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Comment by ivansavz | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine runs a web dev shop and I have seen him train at least six people from zero-to-pro (very smart, fast learners with a math background) and what you described is exactly what happens. Once they become medium/advanced-level proficient they often quit and move on to other, bigger companies.

If there was some formal, or informal understanding that candidates "trained on the job" would stay for a few years, I think companies would be more open to building junior devs.

Does anyone have ideas about how to make this work?

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The other replies touch on this, but I'm gonna get straight to the point:

Does your friend give them actual, meaningful raises as they grow? Is he actually paying competitively to begin with?

Because I think if you have this pattern that consistently, it's really likely that either you're underpaying to begin with or your raises suck or are not even present.

I love working at small companies. It's by far my preference. But none of the small companies I've ever worked at offered anything like the comp and comp growth that the big corp I currently work at does. In fact, almost all of them offered me near zero compensation growth over time. And in real dollars that effectively means negative growth.

That's the weird thing — they (because there are two cofounders) were actually paying very competitive salaries (for the local market). I was impressed to hear what some of them were making. So it's not the money.

I think what's going on is that after a year at any job you start to see the problems with the code base, and it starts to get repetitive. It will be like that both in big-co and small-co, but in a different way. In small-co you can have a much more freedom, but you reach a plateau of the new things you can learn. In big-co there are bigger problems and more challenges, but you're part of a soulless machine that just wants you to do your job and not ask questions.

Not having experience the soul-crushing big-co life, the brough-up-to-speed junior hires don't appreciate the deal they have, and want to explore their options. It's a rational decision, and come to think of it I'd probably do the same. The code is always greener on the other side... Who wants to be like "no I'll stay here and do 3 years of the same things that I'm really good at now and delivering value for my employer."

From the employers's perspective though was it worth it? Time/energy invested to train them vs. maybe 6mo or 1 year of useful coding contributions.

> That's the weird thing — they (because there are two cofounders) were actually paying very competitive salaries (for the local market). I was impressed to hear what some of them were making. So it's not the money.

This is only half of what I asked. What about the raises? As someone in another thread chain pointed out, the expected raise from job leaping is maybe 15%. How did the raises your friend gave compare to that?

I'm not saying they have to meet it, but if you're sitting there doling out 1-2% raises per year people are gonna leave when they get what they need from you.

Also, small companies (frankly, especially 'web' companies) are not even remotely immune to demanding people just "do their job and not ask questions" or forcing their employees to sit in the same box for 3 years doing the same thing. Often the lack of room for career growth in perpetually small companies almost demands this.

In fact in the good big companies, they crave for employee growth. Time and money for training, meaningful career growth, and pay growth, major tech switches without changing jobs.

I find that small companies are often much worse in all these metrics. As a jr employee they’ll never rise to chief architect - your friend, the cofounder, has that job. And is never giving it up. Plus thanks to cash crunch, making shortcuts to deliver is common in small companies. Especially since they don’t have a reputation to protect. So quality? Well, maybe.

I recently took 9 weeks off from my bigco FAANG, job to help raise my baby. After the company’s health plan was on the hook for a million in costs (baby born prematurely, spent 3 months in hospital nicu). At no point was I worried about my job or company. I’m happily back on the team in my job cranking away and being productive.

Now tell me my experience would be better in a 12 person startup/shop. I dare you.

Ps: in terms of impact, well I work on a small thing in a sense so only a few million people directly use my product. Big companies have big impact. Lots of guard rails which is nice to no longer make the same basic mistakes over and over.

> the company’s health plan was on the hook for a million in costs

As usual, this is the craziest part of the comment to my European mind. Your healthcare system spent somewhere around an entire lifetime of effort for something that, while relatively dramatic, should still be quite routine for a sophisticated medical organization!

Which begs the question: what happens if the premature baby is born to a US family that can't afford a decent insurance plan? Does the hospital repo the baby? Is the family bankrupt and the baby's life ruined from the get go just for being born premature? I can't wrap my head around it, and it seems to suck either way.

