BackQuick voteNew employee vs long-tenured employee
A new employee with no experience earns the same as a long-tenured employee. Who deserves more?
Read arguments from both perspectives, choose your country and vote. The results will be shown after your vote.
Long-tenured employees
- When production goes down at 5 p.m. on Friday, they don't call the graduate. They call me. And I pick up because I know what needs to be done. That's exactly what experience is worth.
- This new hire will be at another company in eighteen months, adding another line to their CV. I'll still be here. Should the company pay more to someone who is going to leave? Strange logic.
- Three quarters of the things that keep this company running aren't written down anywhere. The new hire gets a higher salary and documentation that has been out of date for four years. I should earn more because I know how things actually work.
- Clients don't call the company. They call me. If I leave, they leave with me - and then someone will finally calculate what I was worth.
- For the first six months, the new hire doesn't make the company a penny. They cost recruitment, my time spent onboarding them, and the mistakes I have to fix after them. At a higher rate...
- A degree proves that you can pass an exam. I have fifteen years of proof that I can do the job. That's not the same currency.
- I already know what not to do, because we did it once and the company lost a ton of money. The new hire doesn't know that and may repeat it. Experience comes first.
- When someone joins and gets a higher rate than the people who built this place, that's not the market. It's a message that as long as you're loyal, you're cheap. I don't agree with that, and I'm saying it out loud.
- Let's see what happens when the young woman starts a family and takes out a mortgage - whether her employer will still keep giving her raises and how hard she'll have to fight for them herself.
New employees
- I'm not getting more. I'm getting what I should be getting. The fact that your pay is stuck at a rate from five years ago isn't something I did to you.
- Tenure isn't competence. Fifteen years of doing the same thing isn't fifteen years of development. It's one year repeated fifteen times.
- Nobody stopped you from sending out your CV and checking what you're worth. You didn't. That's your decision, not something I did to you.
- I'm on probation, I don't know anyone here and I haven't earned any trust yet - I can be gone almost overnight. You've had your position secured for a decade.
- I negotiated because my hands weren't shaking. You didn't ask because you were more afraid of the conversation than of paying the price for your loyalty.
- A company isn't a family. You signed the terms yourself, didn't you? So if you're underpaid, blame yourself.
- In Poland, people would rather complain over coffee for ten years than tell their boss once that they want more. And then somehow I'm the one to blame.
- If your only advantage after fifteen years is “I've been here longer”, you've just said yourself what you're worth.
- If after ten years you can do no more than I can after three months here, sorry. Maybe I should be earning even more!