Raises…

[Matata]

Will asking for a raise get you blackballed from the industry? Or will not asking for enough raise make you look a chump who's bad with money, stall your career because they don't see you as 'hungry' enough for the next level and make you target for getting picked on in the future.

There's a myriad of potential risks and consequence to these things and it's easy to feel overwhelmed, but you'll never do better than mediocre without fighting for yourself.

"Don't 'nice' your way into a crappy life."
-Patrice O'Neal

[skudr248]

Well had my chat w/ my boss.. asked for what I thought was fair, guess i'll find out in a few days.

[81MC]

https://forum.calgarypuck.com/showthread.php?t=185437

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by northcrunk

lol complaining about a 4.5% yearly raise. I haven't had one in 7 years

[Cecil Terwilliger]

Hey OP, you didn’t post on r/antiwork did you?

Asked for a raise...got fired

Today I asked to meet with the VP of ops at my job to discuss a possible raise. After being blown off twice we finally sat down. I told him what I wanted and his response was “or what?” I was taken off guard by the response so I said we’ll see I guess. I then asked him why he doesn’t think I should get it. He proceeded to explain how he’d love to give everyone $100/hr but it has to be even and fair across the board. I reminded him that I’m not asking for $100/hr.

At my job, which is a team of 4 people including a manager, I’m the only one with knowledge of how to fully operate the production line. I’ve trained others in the past but nobody stayed long enough to do it on their own. I told the VP that it doesn’t make sense for me to be making the same as the new hire who knows nothing yet. He said that’s unrealistic. So now I had to remind him that for the last 6 months not a single finished product would’ve left the facility if it hadn’t gone through me. At this point he began to belittle me and tell me I’m not special and I’m no superstar and that anybody could do my job. I said ok, where are they then? I’m the last one left. All these other people have not lasted. He said that’s the wrong perspective to have. I asked what would you do if I wasn’t here? He said they’d figure it out. So I said I think this conversation is over you’ve made yourself clear.

I then went out into the shop to continue prep for the days run. The manager brought me back in whereHR was now present. The VP stated as soon as I walked into the office that effective immediately my employment has been suspended. I said go #### yourself and went to grab my keys. They all followed me out proceeding to tell me I’m handling this wrong. I approached the VP and said I asked you for a raise, to be compensated fairly and your response was to fire me? Go #### yourself you ####ing idiot.

[RichieRich]

Wow.
There’s gotta be more to the history than that.
Of course now that person is more incentive to look for work - sometimes it takes a forced kick on the @r$e to get moving towards something better.

[skudr248]

Haha no, guess I should update:

Ended up receiving 15% with an additional perk. Thought it was fair enough given all the circumstances and accepted.

[Cecil Terwilliger]

Good for you!

What’s the additional perk? They gonna fix those lazy eyes?

[RichieRich]

Originally Posted by skudr248

Haha no, guess I should update:

Ended up receiving 15% with an additional perk. Thought it was fair enough given all the circumstances and accepted.

Thanks for sharing the journey and outcome. Good for you for making it happen.

That’s enough for a lifestyle change BUT I would suggest you consider avoiding the lifestyle creep and instead make a conscious decision to help your future self out. No, not more booze, but retirement - either by making it happen sooner or have more. Other than a reasonable celebration of course.

[Coach]

Guess I'll share my "asking for raise" story.

I worked for a big Canadian bank in the investments side. I worked in a small team which supported one of this banks top 3 earners. So you can imagine there was a lot of money flowing through this team. And there was. When I started the total book value was ~$500m, by the time I was asking for a raise 4 years later, it was approaching $900m. I worked the administration part for this team (account openings, client documents, dealing w back-office tech problems, and a little trading when necessary). This is the lowest wrung on this team. No problem. This guy is a pretty demanding boss (ie here early, leaving late, lunch breaks are "optional". Again, no problem. I'm fine with all that. But you want premium employees doing the above and beyond, you should be paying a premium.

A little back story. I started working at this firm while in Uni, in the mail room, for $14 an hour. This is 2010's, thats not good money, especially from a bank. But I ate it, cuz it would get better. after graduating I got into the role mentioned above. Starting me out at $40K+ benefits. Again, not great money considering the profit this book is generating.

