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bluerooibos | on: Britain to make salary disclosure in job ads mandatory
> It is within your power as a job applicant to ask the salary range in the first phone call.

For me, being fresh out of university, I didn't really think to press on salary too much and was just happy to land a job. In my first job, I recall not knowing the salary until I got the contract and offer (luckily, it was surprisingly above average pay).

When I moved into the software industry, I started to realise my worth a bit more and job-hopped for 10-50% pay bumps on an annual basis for the first few years and just started chasing higher salaries and turning down interviews unless they were in my desired range.

I know many other engineers who never changed this behaviour (or were never taught to be more ruthless and know their worth) and were just happy to receive any increase in salary - and as a result had 10+ years in the industry and had utterly pitiful salaries due to their employer simply taking advantage - you'll never receive the same increase in pay by remaining loyal to a company versus job hopping. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing in the UK or what but this is the type of advice that should be given in schools more IMO.

tomgp | parent | next
Yeah, this is my experience too, trading up every couple of years (though sometimes I've taken a sideways or slight downwards step to broaden my experience or work for somewhere that I thought was interesting or worthwhile). I've had a couple of longish spells at companies, 7 or 8 years, and in both those cases I left because my pay wasn't keeping pace with the market or my growing responsibilities and management wouldn't budge. The irony being that at those places i was at my most valuable because of my institutional and political knowledge. I think companies greatly undervalue the benefits of long term employees.
sjamaan | parent | next
Same here. You don't even know what you're worth if you keep working at the same company. And even then, if you don't know what you could ask, you will never know how much you're really worth.

Let's say you could command 100k/year but your first job is 30k/year and stay there for several years because you like the work environment. Then you'd go to the next company and ask for, I dunno, maybe 50k/year and think that's a huge bump. If you saw salary ranges for similar positions elsewhere you'd be more inclined to start looking around even if you were happy at your current employer.

Nowadays things are a bit more transparent in the tech world with stuff like levels.fyi (but you have to know about those), but I'm thinking it would benefit people in all fields.

carlosjobim | parent
Just taking what you're offered is understandable when you're young and don't know any better. I think a lot if not most people had that experience with their first job(s). But there's no excuse for not taking agency over your own life when you're a bit older and more experienced. These people have to grow up and stop acting like kids, or accept that people will take advantage of them.