchor holds just as well when the market is falling.
The person who stayed is anchored to a number set when things were hot, which means they’re now being paid more than their role would cost to fill. That’s pleasant right up until somebody opens a spreadsheet to decide where to cut. There you are, the expensive line.
And the person who moved for a big raise in 2021 is the newest hire, on the highest salary, with the least tenure, at a company that over-hired. Last in, first out, which is a phrase I’d only ever used about stacks.
None of which is a comment on anyone’s judgment. It was the right call with the information available. It’s just that the right call and the good outcome are different things, and a market can put a lot of room between them.
I got the tense wrong
I wrote about the loyalty penalty as though it were a permanent property of employment. It’s a permanent property of rising markets, which is a much smaller claim, and everything else in that post depends on a condition I hadn’t noticed I was assuming, because it had been true for the entire stretch I was looking at.
Which is the most ordinary mistake there is. I’ve made it about tooling, I’ve made it about browsers, and apparently I make it about labor markets too.
The honest version would have said that in a market like this one, staying costs you, and that markets turn, and that when this one turns the math inverts and so does all the advice.
60 days
Somebody I know had 60 days to find another job or leave the country, because their visa was attached to the employer that let them go. 60 days, in a market where the interview process alone runs longer than that.
Somebody else moved across the country for a role in 2022, signed a lease, and went in the first round, because the newest hire is the cheapest one to remove.
And the people who stayed are doing the work of the people who went, which is the cycle I described from the other end in 2021. Fewer people, same clients, same deadlines, and the absorbing is invisible because everybody is competent and nobody complains right away.
Agencies aren’t outside any of this either. I’m in no position to be smug about it. I gave notice the week before I published that post, spent a short stretch in-house, and came back to agency work at the start of last year, which is close to the least stable two years a person could have picked. Marketing spend is one of the first things a business cuts, so agency work follows a downturn a few months behind it. We’re fine at the moment. “At the moment” is doing some work in that sentence.
Twice in two years
In 2021 the consensus was that the balance of power had permanently moved toward workers, that remote was irreversible, that talent scarcity was structural. All of it published confidently and at length, including a version by me.
Right now the consensus is that the era of cheap money is over for good, that the industry over-hired for a decade, that all of this is correcting to some new permanent level. Also published confidently, also at length, often by the same people.
That’s the same error twice, pointed in opposite directions, and each time the present conditions get described as the end of a process instead of a point in one. Each time that reads better than the unexciting answer, which is that this is a cycle and neither confident version is going to age well.
I did it again in December. The place everybody left had felt like a permanent feature of my working life right up until it turned out to be a product. Apparently I have to learn this one domain at a time, which suggests I’m not really learning it.
I don’t know which way this goes from here. I’ve stopped trusting the part of me that wants to have a view.
What I’d say now
Three things, all hedged, all of which I’d apply to myself.
Have a runway, whatever you can manage. It’s the only item on this list that turns a feeling into an option. It’s the same point I was making about saying no two years ago, that your ability to make a good decision is mostly a function of how much room you have to make it in.
Keep the relationships that aren’t your employer’s. The people I’ve watched find work fastest this year are the ones whose network predated the job, and a network is far easier to keep up in good times than to build in bad ones.
And the question from 2021 still stands, it’s just got a different answer now. Are you staying because you’ve chosen this, or because you haven’t looked? That was worth asking when leaving was easy. It’s worth asking now that it isn’t, because if the answer is “I’ve chosen this,” that’s a genuinely good place to be standing and worth knowing you’re standing there.
I’m not redoing the exercise, by the way. The market would hand me a fresh set of numbers and they’d be exactly as true as the May 2021 set was, which is to say true for a while. The note didn’t actually teach me what my autonomy is worth. It’s that I measured it against a moment and then filed it away like a fact. Anybody in the middle of one has my sympathy, and I hope theirs is short.