Hey there, Joseph here.

So I wrote about this on LinkedIn yesterday. The promotion. The raise. The afternoon someone checks the market and realises the number is wrong.

Here is the part I did not include publicly.

The designers I work with almost never describe the moment they decided to leave. They describe the moment they realised they had been tolerating something without a name.

One of them told me she rated her job 9 out of 10. Great team. Good manager. Interesting problems. She asked me to help her leave anyway.

When I asked her what changed, she said: “I found out what my colleague in the US makes. We are doing the same work.”

That was it. No crisis. No bad performance review. No toxic boss. Just a number.

The gap had been there the whole time. The number just made it impossible to unsee.

So she did the math. Six years at her current trajectory. Promotions on cycle. Standard raises. She ran it against what the market was paying for someone at her level.

The gap compounded.

Year one: manageable.

Year three: uncomfortable.

Year six: a six-figure decision she made without meaning to.

The ceiling is almost never a dramatic event. It is a slow arithmetic. And the people who catch it earliest are not the unhappy ones. They are the ones paying attention.

If you took the Hiring Signal quiz and landed in the moderate or weak range, that is usually what is happening. The substance is there. The signal is not visible to the people who could change the number.

That is the gap worth fixing.

If you want to talk about where the signal is breaking, reply to this. Happy to take a look.

Joseph