The parents are on the hook to the hospital, to the myriad physicians involved in the in-hospital care, and for non-covered post-discharge costs. Their financial lives may be crushed absent bankruptcy, which carries its own problems regarding loss of assets and mortgage availability for ex.

The infant is also financially liable but likely uncollectable. The baby's life may or may not be ruined depending on where the US goes w/r/t health insurance coverage for pre existing conditions.

How is the infant financially liable?

Maybe more civilized countries can offer them asylum. Its just incredible to what degree the US is fucking its own people and how unwarrantedly proud they all are about their country.

To some degree yes everyones life is ruined. The people with nothing still get some medical care, it's the working poor who make too much to get welfare but too little to cover expenses after insurance who are really screwed.

In the US only the wealthy ( millionaires ) are safe from medical bankruptcy and even they can get taken down by some issues.

The hospital bills a million dollars, the health insurance says, no we'll pay you $125,000. That's it. I don't know enough to understand how this situation came about, but the bill the hospital provides is often 2x to 10x the reasonable cost and the insurance company only pays the reasonable cost. And has sort of negotiated this beforehand with the hospital. This is the situation that truly ends up screwing people without insurance, because their only negotiating power is that they literally do not have enough money to pay.

This is really screwed up. "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it" is deeply immoral when applied to life and limb. I can hardly understand how a democratic society can accept a system like this.

I mean, can you even imagine other areas of life where every person you purchase from attempts to screw you over by demanding 2x-10x of the reasonable fee unless you had the information to be aware of it? It would be impossible, because everyone would just take their business somewhere else.

But you can't exactly say "oh, I'm not willing to pay my life savings for this, I'll just take this 3 months prematurely born baby to the shop across the street, or maybe get it done in six months time instead, when it's more convenient.".

It's even worse because neither you nor the people treating you actually know how much cost you are incurring. You find out a few weeks later when you get the bill. Imagine if anything else worked like that?

> As a jr employee they’ll never rise to chief architect

Considering that only few people get to the top title at a big company (I think there is ~20 Technical Fellows in Microsoft world wide), I think that is a fallacy. If you work at a small company that grows, you're far more likely to become a chief architect.

> Now tell me my experience would be better in a 12 person startup/shop. I dare you.

Only applies to the US. EU citizens don't really have to worry about that.

The thing is that in a big-co, you don't have to become chief architect or CTO to have a healthy career evolution. You can be "just" architect and impact a much bigger team than the 10-people startup.

Technical Fellow is an academic and/or research position. SMEs don't have technical fellows, although technical fellows sometimes start their own companies.

Senior/Chief Architect is an engineering/production position, with limited scope for game changing R&D. In a typical 10-20 man shop the position is usually taken by the CTO, who will be usually be in it for the long haul for both financial and technical reasons.

Very, very rarely a startup will turn into a unicorn with hundreds or thousands of employees. You can get some way up the ladder when that happens.

But the odds are against it happening in the first place. And at the higher levels you'll still be competing with talent hired from outside.

> As a jr employee they’ll never rise to chief architect

This is so important, as a relativley junior developer at a 6 person web dev shop, the owner is the only other backend developer. I have no room for climbing, even if I get a job title upgrade or a raise, my responsibilities and the level I work at won't change. I will handle the day to day backend and the owner works on strategic choices. There is only so much impact I can make in this position

> There is only so much impact I can make in this position

I'm reminded of this talk : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hER0Qp6QJNU around the 8m30 mark is the pertinent point, but worth to watch before that to get where his point is coming from.

Big companies will spend money on training but personally I have learned a lot more at smaller places because I was able to explore a lot more and my contributions had a lot more impact on the buisiness overall.

So in a sense, small companies are the training. You pop in, learn what you can, and jump ship.

The holy Grail of small company is to get trained and keep getting trained at the same company as your trainer(s) rise to executive level.

As a junior, the switch job raise is much higher than that, especially if you decide to move to a larger / more active city (which is not that big of a deal as a junior). During my first job I got raised 12% over 2yearish, and swapping and moving to a larger metropolitan area brought an additional 30%-45% (depending on which offer you looked at). Now ofc there are other factor (higher life cost), but still that's massive.

