Yeah, Calcanis had this weird turn of phrase in his original blog entry "set his career back 5 years to get his salary ahead by 3 years". WTF does that even mean?
It means Calcanis is thinking in terms of seniority and "years of service" being the keys to career advancement and compensation. The decade's-old management mindset that gives us things like SLOC and butt-in-seat quotas.
It also seems to mean that Calcanis would have waited until 2013 years before paying him what his skills could earn him in 2010. Presumably by then, the employee could have earned even more with new skills and experiences.
That's one way to interpret it, but consider a company that pays you to sit in a broom closet, doing nothing, all day and forbids you working on your own code at home. Even if you draw a great salary, your skills after three years on this job may be equal to your skills five year earlier (i.e. you didn't learn anything but forgot stuff/your skills became outdated).
Absolutely.
I wouldn't have taken issue with Calcanis' comment if he'd simply framed it as choosing salary over personal development.
My criticism has everything to do with his use of "career" where he should have said "skills" or "personal development" and his use of "years", when time spent has absolutely no objective relevance, as reinforced by your own comment: 1 year at firm A is not equivalent to 1 year at firm B.
So the implication that there's an objective salary advancement/year or career advancement/year rate is nonsense. It's detritus from the failed management schemes of an older era.
