That's a Manichean perspective that probably applies in a lot of workplaces, but definitely doesn't uniformly apply to competitive software jobs. In a competitive software shop, your employer is probably motivated more by retention, churn, and motivation concerns than they are over whether they can hold on to the extra comp money it would cost to raise your level. Losing a performing developer is very expensive.

I don't doubt at all that a lot of software developers have had the experience you describe, but when you describe it as intrinsic to the economics of commercial software development, I think you're bound to end up in some weird places.

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bradlys a day ago | parent [-]

But practically every "competitive" software job uses stack ranking that's mostly centered on an individual team or a few teams where 20% of the people have to be given a bad rating regardless of objective performance.

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tptacek a day ago | parent [-]

I think stack ranking sucks ass and I agree that it's prevalent but even stack ranking isn't well-modeled by an executive team looking to squeeze every penny out of each employee. Some of the most notorious stack rankers also have some of the most notoriously generous comp packages.

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bradlys a day ago | parent [-]

I'm not seeing TC having gone up over the last 7-8 years with those "notoriously generous comp packages" places. Your typical senior eng at FAANG is still getting $350-450k/yr TC. Yet, inflation has changed a lot and the stocks at these companies have skyrocketed. They're only raising the bar in terms of competition for employees to stick with the company and not with their compensation.

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tptacek a day ago | parent [-]

I lose interest in salary equity discussions when the entire range we're discussing is more than I currently make. :)

	▲	immibis 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've been rate-limited for comments far more useful than this one.