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Comment by sa46 | Hacker News Reader

> Entirely non-surprising that devs are the ones who left because by hard capping their pay you are reducing their reluctance to go work somewhere else with higher pay.

The surprising part is that their dev retention (article notes small sample size) of ~3 years matches Google at 3.1 years and surpasses Uber, Dropbox, Tesla, Facebook and Airbnb. [1] That suggests that the culture created by the one-salary experiment increases the motivation to stay enough to offset the incentive to leave.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/average-employee-tenure-rete...

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Well, maybe. Or it shows that they hired people who were relatively comp insensitive, possibly due to being unable to command higher wages elsewhere. Hard to know.

Isn’t that what was said?

The first comment said that the culture is so good that devs don't leave even with capped salary. The next comment said (politely) that maybe they don't leave because they are for some reason unable to command top-tier salaries.

They were saying this specific company might have a biased group of devs who are abnormally insensitive to salary, thereby removing its value for a generalized conclusion.

If their base salary is decent, then it might not be surprising at all. Determining whether an individual stays in a particular job involves multiple weighted variables. To give an example, once an individual has a base level of financial security, salary could easily become less important than time spent with loved ones. But there are some people who will give the maximum weighting to money no matter what, and companies which optimize for this variable will always need to outcompete all other companies on salary to retain employees. In this case, it's no surprise that their retention rates are relatively low. Looking at the article that you referenced, I notice that the companies with the highest retention rates aren't the ones with reputations as having the highest salaries.

iwantmyname says they've had ~20 employees. You can't compare a company like that to Google, Uber, Tesla, etc, who've got multiple orders of magnitude more employees.

20 employees is down in the range where noise dominates. I’m not sure exactly how many employees are required for statistical significance, but it has to be in the hundreds.

Totally depends on the effect size and the threshold at which you're evaluating statistical significance. If their churn were 10x higher than Google's, 20 employees over 10 years would probably be enough to confirm the difference at a high level of confidence. But if their "true" long-run churn is "only", say, 10% higher than FAANG and friends, you would need a much larger sample to identify that.

N.B.: Even a 10% increase in employee churn is expensive in general, and even more so when your recruiters make as much as your senior engineers.

Depends how senior the devs in question were and how competitive their interviewing abilities were. Junior devs who don't interview well are easier to retain for example.

Also, top companies have a problem because they are top companies. Working there is a signal to other employers that you're top talent as vetted by a top company. That increases the values of offers thrown at you and eventually one may be enough to pry you out.

That BI article is confused.

The title says "here's how long the average employee stays at the biggest tech companies" (retention), but then it goes on to give stats about average tenure.

If your company doubles in size every year, then your average tenure is going to be very low--most people just started recently! You simply cannot use average tenure as a proxy for retention or turnover.

The OP makes the same mistake, which is where I stopped reading.

Note that they're also New Zealand-based - I don't know the numbers but I wouldn't be surprised if average retention there is a bit higher than the Bay Area. (Someone correct me if they have stats that say otherwise!)

I guess it depends on how much of the culture is generated by that point. It could be that the culture could be good _despite_ this, or some other angle.

I imagine that this policy is a consequence of some good internal culture

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