How Much Should You Pay Your Engineers to Ensure They Stick Around?
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There's obviously some kind of prisoner's dilemma-like iterated game that reaches that Nash equilibrium, and I'm trying to figure out what it is exactly.
I would have loved to stay at my first organization. Interesting work and research. I was PI and PM for interesting projects by the time I left. Now I make almost double. The thing is, my current salary at my original organization isn't unheard of for that level of responsibility at all, the problem is that getting that kind of adjustment is impossible. It's possible to be hired in at that salary, though. I've noticed this is true for most organizations I've worked at.
This leads to the same phenomenon where you need to work for 2 years to get promoted but if you jump ship your new manager will set your level in line with your salary expectations. And of course the levels are largely meaningless outside of compensation and office politics.
At my original company I was performing Senior-level work (like, literally according to the staff level formalism from HR). But I was told by my manager that to be classified as a Senior-level staff, you have to have been performing Senior-staff level work for at least a year. Therefore being promoted within the organization is a long process. Moreover, with the usual 1-3% raise, you're still in the (low-end) of the pay band for Senior staff, so from management's point of view there's no real problem.
.. and then of course, if you're hired in, you just have a few phone calls, couple of interviews, discussion with the hiring manager and you're at a pay-level and job-level far ahead of existing employees even with identical experience.
The weird thing about paying at the 50% line is that it means that your policy is, in effect, "we do not want any above average programmers."
Honestly being given anything under 2.5% is just insulting. Pay freeze or COL adjustment in line with inflation is for a few years in bad recessions imo, like 2009-10 or, probably the upcoming 12-18 months.
Being given 3% is in the neighborhood of "better than nothing", but nowhere near what it should be for an employee trying to get ahead and putting in the required effort.
The lucky team member gets a 5% raise, everyone else is usually ranked as "Meets standards" which merits a 2.5% raise. A few people who need time in the penalty box get a 1% raise.
So what happens is your actual performance doesn't matter unless you make the boss look great, or look terrible. He's a non-tech person, so he can't effectively evaluate you on any other criteria.
This leads to employees doing enough work to avoid being fired, or (as is usual with Stack Ranking) sabotaging other workers.
But then you’d have to run the interview gauntlet again, and frankly that’s just so distasteful that I don’t want to.
1. Your internal leveling scheme for SDEs needs to have been sorted out. External titles like "senior" are pretty meaningless, so one reasonable solution is mapping SDEs to an internal numerical tier so you can differentiate between "senior" and actual "senior".
2. Radford data comes with a trillion job titles. You need to identify the relevant ones and how your internal tiers map to them.
3. In markets where compensation is exploding (Seattle a few years ago), compensation data is a trailing indicator of what market rates you need to pay for new hires. You get fresher, but noisier, signals from candidates who reject your offers and from your personal network.
I think if software engineers ever decide to collectively bargain, and they want to include comp as an area to bargain on, the easiest thing to do is buy these same datasets and share with members.
As a manager, one way to get yourself some wiggle room in the situation you mentioned is using that strict policy against them. Request as detailed a list of roles and compensation bands as possible[2], then creatively interpret the job duties such that you can justify opening the requisition with whatever role provides the most favorable "70th percentile" salary band to attract the talent you want to bring in.
Success varies between companies, but it's not uncommon for larger companies to have latent roles/titles set up in the system that are rarely used, but exist in the benchmark data and have far more favorable salary bands than the roles you'd typically use for your reqs. Or if you can get the full benchmark data itself, you can look through it all and try to get HR to add a net new one to the system based on what you find.
[1] https://radford.aon.com/surveys
[2] https://apps.adp.com/en-US/apps/79131/benchmarking-powered-b...
They will deviate if the field is hot enough and it translates to money for them. They were paying FAANG money to AI/Data Science fresh out of college.
The McKinseys/Gartners/etc of the world talk about the coming advantage...exec hears it and they become more open to these "critical sectors"
Netflix seems to be a rare example of a company that is proactive enough with pay raises to counter this (any Netflix folks here that can confirm/refute?). Not sure why more companies don't do that, at least when they're well capitalized.
Netflix just seems to be an extreme outlier in terms of base (cash) compensation. I think the only companies that could beat it are some rare and elite financial firms (i.e. Jane Street) that are even tougher to get into than FAANG.
Year 1: At Netflix you get 400k in cash, you buy 200k of FB stock, so you have 200k cash, 200k worth of FB stock At FB you get 200k of cash and 200K worth of stock
Year 2 - FB stock goes up by 10% so 200k of FB stock from last year is now worth 220k: At Netflix you got another 400k in cash and you will buy another 200k worth of FB stock. So now you have 400k of cash and 420k worth of FB stock At FB you get 200k of cash and 220k of FB stock, so now you have 400k of cash and 440k of FB stock.
