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Comment by scalesolved | Hacker News Reader

"Are there some extra responsibilities I can take on to advance my career here?" - That seems a good way to get a lot of extra work with no benefits and a loose date where management will 'revise' whether you are fulfilling it or whether the raise date needs to be bumped further out (the latter usually occurs).

I found the 4 tips on what not to do well written and useful for people earlier in their career. I didn't get a lot from this article for when you find pushback against raises (very common) especially when we're in an industry that fully rewards job hopping and has a wholly broken promotion/retention eco-system.

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Taking the liberty of removing the superlatives, I think this is very true, and arguably more interesting than the article:

> rewards job hopping and has a broken promotion/retention system

Has anybody seen something successfully done about this? I mean, we know about vesting and we know that interesting work keeps good people, etc., but I'm curious what there is that isn't widely known which has been seen to shift this issue.

Basecamp appears to be successfully managing this. If you look at their "About Us"[1] page, you see a lot of people who've been there for quite a while. Their solution appears to be:

1. Pay a lot of money: "Our target is to pay everyone at the company in the 95th percentile, or top 5%, of the market, regardless of their role."[2] Previously that was benchmarked to Chicago prices; as of late 2017, that's benchmarked to San Francisco prices.[3]

2. Offer an excellent benefits package that actually benefits people (i.e. isn't just an unused ping-pong table/game console and the promise of "great culture!").[4] Something specifically noticeable is that they offer the kind of benefits that maybe aren't big selling points when you're younger, but that become increasingly enticing as you get older, and especially if you have kids - a fantastic parental leave policy, good retirement policy, short summer weeks.

3. Respect your employees and treat them like adults. Harder to quantify, but if you click around their handbook[5], you see a lot of things that boil down to "We trust you to do the right thing, even in a very independent setting. We won't be looking over your shoulder constantly." I think that's a really scary idea for some people, and a really attractive proposition for others. If you find people who are in that latter group in your hiring process, I suspect it makes it easier to keep them around when most other jobs are not going to involve that level of trust.

The idea of "interesting work keeps good people" - I dunno about that. It's hard to say what's interesting work. It's easy to say "adding new endpoints to a CRUD app" is not interesting, but for some people it might be, or at least it might be "sufficiently interesting" to make a career of it. I have friends in FinTech for whom tracking the market actually brings them joy, and I'm happy for them, but when I try to watch their screen while they tell me about what they're doing, my eyes start to glaze over. I don't know if what Basecamp does counts as "interesting work" for most people, but it seems like it's interesting enough, and the other parts of the company are good enough, for a lot of people to want to stay there for quite some time.

[1]: https://basecamp.com/about/team

[2]: https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp-f1d...

[3]: https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-doesnt-employ-anyone-in-...

[4]: https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/benefits-an...

[5]: https://github.com/basecamp/handbook

#2 is one of the reasons I'm where I am now - I have a young child, and my wife has been sick a fair amount this year, so a fairly liberal vacation policy has been a godsend.

I know what you mean. We are having yearly adjustments to our paycheck. But more importantly we have not only the trust to do good work and are able to do Home-Office and necessary vacations (especially in times of need) without any ado.

So I know why I am staying and not in any need to look for something else.

They are explicitly missing equity compensation in their pay calculation for #1, so you are taking a pay cut working for basecamp compared to say facebook or netflix. #2 is also present in FANG companies. I would say #3 to an extent too.

FANG has the same "problem" as the video game industry: it is inundated with applicants and can afford to be highly selective and selective in ways that are literally irrelevant to the jobs they have available. Generally for well qualified candidates who don't want to (or in some sense can't) jump through their hoops it's better to work elsewhere: the compensation difference isn't that significant in most cases.

Basecamp pays well, but from a couple people I know with firsthand knowledge, they don't pay so well that it explains low turnover. They may pay a lot better now, but still that wouldn't explain low turnover over the life of the company.

It seems probable to me that what makes Basecamp retention powerful is a combination of:

(1) Work-from-anywhere remote

(2) A culture people enjoy working in

(3) An extremely selective recruiting process with very low hiring tempo

An important thing to remember is that there are aren't a lot of truly excellent full-remote gigs at high-status companies out there. The fact that Basecamp doesn't hire often might mean that if you leave, you're not likely to get your seat back if things don't work out at your next gig.

A friend's software company has seen very low turnover by increasing retirement benefits by an order of magnitude and sinking them into SEP IRAs.

That's exactly the sort of new variation I was asking for. Interesting.

"an industry that fully rewards job hopping and has a wholly broken promotion/retention eco-system"

If it's broken, it's broken by design.

Industry leaders are not stupid. If they let people leave it's because they don't care enough to do what it takes to keep them.

It’s also a way to show the employer that you can accomplish more and be rewarded without having the employer risk raising a salary. It’s also a differentiator from your peers who may also want a raise.

There is a risk that your employer can take advantage, but then if you have a jerk employer, you will suffer in other ways as well. The added responsibilities will make it even easier to find a new position.

I can definitely speak to that last sentence. I recently quit my job for various reasons, and way too many responsibilities for a 2 person team was one of them. We had enough work for 6 people, and things were always on fire because we weren't allowed to make infrastructure maintenance a higher priority than shipping the product -- it was excruciating!

Now when I am interviewing, and explaining the breadth of my previous responsibilities, instead of whining about it ("ugh I was sooo overworked") I use it to my advantage ("It was challenging, but I learned a lot, and now I feel I'm better at managing my time/planning skills as a result")

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