Why Loyalty Won't Grow Your Salary
A recruitment veteran was told her ten years of loyalty was worth a dog. The lesson behind that brutal line quietly explains why your pay stops moving.
“If loyalty is what I wanted, I would have got myself a dog.” A boss said that to Aunty HR after she had given the company ten years and stumbled through one bad one. It gutted her. She left. Years later she calls it the most useful thing anyone ever taught her about money.
In a recent Mr Money TV interview, Aunty HR sat down with us to talk about work across the generations. She has spent years in recruitment and HR, has worked under more than thirty bosses in her own words, and has managed teams of fifty. Somewhere between the stories about emoji etiquette and Gen Z, she laid out the cold economics of why some people’s pay keeps climbing and other people’s quietly stalls. Loyalty, it turns out, is on the wrong side of that line.
Here is what she means.
1. Why loyalty quietly caps your salary
Picture the profit and loss statement your boss actually looks at. Every year you stay, one number goes up automatically: the cost of keeping you, salary plus whatever increment you will expect next cycle. The question is whether the other number, what you produce, went up to match.
For a lot of loyal, comfortable employees, it did not. They are doing roughly the same job they did three years ago, a little faster maybe, but nothing new. Meanwhile the pay expectation keeps rising. Aunty HR points out the gap plainly: the average increment in Malaysia runs around 4% a year, but plenty of people expect 7% to 10%. When your cost climbs and your output stays flat, the margin on you shrinks. Do that across a whole team of long-servers and the company’s bottom line starts to bleed.
This is the part that stings, so it is worth saying gently. Your years of service are real. They are just not what you are paid for. “We are only as good as our last result,” she says, and she says it about herself first. Loyalty is helpful. It builds trust, it smooths a rough patch. But it is not the thing that grows a business or a career, and if it is the main case for your raise, you are already losing the argument.
There is a flip side that is genuinely freeing. A boss has exactly one job, she says, which is to grow the revenue so there is room for people to grow. If your company is not growing, no amount of loyalty on your part creates a promotion that the numbers cannot pay for. Sometimes the salary is not moving because you stopped moving. Sometimes it is because the whole company did, and the honest thing is to notice which one it is.
2. Are you an A, B or C player?
Every boss is quietly sorting the team into three buckets, whether they admit it or not. Aunty HR is happy to say it out loud. There are A players, and keeping them is a no-brainer. There are C players, and letting them go is a no-brainer. Then there are B players, and that, she says, is the conundrum that eats up her brain space.
You can usually spot the bucket from the numbers. Give someone a target and an A player lands it, a C player is nowhere near, and a B player sits in that soft middle of about 60% to 90%. Landing enough to avoid the sack, but not enough to be safe. So the decision drops down to the softer stuff. Are you easy to manage, or are you high maintenance? Because a mediocre result you can live with. A mediocre result attached to someone you have to check on every morning, who goes quiet and then feels ignored, is a different story. As she puts it, if you are already a B and you are high maintenance, you are closer to the exit than you think.
This is the part that costs you money. B players still ask for a raise every year, and nobody asks for a B-class raise. They ask for an A-class raise while doing B-class work. That is the exact gap that shows up on the P&L: cost going up, output staying put.
If you want to know your own bucket, she says the move is almost embarrassingly simple. Ask. Sit down with your boss and build a report card in three parts. First, a scorecard against goals you both agreed on, scored honestly. Second, the gaps: what is actually stopping you from going further, and what would close it, be it training, coaching or a mentor. Third, the general comments, which matter least. Numbers do not lie, and a B player who deliberately climbs toward A has a real case for more money. A B player who just wants more money does not.
The uncomfortable bit is what happens if you are content to stay a B. Aunty HR is warm about people but clear about the business. If you are happy coasting, she will have the hard conversation and, eventually, move you on. Not out of cruelty. A break-even employee, in her framing, is still a loss, because that seat could hold someone profitable. “We are not a charity,” she says. You do not have to love that. You do have to know it is how the person signing your cheque is thinking.
3. When quitting is the smart money move
If loyalty does not grow your pay, movement often does. But movement has a right and a wrong time, and Aunty HR has a rough framework for it.
The textbook answer, she says, is three to eight years. Stay at least three, because you need to be somewhere long enough to point at something you actually built. Try not to stay past eight in the same seat, because that is roughly where comfort curdles into complacency. Those are guide rails, not gospel. The real override is a golden opportunity: something rare and genuinely better. When that lands, tenure stops mattering. Two years, eighteen years, six months, you move.
And what if there is no dream offer, you are just sick of the job? That is allowed too. Taking a career break is common now, and “I am tired” is a good enough reason, she says. But she attaches one hard money condition to it. You have to be able to support yourself. Do not quit into a hole and then create problems for the people around you, like going back to ask your parents for money. The freedom to walk away comes down to how much you have put aside. Build the runway first, then you get to be brave.
There is one line she draws above all of that. If work has pushed you somewhere dark, if you are crying before you reach the door in the morning, if you are starting to self-harm, then the financial rulebook is off. Ask for help even if it inconveniences someone. No job is worth that.
4. Leave so the door pays you later
Here is the money lesson people miss most: how you leave a job sets the price of your next one.
Aunty HR has learned to do proper reference checks, and she says nothing is more powerful than an ex-boss’s endorsement. When a candidate says “just call my old boss,” and that boss says “yes, I would rehire this person,” she is willing to pay more. Even a premium on the asking salary. That track record is worth real ringgit, and you build it by not torching your exits.
Which is why badmouthing your boss is quietly expensive. If someone walks into an interview and opens with how terrible their last manager was, she reads it as a red flag on the spot. It is not that you can never have a grievance. It is the delivery. “You can mean what you say,” she says, “just don’t be mean when you say it.” Swap “my boss was useless” for “I would have stayed if the role had grown.” One is a character attack. The other sounds like a person who handles hard things well, and that person gets hired at a better number.
The deeper idea underneath is what she calls a career sponsor: someone senior who opens doors, coaches you and speaks up for you when you are not in the room. You cannot get promoted if your boss does not rate you, and you cannot collect a glowing reference from a relationship you burned. Even after people leave her, she stays in touch, because in a market this small you never know when you work together again. She keeps those relationships warm on purpose, and counts them as one of her real assets.
What to actually do with this
A few concrete moves come out of all this:
- Stop pricing yourself on tenure. Before you ask for a raise, write down what you have delivered lately, not how long you have been there. That is the number your boss is looking at.
- Grade yourself honestly. Are you doing A-player work, or asking for A-player pay while sitting at 60% to 90%? If it is the second, close the gap before you make the ask.
- Build the report card yourself. Agree on goals, score them, name the gaps and what would close them. Do not wait for a boss to hand you clarity.
- Build runway before you build the exit. If you might want to leave, whether for a golden opportunity or just because you are tired, save the cushion first so the choice is yours and not your parents’.
- Leave every job like you might need the reference, because you will. Say the hard thing without being cruel, and keep the relationship alive after you go.
What ties it together is not really cynicism about loyalty. It is that pay follows value and movement, and loyalty on its own is neither. The most expensive career mistakes are rarely about spreadsheets anyway. They are usually feelings: the job we cling to because leaving feels like betrayal, the raise we feel owed for years rather than results. You do not have to switch the feelings off. You just have to keep one eye on the numbers while you feel them.
For more of Aunty HR’s takes on work and careers, including her training and coaching, see auntyhr.net. The full conversation is below.