Also RSUs vests quarterly so you can (and should) sell it and invest in other things to diversify.
GOOG vests monthly, but if you're going to receive less than 1 share that month, then I guess they might round that down to 0 and effectively vest less frequently.
The WSJ had a piece in 2018 which sparked a bunch of follow-on coverage:
"Mr. Hastings’ ring of top executives take the keeper test seriously. At a meeting in late spring of Netflix public-relations executives, one said every day he comes to work he fears he is going to get fired. Karen Barragan, the vice president of publicity for original series, asked how many other people felt that way. A number of hands went up. “Good, because fear drives you,” Ms. Barragan said, according to people familiar with the meeting."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-netflix-radical-transparency...
Other coverage from 2018:
https://qz.com/work/1439451/the-seven-ways-netflix-culture-s...
https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/netflix-culture-of-fea...
https://theweek.com/articles/805123/netflixs-culture-fear
Older coverage:
https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-culture-of-fear-2010...
What a fake. Fear of what? That some rich asshole doesn't like you?
If you get a Netflix job, you can trade down to a ton of other companies with better life balances.
You could splurge it, but you could also manage it well and potentially retire early? My friend seems to be on this path.
You could use your time at a FAANG to get experience, accumulate money, and have the FAANG brand on your resume to leverage for future job prospects?
Also from everything I hear, working as a SWE at FAANG and other top tech companies are still more pleasant to work at than as a SWE in other industries - i.e. finance.
Granted their culture sounds very demanding with the whole "pro sports team" mentality, but I can see that being a positive thing too. I wish my team/company was more like that.
That said, it seems it might be different for each team/department, as my friend claims there's still people there who are not very good but still around for a long time.
They even encourage engineers to interview elsewhere and see what the offer is if they feel they are miscalibrated, and they will adjust appropriately.
Finally, a question they encourage engineers to ask their managers is: "if I had a job offer elsewhere, would you fight to keep me?" It's a scary question to ask, but a great way of getting feedback.
Source - worked there for 3 years.
I work in a field that posts salary publicly (higher education). It is public knowledge what we all make, with databases devoted to this.
When someone is hired at more than a current employee, instead of getting mad at the employer for their compensation plan that takes advantage of existing employees, people inevitably get upset at the new employee.
I don't know why it happens, but it has happened in 100% of the cases at my institution. Every single one.
In essence, how people treat newcomers, especially vulnerable ones, speaks volumes about the values and culture already set in the organization. There are organizations and countries where people can expect nothing good from leadership.
Imagine a bell curve, the system is designed to try and keep everyone in the same role towards the middle of the bell curve. When you get hired, you just have to fit within the bell curve, not near the center. Changing companies lets you reset to somewhere else under the curve, though you may get smaller YoY raises.
If we had a tech workers guild, we could push for much more transparency in all this.
Therefore companies know that their engineers will leave anyway, so they chose not to increase the salaries.
Since not all engineers get offers from FAANG, there must be something else.
However, a new employer doesn’t have access to this information so they can make a more objective determination of worth without being biased by this pay anchoring aspect.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)
Some of it has to do with stock based compensation. I’ve not heard of any companies that, by default, renew RSUs at a dollar value comparable to what they gave the employee as a new hire (even if they’ve promoted the person!)
Even if they did, that would be less than what that employee is paid when the initial grant expired, or what they could make by moving jobs (since they’re now 4-5 years more senior).
I’ve heard people call this effect the “salary cliff.” I know a manager at $bigco that has an elaborate system to push it out a few years by gaming the system. The idea is to get a few extra years out of people before they switch jobs.
I’m not sure why this is the equilibrium the system has chosen. It might be that people put a large monetary value on having a stable set of coworkers.
More cynically, it might be political. If only a few cherry picked employees stay, and all the other organizational memory walks out the door every 4-5 years, then all the organizational power eventually accumulates in middle management.
Questioning these things when offered is probably the best way to get the employer to change them, or at a minimum it may make it clear what your future prospects at the company are.
Regardless of what it's called though, the question remains. Why does your value to other companies increase faster than your value to your own company? Presumably you're learning more about your company's business and your specific domain problems, which should make you more valuable to your company than it would to others. Is that assumption not valid?
I think there's a lot that goes into this, which also shows how complex the topic is.
