At many companies, raises are due to length of tenure (sad, but true). Prepare to be told, "But you've only been here for a year. It'd be bad if we gave you a raise."
If a company wants to buy tenure and you want to sell performance, it's a bad fit. Find someone wanting to buy what you are selling and do business with them.
If the language section of your resume lists Java, J2EE and Java 1.6, you should stick around. You'll never get a better deal elsewhere.
I totally agree. But take two programmers. 1 is good and has been there for 5 years. The other is GREAT and has been there for 6 months (and is 20 years old w/out a college degree). The second programmer gets a fat raise, placing him above the first in terms of pay. The first doesn't necessarily agre that the younger fella is clearly better: "Yeah, he cranks out code and he kisses the right asses. But a lot of it needs to be rewritten and he gets 'creative' with the spec," or somesuch. "Performance" is subjective. In the above scenario, you might have 5 disgruntled good programmers when you give you young star a fat raise.
I'm all for a meritocracy, but it's tricky with anything that's hard to measure (exception: sales).
Completely agree, was going to say, any company that doesn't recognize performance early on (vs. tenure) is not going to have very talented people who stick around very long. A bad fit period for anyone who wants to be part of a top notch team.
Comments
At many companies, raises are due to length of tenure (sad, but true). Prepare to be told, "But you've only been here for a year. It'd be bad if we gave you a raise."
If a company wants to buy tenure and you want to sell performance, it's a bad fit. Find someone wanting to buy what you are selling and do business with them.
If the language section of your resume lists Java, J2EE and Java 1.6, you should stick around. You'll never get a better deal elsewhere.
I totally agree. But take two programmers. 1 is good and has been there for 5 years. The other is GREAT and has been there for 6 months (and is 20 years old w/out a college degree). The second programmer gets a fat raise, placing him above the first in terms of pay. The first doesn't necessarily agre that the younger fella is clearly better: "Yeah, he cranks out code and he kisses the right asses. But a lot of it needs to be rewritten and he gets 'creative' with the spec," or somesuch. "Performance" is subjective. In the above scenario, you might have 5 disgruntled good programmers when you give you young star a fat raise.
I'm all for a meritocracy, but it's tricky with anything that's hard to measure (exception: sales).
Completely agree, was going to say, any company that doesn't recognize performance early on (vs. tenure) is not going to have very talented people who stick around very long. A bad fit period for anyone who wants to be part of a top notch team.
> Java, J2EE and Java 1.6 Care to elaborate? 'Java' colliding with the 2 others?