Absolutely. Fresh out of school, I job hopped twice and ended up with >50% raise. Started at $40k CAD, 18 months on jumped for $48k, and 4 months later (there were other reasons too), jumped for a greenfield project at $65k.

The first job refused to match the $48k offer. I’d probably still be there if they had, a decade on. Awesome place, awesome people, but... student loans and wanting to not live in a dumpy apartment won...

I was able to achieve a 264% raise in the first 2 years of my dev life by switching companies and roles.

Startup -> Medium sized company

I didn't have to move states.

Edit: I'm a college dropout too. Rapid learner so I learned a lot on the job at the startup. Did a ton of tasks nobody else wanted to do (devops, automation, performance, tests).

> (for the local market)

There is no local market, at least not in the long term. Once a junior developer has acquired some skills and experience they're going to start looking at other markets where their market rate will be higher, and being less likely to have attachments that make it harder to move they will find it easier to move than more senior developers.

In big-co you can change team/product to get some change in you career.

Now assuming they got another three - four years of Soul Crushing big-co Life, that should be 7 years into their professional coding, turning 30s, questioning everything there is in life. Would they have rejoin their first company if they were given the same salary?

^THIS I have come into a job missing a particular qualification, but being the best candidate. Then I have worked my socks off, and had all the plaudits off senior management and colleagues.

But still I was being paid less than the job was originally advertised at, because of a missing qualification.

So I moved, yes. Pay people what they are worth to you, not what you think you can get away with.

It doesn't matter what his friend gives them. I can beat it _and_ for those who prefer just working on technical design and code with an experienced team, I can offer them that. No forced mentorship taking up your time. Since senior engineer mentorship is a different thing, I can easily give them a better job than the "you have to help train junior engineers" guy.

Altogether, this is the best approach. The guys at two years and slightly more of experience have learned on the job from someone else and you can get them for relatively cheap vs. the huge opportunity cost of having your senior engineers mentor people if they don't want to.

Care to disclose where you work/what your org does?

No, I'd rather not. Angry HNers are best kept on the other side of the online/offline divide. Pleasant HNers I hope to see in real life :)

The downside is I can't recruit off this user handle but c'est la vie.

One could argue that their "raises" were paid in training

If the only raise you give them is in training, then the only way they can turn that 'raise' into something tangible is by leaving. If this is your attitude and you're still shocked they're leaving you've missed something in your calculus.

Sure, but the baseline of comparison here is vs a situation where the job didn't give you raises nor good training.

And yes, the employer in OP's example should reconsider providing value through training vs straight cash.

In a static analysis. But in a dynamic analysis, the employee has learned some things and is now in a completely different job market.

Training was “paid for” by the low initial salary.

I don't think the OP indicated anything about lowness/highness of the initial salary. OP did mention that the training they provided was exceptional. That's kinda rare.

Maybe they simply can't afford to pay more. Big companies tend to have a bigger budget.

I did this. I landed my first job out of school way below industry rates (like 2/3 typical junior in my area, mostly because I'm bad at negotiation), got a tiny (~2%) salary bump at 6mo and then nothing for a year. I never felt comfortable asking for a big raise, despite learning a lot and contributing a lot, and after a year the bump at 6mo felt more like a slap than anything. I jumped ship when another opportunity arose. They counter offered more than where I was going (double my current salary) but I didn't care, they had already eroded my trust (and confidence) and I didn't want anything to do with them any more (not that I actually said that, gotta follow my M.O.).

My communication skills are my biggest flaw, especially around things like negotiating salary / talking about how I feel with the job. My technical communication is pretty fair, but I turn into a brick wall when we approach higher level meta conversations. I had plenty of opportunity and I wasn't mistreated, but being paid half what you think you're worth for a year with no change in sight really does a number on your confidence as a new player, and I never spoke up about it. I'll accept if that means it's my fault for not getting myself a raise, but I also won't feel bad about leaving after getting on the job training.

