I haven't gotten a raise in 10 years (since I turned 50). In fact, switching jobs often resulted in a decrease in salary. From 2018 to today, counting inflation, my effective salary has dropped over 30%.

And no, I'm not mediocre at my job. At one Major Internet Monopoly I wrote a script to refactor several million lines of code, to remove redundancy in some autogenerated structs, with only one major outage that I fixed in a few hours. I than proceeded to modify a data display and write a coefficient calculation engine for an inhouse experiment that ended up saving them tens of thousands of dollars. After the experiment I leveraged the ML platform to generate reports for the data scientists in hours, where they were prepared to take weeks. My evaluation for that period? One step below Meets Expectations.

At another Major Internet Monopoly I basically implemented a major feature to the mobile app, while still in my 90 day onboarding period. Under extreme schedule pressure. And while the other engineers "helpfully" redesigned my code in code review. Once I missed a release cycle because a reviewer blocked my submission because I forgot to add a period at the end of a comment. I'm still burned out from that one.

I'm at a much better company now, at $10k below the Major Internet Monopoly above. In 2 years I got one 5k bonus, but still no raise. And we're a startup struggling with the current economy fuckery, so no real point asking for a raise.

Sorry, that was 3 things.