So 4 years go by, I'm now at 50K and a small quarterly bonus if I had a "clean quarter" (ie not a single mistake on any of the millions of pieces of paper I go through, whether it impacted business or not, I would find out later). Pushing me to around 60K. Okay, not bad. Then I find out the people who work for individuals (not in teams) that do essentially exactly what I do are making anywhere from 20-40% more than me while coming in a 10am and leaving at 2pm every day, enjoying full on lunch breaks and basically living it cushy. So I asked for a raise. A substantial one. I wanted to be making 80k. I thought that was reasonable considering the growth of our book, and the revenue we take in. I figured after asking for that we'd settle around $70K and I would have been happy with that.

The response was the "structure" doesn't allow him to pay that position that much. I told him you'd never have anyone doing that job for more than a few years if you weren't willing to bring them along with the added value of the book. I'm under no illusion I was driving that value, it was all him, but I'm dealing with the influx of work (almost double, not to mention constant tech updates), and still being paid the same as the person before me. They told me thats how it works. I worked there from ages 19-26. This was the first time I asked for anything.

So I quit. I had other philosophical reasons, but the inability for the white collar crowd to see the value of lower wrung employees (not even me, but basically anyone thats not an "earner") was at the top of the list. Now I work in movies and I love it. My old boss took me to dinner a year and a half after I left. He has two people doing my job now. So instead of paying me an extra 10-15K, he's paying a whole other employee plus benefits. Don't know how a successful investment advisors settles out on that math, but not my business.

TLDR: It took me too long to realize employers are not doing you a favour. This is a mutually beneficial relationship. I do the work, and you pay me. If I do more work, you pay me more. If I do better work, you pay me better. It's not a charity. They need you as much as you need them. Sometimes more so. Nothing is being given here, and you should stand up for what you believe your value is. If a company or boss isn't willing to pony up, if you can, walk.

** I understand not everyone has the option to walk away when you are supporting other people and have other roadblocks. But one of those roadblocks shouldn't be a fear of taking a step back to go a different direction, if you can manage.**

[d00little]

Originally Posted by Coach

Guess I'll share my "asking for raise" story.

I worked for a big Canadian bank in the investments side. I worked in a small team which supported one of this banks top 3 earners. So you can imagine there was a lot of money flowing through this team. And there was. When I started the total book value was ~$500m, by the time I was asking for a raise 4 years later, it was approaching $900m. I worked the administration part for this team (account openings, client documents, dealing w back-office tech problems, and a little trading when necessary). This is the lowest wrung on this team. No problem. This guy is a pretty demanding boss (ie here early, leaving late, lunch breaks are "optional". Again, no problem. I'm fine with all that. But you want premium employees doing the above and beyond, you should be paying a premium.

A little back story. I started working at this firm while in Uni, in the mail room, for $14 an hour. This is 2010's, thats not good money, especially from a bank. But I ate it, cuz it would get better. after graduating I got into the role mentioned above. Starting me out at $40K+ benefits. Again, not great money considering the profit this book is generating.

So 4 years go by, I'm now at 50K and a small quarterly bonus if I had a "clean quarter" (ie not a single mistake on any of the millions of pieces of paper I go through, whether it impacted business or not, I would find out later). Pushing me to around 60K. Okay, not bad. Then I find out the people who work for individuals (not in teams) that do essentially exactly what I do are making anywhere from 20-40% more than me while coming in a 10am and leaving at 2pm every day, enjoying full on lunch breaks and basically living it cushy. So I asked for a raise. A substantial one. I wanted to be making 80k. I thought that was reasonable considering the growth of our book, and the revenue we take in. I figured after asking for that we'd settle around $70K and I would have been happy with that.

The response was the "structure" doesn't allow him to pay that position that much. I told him you'd never have anyone doing that job for more than a few years if you weren't willing to bring them along with the added value of the book. I'm under no illusion I was driving that value, it was all him, but I'm dealing with the influx of work (almost double, not to mention constant tech updates), and still being paid the same as the person before me. They told me thats how it works. I worked there from ages 19-26. This was the first time I asked for anything.

So I quit. I had other philosophical reasons, but the inability for the white collar crowd to see the value of lower wrung employees (not even me, but basically anyone thats not an "earner") was at the top of the list. Now I work in movies and I love it. My old boss took me to dinner a year and a half after I left. He has two people doing my job now. So instead of paying me an extra 10-15K, he's paying a whole other employee plus benefits. Don't know how a successful investment advisors settles out on that math, but not my business.

TLDR: It took me too long to realize employers are not doing you a favour. This is a mutually beneficial relationship. I do the work, and you pay me. If I do more work, you pay me more. If I do better work, you pay me better. It's not a charity. They need you as much as you need them. Sometimes more so. Nothing is being given here, and you should stand up for what you believe your value is. If a company or boss isn't willing to pony up, if you can, walk.