- There's your actual value and your perceived value
- When you're there and filling a niche, there may not really be a lack for a specific skill set which (might exist if you left) which there might be at the other company.
- Companies aren't always good and managing their desire to pay the least amount possible to retain an employee (natural, to keep costs down) with the employees willingness to leave, if they even have any inkling of the latter.
- An employees willingness to leave can have many inputs, some of them nothing to do with work, so it's hard to judge (e.g. lack of ability to work from home some days can go from a small annoyance to a reason to look for alternate employment depending on what else is going on in their life).
etc.
As to whether your skill should always be increased to the company you're at, I think that's generally true, but may not be in the specific instance. People get complacent, and sometimes the work environment can cause a excellent employee to perform in a mediocre manner, and vice versa.
> Even if they did, that would be less than what that employee is paid when the initial grant expired, or what they could make by moving jobs (since they’re now 4-5 years more senior). If employee became more senior that would mean they got promotions (base salary increase in double digits, bonus increases) and their annual refreshers are much bigger now (they almost double between levels [1]). If they did not get promotion over past 4-5 years (that's only possible for senior roles, grad and junior levels need to get promotion in certain time frame otherwise they are out) there's quite low probability they would get hired to more senior role at other FAANG (though they might be offered big initial RSU offer)
> More cynically, it might be political. If only a few cherry picked employees stay, and all the other organizational memory walks out the door every 4-5 years, then all the organizational power eventually accumulates in middle management. Same salary rules apply to management, so they could also walk out if they hit salary cliff. However if you are manager/director/VP you will be higher level and your annual refresher might be high enough to keep you there.
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-range-of-the-RSU-stock-ref...
A smaller number of people are actively willing to take the personal cost and move around, and in a near saturated market those people end up defining the price of new labor. But paying everyone that rate would be irrational because the cost (to the business) of them moving, hiring and integrating their replacement and the opportunity costs loss, is less than what it would cost to pay everybody that rate.
Having another firm offer that you are absolutely willing to take is also the best way to get a raise where you already work, so there is also an intermediate option to handle some of the pressure of willing-to-movers without giving everybody a raise.
This leads to predictable issues for companies with rigid compensation bands. You get frustrated because you feel you are doing the more senior role job now. You express this frustration or sentiment to your "manager". They tell you that you are doing great, but maybe you need a little more of X before they promote you. Maybe they see things in you that make them feel you should not be promoted to the next role / salary band at that time. This causes you to hunt around. Another company that really needs someone who can do what you can do will just hire you to the senior band because, on paper, they see you look effectively ready for the senior role, whereas your current managers may [right or wrong for their situation] think you are not ready for it. Maybe it is myopia and they should just promote you and that is the right call, but maybe you really aren't quite ready, by their standards, for the role yet.
My experience with all of this has taught me that a big chunk of people are an "edge case" with special circumstances. Like, maybe this one guy who is not ready for the senior role because of performance issues can just go to a competitor and get a job there in the senior role. And maybe they do great in that role in the new environment. Maybe they fixed the flaws they had or they put in that extra effort at at new job, etc. There are so many nuances to this. But I think I would trace a lot of it to imperfect information on both sides. One employer may not be willing to promote you for whatever reason, another one hungry for talent is happy to pay you more and give you a shot because you are "almost" there anyway.
Maybe other companies just have very different comp structure and available cash. Maybe the manager is being stubborn or they just don't have good, objective criteria to measure your performance and you deserve that comp bump. I do think it is easy to not "see" someone and the great work they do when you work with them and manage them every day.
IDK, at the end of the day at my company we try to be as fair as possible, and we are willing to, and have often, made big comp adjustments once someone has proven themselves [in a relatively short amount of time 1-2 years or less] for that exact fear. Someone we trained up, like working with, etc. It would be a shame for them to go to a competitor for a 10-20k pay raise.
One final reason not to be overlooked is plain old greed. Some companies just don't care. They will suck every last thing out of a junior developer or consultant type role and keep you in that pay band for the longest time they can, or maybe they never actually intend to promote you, but they just won't tell you that and figure you will see the writing on the wall eventually and leave. And that is fine with them.
Anyhow, I have seen all of these scenarios play out in various forms over the years as a manager and employee. So, it is a multi-faceted problem that doesn't have one obvious answer. I don't know about the game theory aspects, but I assume on a large scale companies that don't adjust to "market" wages ultimately are forced to adjust to market wages or go out of business because enough people leave and they can't hire new people if their comp is too far from market wage.
This means that even at a 1% raise per year, some people will stick around for decades. One of the best developers at one of the companies I worked for was exactly that kind of person.
