It's exceedingly rare to get a huge raise just for doing the job you were hired for. The best place to demand dollars is in the interview. Inside a company your best bet is to clearly delinate role changes, and make your demands parallel to that change. Don't ever fall for the "do the higher level work now, get the raise later".
Worth pointing out that this varies case by case. I can't speak with more than a single data point, but the only company I've been with has seen both pay rises (decent ones) and title bumps be rather fluid, and they've never actually happened at the same time. And yes, started off on a shit salary, now it's great - without any single huge change in what I'm doing, just gradual changes.
Really? I have had 3 jobs in my 7 year career as a developer. In each job, I have always given 110%, solved every problem given to me, and been 'the guy' who can fix things quickly when they break.
I'm a PHP developer by trade, recently our iPhone developer quit. I learnt Objective C in 2 weeks and am now maintaining two large iPhone apps as well as doing my PHP duties as a senior dev.
I have never asked for a raise, in my first job I started on 30k and was on 80k in 1 year (new zealand dollars). In my second job I started on 40k pounds and was on 50k in 6 months. In my current job (been here 3 months) I'm looking at a 20% pay increase in the next month.
Never asked for a raise. I just shine and get the karma back.
Your experience will vary from company to company - while my initial post mentioned the company that I had to fight to get a review at, I later on worked at a company for over 4 years where I was given a yearly raise that exceeded the percentage cap that was in place - I was appreciated and they made sure to show me. Every company and every boss is different - it's great when you work for the good places.
I've never had to ask for raises either, but I honestly think that's more likely to be a sign that I'm underpaid for what I do. Not that I'm ungrateful to my boss for fighting to get me them.
It is rare, but it happens. At least one entire team at microsoft recently received $60k+ raises (salary increases -- not one time bonuses) because google started poaching team members.
Now nobody on the team can justify leaving since they are paid so out-of-whack with their actual market value.
>Now nobody on the team can justify leaving because they are paid so out-of-whack with their actual market value.
You can't reason like that. The market value is simply the price the customer is willing to bear. If Microsoft can bear an $60k per year increase to hold onto these engineers, then that's their "true" market value. In other words, they're getting paid exactly market value right now, and they were getting horribly underpaid before.
Side note: This misconception about "true market value" is probably the number one reason as to why engineers are underpaid. If the person on the other side isn't challenging your price, you're lowballing yourself.
It's not necessarily their true market value - it's just their value to Microsoft at that particular time.
If the project that they're working on is strategically important, and any disruption is unacceptable, it might be in Microsoft's best interests to pay them well above their market rate to ensure nobody quits. But the same engineers in another part of the company may not have received raises at all.
On the flip side, Google may be willing to pay above market value in order to take valuable assets away from their direct competition in key areas.
Just because one company in one circumstance pays them a certain salary, it doesn't mean that's their true market value, unless they could get the same rate elsewhere if they quit tomorrow.
Agreed. Most companies realise the disruption caused to a project when key staff leave and paying an extra 10K, 20K or even 60K passes a simple cost-benefit analysis - but only during that project.
Personal experience: I was one of about 5-6 people who actually knew what they were doing on a 50 person, 3 year project at a large company when I got a much better offer from a much better company. I called the HR manager in good faith to see if they would match it, but he didn't want a word of it (nearly hung up on me, in fact). That was until he was told by my boss that I'm needed on a critical project. Not only did he call me back and talk to me, the CTO of the company (who never spoke to me before) spent an entire hour with me, ignoring his constantly beeping phone, convincing me to stay. As flattering as that was, I knew by then that they only did this because of the critical project and took that into account in making my decision.
I still decided to quit. The "critical project" was cancelled two weeks later (for unrelated reasons).
