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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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 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.

> 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.

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 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.

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 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).

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

> (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.

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

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.

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.

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

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