For the company this means a large amount of extra profit year in year out.
The odds of you saying "Nevermind, I'm out" when they don't budge from a 2% raise are from the employers side pretty low. The odds of a new hire saying "Nevermind, I'm out" when unwilling to budge on salary negotiation is a lot higher.
Hence it becomes easier to give some additional leeway in that situation. Also if companies already have a large workforce, giving a raise to all current employees is a whole lot more expensive than giving more money to all new hires.
Lastly, there has been plenty of research that has shown that salary is not that big of a predictor of whether people stick around or leave in any given year. Whether that research is also true for software developers is up for debate, but it is what most companies rely on.
Lastly an anecdote, I was told by a manager once that if I wanted to get a significant raise, I could quit and come back as a contractor or "Senior Developer" after 6 months. At that time I was considered a junior, and promotion to senior was only possible after 10 years experience internally.
As someone in their 30s who has spent in-person time at about a dozen companies (a stint in consulting will do that) ranging from start-ups to large enterprise, this is exceedingly rare from what I've seen. Hardly anyone makes it to a single decade, much less multiple. Maybe at a law firm, but not in a development role.
I don't doubt these people exist but I'm a bit skeptical they are that significant in number to the point of defining the equilibrium as mentioned in the OP post.
In the teams I've been part of, average tenure at the company was over 5 years in every single case. In one case over 15 years.
These are all development positions. Management positions and marketing positions did tend to move around a bit more often.
I’m guessing you’re a webdev and this is normal for that industry but in more “traditional” fields programmers behave much more like other white-collar workers. I’ve met plenty with 20-30 year stunts at the same company.
Regardless, the number of developers at these companies is much fewer than in tech; therefore, they cannot be setting the equilibrium referred to by OP.
Insurance companies change slowly. We still have COBOL, mainframes, etc. Applications that cost $10k/minute if they're down.
Part of the equation is job security. You eat enough shit, put up with enough mgmt BS, but you get a steady paycheck, decent benefits, and little threat of downsizing.
You can live your dream or help someone else build theirs.
How interesting that we can build a system that can fluctuate enough to upend lives both good and bad. You become so focused on it, it is seen as this brass ring. Once you have it, you question everything.
I realize this is a bit philosophical and idealistic. You appear to have a similar viewpoint as mine in terms of a society that supports the whole, I just wonder if you can do that effectively when you have a source of power so specific like money.
There are some very revolutionary thinkers/philosophers/minds that were somewhat detached from money (in that they came from such wealth they didn't have to care or they chose a life detached from it) Plato, Aristotle, Wittgenstein...many more. I'm curious if there is a connection or merely just a representation of the population.
This is something I've rolled in my head for a while but first time I've said it out loud so a lot of people are now coming to my mind now that were not wealthy.
I cannot necessarily see it going away but perhaps more of a direct representation of what it means...our time/energy.
Save consistently and retire?
To play devils advocate to my own point:
There are some jobs that between those hours of 9-5 it is a dream come true. I ran an R&D team, we could buy any technology, kick off any project, success wasn't "Making a unicorn" but merely understanding something and providing guidance/insight to our executives.
It went well for several years...the party ended after leadership changed and they had new opinions on what R&D meant.
It was my dream and theirs for a period of time...then it was no longer my dream, just theirs.
I left to find my dream....I now make 5x as much doing something I love.
It went well for several years...the party ended after leadership changed and they had new opinions on what R&D meant. It was my dream and theirs for a period of time...then it was no longer my dream, just theirs.
And when that happens, I email recruiters and get another job usually paying more within a few weeks. The shortest time from looking for a job to having an offer is 4 days. The longest is about 7 weeks. But I only applied for one job. The process just takes a while for $BigTech.
Which brings up an even better example. The company I work for announced an across the board pay cut because our customers were losing money because of Covid. The company is having to cut prices, come up with payment arrangements, get money from the government, etc. I bet the owners aren’t sleeping well at night.
The next day after they announced the pay cut, a recruiter from $BigTech reached out to me about a remote role. I applied for the job, got it, with a 50% pay bump and I still sleep well.
I left to find my dream....I now make 5x as much doing something I love.
Survivorship bias. Statistically how will most software developers make more money over a lifetime - starting their own company or in the immortal words of r/cscareerquestions, “learn leetCode and work for a FAANG”?[1] Or depending on where you are living, just bring your run of the mill “Enterprise Developer” in any major city in the US that’s not on the west coast.
[1] Not that I went down that road to “work for a FAANG”. I took another route that pays as well to get into $BigTech.
