I've never felt as stuck in a job as I have this past year. I've been searching for about ten months so far. During the great resignation, it felt like there was so much career portability and possibility. Want that dream job in another state and to stay in the home you bought at 3% interest? No problem. Want a 40% pay bump? Sure, you should have asked for 50%.
Today, most roles in my field of expertise would be a pay cut to half of my total compensation if I am lucky. Sure, I can live on just a base salary number, but it's a mental hurdle to accept, especially with all the inflation and price increases everywhere. Also, most roles want you on-site or hybrid, many in HCOL areas. Making a move like that means giving up a 2020-era interest rate and completely uprooting my family for a 50% pay cut.
I'm in an engineering subspecialty at a FAANG. Our service is built on industry-standard tools and technology, so I hope my skills will be portable. But with the poor prospects in the market, I may be more inclined to start my own company vs. trying to get in with another BigCo. Plus, all of the FAANGs are fully succumbing to enshitification and aren't that interesting to work for anymore YMMV.
IMO it is an attempt at employee retention as well as attracting new talent.
Purely anecdotal on my part, but I've seen post after post on LinkedIn of senior/tenured Amazonians moving on to other roles after five, ten, and even fifteen years. The stock performance has been pretty flat for the last few years, so the TC growth is lagging behind the gains you could get from being a new hire.
Also a base salary cap of $160,000 is really low. Not everyone joining Amazon wants a large portion of potential comp to fluctuate with the whims of the market. This increases the choices for TC configuration. If you wanna have lots of base and a minimal RSU grant, you now have the option.
I’m sure I could build a personal web cv, optimize for SEO, pay for hosting, etc but LI has all of that plus the ability to dig into connections, and connections connections. It’s also the default sourcing database for recruiters to find professionals. If I need a job, I flip that switch that says “I’m looking for a job” and let the roles roll in.
In a decade plus of my career, four of my most significant jobs, including my current role have come from being sourced/recruited on LinkedIn.
I hate being on any social networks, and I feel like LinkedIn has declined in quality over the years, but I stay with LinkedIn.
The primary reason is that you never know when you are going to be thrust into the job market, and its the key place to find future opportunities, identify gatekeepers and leverage your professional rolodex when an opportunity to earn an income is on the line.
I ditched Facebook long ago, Twitter has waaayyy to much politics and I’m leaning toward closing down LinkedIn because it has gotten bad lately with too much news and ads... it’d already be closed if I hadn’t gotten my last three or four jobs from it.
Today's major publicly traded companies have one allegiance and that is creating shareholder value aka profit. So if the company doesn't give an eff about employees in the US, why would they care about supplier ethics or the treatment of workers in China.
Today, most roles in my field of expertise would be a pay cut to half of my total compensation if I am lucky. Sure, I can live on just a base salary number, but it's a mental hurdle to accept, especially with all the inflation and price increases everywhere. Also, most roles want you on-site or hybrid, many in HCOL areas. Making a move like that means giving up a 2020-era interest rate and completely uprooting my family for a 50% pay cut.
I'm in an engineering subspecialty at a FAANG. Our service is built on industry-standard tools and technology, so I hope my skills will be portable. But with the poor prospects in the market, I may be more inclined to start my own company vs. trying to get in with another BigCo. Plus, all of the FAANGs are fully succumbing to enshitification and aren't that interesting to work for anymore YMMV.