If you want to keep your junior employees, pay them what they're worth now not what they were worth 6mo or a year ago. Switching companies is just the only way to force companies to reset the memory of what your salary used to be and reevaluate your value.

That said, based on your other comments itt, that may not be the case in your example.

I have been working for a"consultancy" (just an outsourcing place in reality). They low balled me on my initial salary but I was desperate to leave the previous job so I took it. After a year I was told I did a good job, but I saw not getting any increase because of salary bands. Like you this is not something I am especially good at negotiating.

Took me less than a month to find someone who was offering significantly better salary, yet the consultancy seemed surprised when I told them. Suddenly the salary bands became a lot more flexible.

I shouldn't need to have another job offer to get offered pay rise in line with inflation.

Embed salary upgrades within the employment contract.

We already know jumping gives on average a 15% salary increase every two years, so you just have to beat or match that.

Now people might still leave for more interesting projects, but you get one of the larger motivational factors out of the way.

People often leave because negotiating a salary upgrade is way harder than navigating an interview.

So, unless your hidden motive is to have cheap labor just write down in the contract that every two year the salary will increase 15% minimum, unrelated to objective bonus and all that bullshit.

The you have it. The secret for training and retaining talent in a competitive market.

I wonder if that job jumping statistics is "poisoned" by causality.

You could argue that head hunted employees that's a good match for the job they leave for probably get higher salary.

The current job of a dev is more likely to be the first job for the dev (after job jumping it's never the first job).

Since the dev age pyramid is quite base heavy, job jumping is a indirect measurement of more experience.

Just being able to job jump is a indirect measure that you are sought after and that brings higher wages.

The problem from zero to hero is more than that. Entry-level college graduate non-developer positions might net 50-60k even in the Bay Area. So if you hire a 22 year old with a degree at that base and then teach them how to be a react pro over the course of two years they will then be eligible for 100k+ salaries. That's a 200%+ increase that is very difficult for even modern businesses to take sitting down.

If Starbucks starts making coffee 3x as good will people happily start paying $12 for coffee?

>>That's a 200%+ increase that is very difficult for even modern businesses to take sitting down.

Because businesses would rather have a person leave and then hire someone at 1.5x or 2x their salary than just pay the first person 2x what they were making the year before.

This happens all the time. Employers want to have 2x people at 1x prices, and that doesn't work for long.

One place I worked "wasn't able" to give me a pay rise, yet they were able to hire 1 and a half people to replace me (one full time and one on split between projects).

I had the same thing happen: They co7uldn't take me from contract to permanent at the pay rate I was getting contract, but they could hire TWO younger men to replace me (both of whom left after six months of 10 hour days, 6 days a week at lowball salary.)

I am not business savvy so I am curious why businesses choose to do this.

It's very simple, really. If you only raise salaries on personnel rotation, you do not have to raise salaries of those employees that do not jump ship. You save a bundle if you have a large workforce.

This attitude introduces a skew where your workforce gets progressively filled with people who do not switch jobs. It's a dangerous outcome, to be managed with care. If you get stuck with those who do not switch jobs because they are too incompetent, you have a big problem. If you manage to get those who are competent but content, and not very concerned with higher earnings, you have the ideal result: stable, competent, performant team, with controlled costs.

If you can't pay the guy who has spend the last two years learning everything about your business and your tech stack the going rate for a programmer with two years experience, how are you going to afford new hires at that rate?

> If Starbucks starts making coffee 3x as good will people happily start paying $12 for coffee?

When Starbucks entered the market here, their $5 coffee was about 3x the price of the status quo cup.

Also, if businesses can't pay the market rate for labour (by definition, the money the employee can get in an open market is the market rate) then they don't have a sustainable business model.

Those positions are in exceedingly short supply. Also contact can follow whatever salary curve your local market has, so this whole point is moot

Give proper annual raises to pay people what they’re worth instead of barely keeping up with inflation.

After two years, you’re essentially a mid-level engineer and the money you can command is way more than what a junior developer with two annual “raises” is typically paid.