** I understand not everyone has the option to walk away when you are supporting other people and have other roadblocks. But one of those roadblocks shouldn't be a fear of taking a step back to go a different direction, if you can manage.**

Good for you. If this was one of the big banks though, they do have fairly firm salary levels/bands though. If he was telling the truth about structure, he should have then promoted you to give you a higher salary. But maybe it was easier to add another employee at the same job level to the team. It's one of those things that don't make sense like a department using up budget towards the end of the year so their budget doesn't decrease next year.

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by Coach

TLDR: It took me too long to realize employers are not doing you a favour. This is a mutually beneficial relationship. I do the work, and you pay me. If I do more work, you pay me more. If I do better work, you pay me better. It's not a charity. They need you as much as you need them. Sometimes more so. Nothing is being given here, and you should stand up for what you believe your value is. If a company or boss isn't willing to pony up, if you can, walk.

My first job post school was working at Shaw. Started as a frontline TSR and eventually worked my way up to internal IT helpdesk. Busted my ass there, always the top ticket closer. Then we get a new team lead who has zero IT experience and all she does is look at numbers. And her first move is to meet with me to ask why my numbers for that month weren't as high as last month. I ask her if it might not be more beneficial to talk with the other team members who weren't even closing half the tickets I was, and she flatly states "You established your own baseline, and we expect you to keep that standard". She followed that up with an email CC'ing the manager detailing my "poor performance" and demanding I fill out and sign a performance improvement plan. Well I lit into her, also CC'ing the manager, refused to sign that ####, and immediately started looking for a new job. Ended up getting fired the next week with a healthy severance package and got a helpdesk job at an oil company a week later that paid 50% more

That experience taught me a valuable lesson, companies do not care about you as an individual, only as a number on a spreadsheet. So do what's expected of you, but don't go above and beyond expecting to get rewarded for it. And if you want a raise the best way is to jump to a different company. I've worked at several different companies since then, always getting a healthy salary bump when moving. That's pretty normal though in IT, maybe it's different in other industries

[RichieRich]

Here's an interesting blog/article on corporate logic and employee compensation:
https://bestinterest.blog/raises-negotiations/

[RichieRich]

Like some of the other posters here I too had an experience where I was doing fairly unique work that not many others were capable of doing, nor willing to do. It involved working much longer hours to accommodate and solely support an overseas office. I had changed into that department immediately prior to what should have been a performance review and salary adjustment... but got neither. After first year had a barely nominal "raise" which, considering how I'd bust my nut and helped generate many millions of extra sales, was insulting. I actually rejected the "congratulations you get a nominal performance raise" letter from my supervisor and verbalize I was grossly unhappy and it was insulting, not to mention didn't come close to meeting industry standards. After a few weeks of p*ssing around they came back with about a ~7% raise, still well under industry and my colleagues. I found another role paying ~25% more (and that's after the 7% raise) and handed in my notice... somehow they were shocked, surprised, and wanted to keep me around. "what can we do to keep you in this career building role and we so appreciate you... blah blah blah". Sorry, you had your chance.



That anxious, stressful, and scary time taught me a lot... work hard and have a solid reputation; stand up for yourself; always support your request with factual quantifiable data; look after #1; don't be afraid of change.

[Coach]

Originally Posted by d00little

Good for you. If this was one of the big banks though, they do have fairly firm salary levels/bands though. If he was telling the truth about structure, he should have then promoted you to give you a higher salary. But maybe it was easier to add another employee at the same job level to the team. It's one of those things that don't make sense like a department using up budget towards the end of the year so their budget doesn't decrease next year.

I don’t begrudge my immediate boss really as much as the entire system, as you refer too. He was a very generous and great person otherwise. If I had the cash to meet his minimum account level, I’d have my money with him. He runs a good business.

Yeah I was fed up with exactly what you are referring to. People I worked with in the mail room (mostly immigrants with families) had to have multiple jobs. Meanwhile my screensaver says we had 2+ billion in revenue that quarter. That and being the literal facilitator of wealth gaps, I just couldn’t deal. Honestly was on my way out with the job as it was. Asking for the money was really a Hail Mary attempt to squeeze some happiness out of it.

The people I worked with were all very kind and generous individuals. But when it came to giving me a drop in the bucket and retaining a loyal employee my boss, HR, and the branch manager, all of whom I had strong personal relationships with, side with letting me walk. Made me feel pretty affirmed in my feelings of wanting to leave.

[Coach]

nvm