Chapter Twenty Five: A Raise and a Promotion In-House

Overview

Coming into your manager s office with a solid offer from another company and using it to negotiate a raise and/or promotion is good strategy. But any experienced programmer knows that meeting your manager armed with nothing but the threat that you ll take your skills elsewhere is more likely to provoke hostility than to make a persuasive case for a raise.

No matter how good your current job is, no matter how much you are earning , and no matter how stimulating the conversation is at the water cooler , one day you will come to work, look around, and decide that it s time for a new job.

Should you tell your manager you re looking?

No.

Coming into your manager s office with a solid offer from another company and using it to negotiate a raise and/or promotion is good strategy. But any experienced programmer ”indeed, anyone who has spent several years building a career ”knows that meeting your manager armed with nothing but the threat (however subtle) that you ll take your skills elsewhere is more likely to provoke hostility than to make a persuasive case for a raise. This seems obvious, but younger programmers may not know or have enough social savvy to understand all of the issues involved; the question warrants a chapter in this book because I ve been asked to answer it so many times over my career.

My forty years of observing corporate programmers solicit and receive raises and promotions ”or jump ship for a really big raise ”have led me to form two strategies that bear on this. They apply across the breadth of programming, both in technical issues and in interpersonal issues. I ll share both with you in this chapter.