It's not just the salary. It's often about personal growth and wanderlust. Let me try an odd comparison: after graduating, would you choose to live with your parents if they fed you even more and offered you an even bigger room with more furniture ?

Careful about using that analogy. While the Western world would most likely choose to leave, the Eastern world would more likely do the opposite.

It isn’t even true for the Western world. More like Northwestern Europe and those polities founded by people from those countries. Italy has a high rate of adult unmarried children living at home and it’s definitely part of the West.

As an Italian expat I can assure you it's not because people want to do that, but more due to the economical conjecture. Sure, there might be the odd one that is just "lazy", but p.much anyone you speak to <35 that hasn't left home yet will tell you that moving away from parental house is very high up in their priority, but they just can't afford that.

Pay them more.

Isn't this why most junior devs leave? Because they are getting crap junior dev salaries? Once you've trained them they are no longer junior devs. The market certainly doesn't think so.

Pay or being capped as the junior in other peoples eyes.

In my first dev job, which was a fantastic job, some gatekeepers wouldn't give up access or tasks that I was better suited for.

I was always going to be a bit younger, always the junior guy on the team, despite the fact I had relevant education and, in my opinion, was probably better at the job.

Eventually I left and they were upset, but I didn't like being held back. Not everyone is like that though.

Nowadays I build and run teams. I don't do any real technical work unless I need to show a junior a working example on how to do it. I'd rather watch them learn and grow.

I was lucky enough to get my first job when I knew very little and learned so much on the job and I am very thankful to the company for giving me that opportunity. I worked there for almost 3 years but for the last year I was basically doing an act of charity to the company (Fair because they did the same for me but there is only so long that I can work for almost free). They couldn't afford to pay me a livable amount and I was still working on super basic junior problems.

If they had an option to move up and work on interesting problems than I would have stayed.

I suspect many others are the same. The only people hiring juniors are the ones who can't afford to pay mid level devs and when the juniors become mid level what are they to do but leave.

> very smart, fast learners

Well that is your friends first problem!

For a smart fast learner your friend isn’t providing a benefit worth the cost of a couple of years of low job growth.

Your friend should look for candidates who are average learners, want a steady paycheck, and don’t want to do anything tech related outside of work hours.

Smart fast learner is not in opposition to want steady paycheck nor with "does non tech outside of work". The two don't imply average learner either.

Sure - I’m saying you want a combination of the three.

People stick around when they're challenged, paid competitively, and treated like people/adults. I suspect that one of these has broken down.

Realistically it will work only when the job market liquidity is low.

Think of Japan, where changing job is like a lifetime event, training is graciously provided, since the firm assumed that your loyalty is guaranteed. Or in case of some companies in China, where they can sue you if you quit your job before the agreed years are met on your contract. Both seems undesirable to me personally.

This may have been true for some industries historically in japan, however modern day softwave developers will change job every 2-3 years, same as in the west, for the same reasons.

Is that true for Japanese people, or others hired on the salaryman track? If you’re hired out of university by Toyota, Sony or Rakuten isn’t it expected that you’ll be there until retirement?

Shit, in China, it’s very common to jump ship after one or two years to get at 10-30% raise in many industries. Many of my students have done that.

> Does anyone have ideas about how to make this work?

Pay more. If they can make more money by switching jobs, you're not paying enough. They paid for their training by working for a lesser salary for 1-2 years, and it's not irrational for them to then want a competitive salary.

Frankly, I did the same. For me the reasons were:

- Personal growth: Devs in that company were nice, but not stellar (I was the most "senior" one after a couple years), so I couldn't learn much from my peers.

- Nature of the business: I moved from customer service to product development, which is a personal preference.

- Money: The new place paid about 40% more.

Graded salary based on a mix of tenure and experience, with clear performance goals tied to moving those salary grades up sooner. This works very well for our grad programme.

Also; most people leave managers not companies. So if pay is right, and the people are otherwise a good fit, it might be company culture that pushes them out.

