If you have people on your team that are valuable enough to demand a 40% compensation increase, then you should have been paying them 40% more without them having to demand it.

It never ceases to amaze me that the owner class is so continually shocked that the people who build the value that the owners leverage into growing their fortune might suddenly realize their value.

The entitlement is baked deep into the mindset that there are people who work and people who profit.

Often enough they don't care or realize it. I've seen all the data analysts that were eiter (1) senior or (2) also had data engineering skills leave.

They all got 25% more after leaving. And this is in the Netherlands, where pay is already kind of low. What was even weirder was that this company is a F500 company and the people that left, they left for all kinds of organizations (small and large) and still got paid more.

That includes me by the way. I was doing 4 roles (data analyst, pentester, software engineer through web development, AI stuff + data engineering and project manager). It was a lot of fun though. But it paid decisively mediocre.

Currently going to a fun job that pays way better.

It gets worse. I've seen some managers hold back strong developers because they want everyone to be a replaceable cog. They push for average work across the team so no one becomes irreplaceable--even if it means the product ends up weaker than it could be.

This is such a childish mindset. How much did you pay your plumber to fix your toilet last time? Why didn't you pay 40% more than that?

"Value" is not this objective measure that can be deduced from someone's output. It depends on many variables like cost of living, the job market, tech trends, and industry competition. Could very easily fluctuate 50% or more in a short period of time.

The employer and the employee have different goals and metrics for "success". This mismatch comes up all the time whenever "interviewing is broken" threads come up. Many interviewees think the goal is to find the best person for the job. It isn't. It is to find someone suffciently good to do the job for the least money possible. This mean that if you filter out "better" candidates, it's not a failure if the position gets filled anyway.

So the mistakes being made here are:

1. You think you're irreplaceable. You're not. "But--". "--Nope";

2. You think it's more expensive to replace you. Possibly but irrelvant. You see, if they give you a 40% raise, there now might be 10 or 100 other people who will demand a 40% raise. It's cheaper overall not to give you that raise.

This comes up all the time when landlords lose good tenants by raising rents $100-200/month. Tenants will rightly point out that they'll lose more with the vacancy period than they'll get from $100-200/month. Also irrelevant. The landlord will often have 10 or 100 or 1000 or 10,000 units. They give a $200 increase to all of them and not all of them are moving. The increased income from those who don't will exceed the losses from those who move.

Plus, the $200/month extra increases the property value. Someone may lend against that increased value to buy even more units;

3. Ultimately any enterprise can only increase profits by raising prices or lowering costs, particularly wages. Suppressing wages becomes the entire business of the company. That's what permanent layoffs culture is for (to get more unpaid work on those that remain and to stop them asking for raises). That's what AI is for. Supressing wages is THE product for AI.

Remember there's a fundamental imbalance here. If a company loses a particular employee, most likely they either won't notice (at least for awhile) or they'll simply be temporarily inconvenienced.

What happens if you don't have a job? You might lose your house, your car, your health insurance, your childrens' school and so on.

The stakes for you are so much higher so in any difficult hiring market, you will be squeezed.