Some companies in my home country have a clause in the contract which says approximately this: "The company will provide $FOUR_TIMES_MONTHLY_SALARY worth of training to employee. If employee leaves the company within first 2 years he will have to pay $TWO_TIMES_MONTHLY_SALARY back".

What country is this from? In the US the case law is iffy and in practice it seems like companies aren't willing to go to court for it [0].

[0]: https://www.hrdive.com/news/when-an-employee-leaves-can-you-...

> if there was some formal, or informal understanding that candidates "trained on the job" would stay for a few years, I think companies would be more open to building junior devs.

There are already many companies that lock you in contract in exchange for comprehensive training.

Which is mostly illegal in the developed world - its illegal in India but employers still try and enforce bonds.

You could go back to the real apprentice (no modern apprentice shelf stacking mc jobs) route but in that case the apprentice signs for x years and you cant make them redundant - and you also not guaranteed a job after it finishes

Here's how apprenticeships work in Switzerland:

Before leaving school you try to find a company that is willing to take you on as an apprentice for a four year contract.

Time is roughly split 50/50 at work in the company and specialized schools. The companies will cover the cost for the school, and pay a small amount to the trainee (~550$ first year to ~1400$ in the fourth year)

On average companies lose money in the first 2 years, but make it up in the last two for an overall win. Especially for programming apprenticeships, this can be quite lucrative for the companies.

So even if they leave immediately after the four years, it is not really bad for the company.

Same in Germany, but programming apprentice and computer science major is a completely different thing, afaik also in Switzerland. No one coming from 3-5 years of unpaid (and depending on country expensive) university is up for this kind of payment and training.

Though the majority of devs would be better of with a programming apprenticeship instead of an university degree in the first place. Only a fraction of devs work on these hard technical problems or complicated architectures that are actually engineering and not just programming.

Can't you make a binding / contract? My company did that with me. Basically forbidding me to quit for 12 months.

Ways you can do it in germany: hire. After 2 or 3 months to see if he is a good fit. Give him a bonus to stay. The contract allows you for up to two years without issues, maybe three. If he quits earlier. He must pay back the bonus back (Valles Heilung des bonus in german, healing 9f bonus) after a few months he won't have a chance to get something better.

You also can increase the salary in a bonus. Which he eeds to payback if he wants to leave early.

Is that not possible in America?

Why would anyone want to sign this kind of a contract when most companies don't play these games? Even as a junior I wouldn't see this as an opportunity, I would wonder what is wrong with the company.

The company offers you 10k bonus with the condition that you stay at least one more year. Otherwise you have to pay it back.

If you intend to stay anyway or are not so keen on leaving, why should you say no?

It's similar to stock option vesting and that is very common.

What is "Valles Heilung des bonus"? I'm German, I have never heard that and it brings up nothing in google.

But yes these types of bonuses are common, especially as stock options with vesting. More so outside of Germany as far as I'm aware.

Roughly 2/3s of the states in the US have “right to work” laws, which basically means that either employer or employee can terminate the job at any time for basically any reason.

You are thinking of "At will employment".

Right to work means you can't be forced to join a union.

That's not what he is talking about. You can also always quit your job in Germany.

He is talking about payments that are conditional upon you staying at the company for a certain amount of time. Relocation bonuses and stock option vesting are a very common type. If the bonus is high enough, it makes it very unattractive to quit. He is exaggerating though.

I have seen it work. I think that the key is in transition, company must change how it treats them as they progress. It is not just about salary and may not even primary salary.

They need (not just want, but need) progressively more and more autonomy, bigger and bigger tasks, more and more responsibility. It also helps when the company culture/management is such that they can talk openly about their preferences and dislikes. It does not mean they should get everything they want, but there should be no "punishment" for saying what they want.

Culture and individualized incentives. Build a culture that aligns with the values of people hired and performers. Most people are motivated by positive feedback incentives. Others are motivated by monetary incentives. This guides career growth.

Even if they leave, they will be back because most companies lack a unified culture with clear values.

Increase their salaries to fair market rates as they improve. Stop being a cheap bastard.

Rise their pay when they become competent

Pay them enough to stay?

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