I got into generating passive income. I am now in a position where I can maintain a lifestyle I enjoy and homeschool my small children.
I could pay for the best schools and keep track but I love education...I love passing that on. If I built a company it would be around that. I would not like the money struggles that you talk about so I would probably aim for something non/not for profit assuming it would lessen that burden.
I don't know that I care so much about money but before when I struggled, it was my singular focus.
It may seem like a silly question but if you had all the money in the world would you show up to work? If the answer is yes I hope you have that job for a lifetime, if the answer is no I hope you have all the money you need for a lifetime.
Edit: As a side note...perhaps because of the R&D nature of my previous role I had an advantage in the low barrier to entry of this. I saw a lot of acquisitions. Companies that were startups, bought, cannibalized, and then repurposed as a product. Sometimes these products internally thought up by us or other LoB's. They were all rough, prototypical in nature... Realizing that millions was "exploratory money" whether internally developed or purchased to have a product that looks and feels like something became a realization that you can profit on ideas...not full blown products bulletproof and cemented into history.
There are many that are not in it to make a legacy, just to get the thing airborne and sell.
The first time I saw a group spin up ten webpages of fake products to market test a brainstorming session was a lightbulb on what is happening under the surface in many areas.
As it is now, why wouldn’t I enjoy my job? I get to work remotely in a relatively low cost of living area making $BigTech money.
Will I be where I am for the rest of my life? Statistically, probably not. I can’t see that far ahead for a change. But 3 of the 5 biggest technology companies offer similar roles and if the local economy ever recovers there will be local companies.
I’ll be on my sixth job since then starting in July.
I have another friend who graduated in 1995. A year ahead of me. He was hired as Cobol programmer. 25 years later, he’s still writing COBOL.
This is one thing I've coached career-focused and executive aspiring women on.
If they are worried about being assertive and being called a "bitch" at their current organization then they are already playing at a disadvantage.
The competition is full of men that got called "cocky" and self absorbed at many organizations, before landing in one at a senior level in a different place that needed someone new to shake things up or "make the hard decisions".
I don't really see that factored in to the outcomes.
Whether this idea results in a bunch of women finding that no organization wants their assertive attitude? Time will tell. A level playing field definitely involves normalizing behavior.
It’s also strange to me that companies aren’t willing to give a nice raise to an engineer, say from 150k to 180k but are completely fine with hiring a replacement at 180k.
This is literally the story of my professional life.
Maybe there is some math done somewhere that says the money saved from underpaying from reduced raises is more beneficial than the risk of losing an engineer that's already familiar only to be replaced by a more expensive engineer that's new.
Raises and bonuses are based on how much can keep the engineer motivated and prevent them from looking for new work (I don't want to sound too cynical here, I think when it comes to measuring how much someone deserves in a raise/bonus is essentially how much it takes to keep the engineer providing this level of work, more or less) (based on management's assessment, and often constrained by general salary policies).
That's how I approach these discussions in broad terms, although keeping an engineer motivated and preventing them from looking for new work are not simple things to analyze
I see this frequently. I have a question: how many times have you done this? Don't you hit a limit at some point fairly quickly?
Not OP, but I did some job-hopping right after college in the late 90's. That was a glorious damned time to be a programmer: I doubled my salary twice in four years, changing jobs four times between 1995 and 1999. Then, around early 2000, I decided it was time to do it again (I was young and inexperienced, and it never occurred to me that anybody would have a problem with me job hopping). All of a sudden, I found it really hard to find a new position. Everybody looked at my resume and pointed out that I had never stayed at a single job for longer than a year. I did finally find something, and started staying at jobs for much longer periods of time (four years is my shortest stint since), but when my last company shut down suddenly and I found myself looking again, the four-jobs-in-four-years from 20 years ago came up as a negative in the interview process again.
Things were still hot but there were at least storm clouds on the horizon at that point.
>Everybody looked at my resume and pointed out that I had never stayed at a single job for longer than a year.
A year means that, to exaggerate just a little, you were basically starting to look for a new job as soon as you started the old one. But, yeah, if someone has moved between jobs like clockwork every year or two, the working assumption of the hiring manager has to be that this time won't be the charm and you'll hop again. Whether they're OK with that doubtless depends on the role.
You might consider just leaving those right out of school jobs from 20 years ago off. If someone really wants to see them, you can tell them but it's not unreasonable to age stuff off your resume if you have lots of jobs.
Well, with any luck I won't need to look for a new job any time soon ;)
- You're growing as a professional so you're worth more. But your current company doesn't necessarily see that, some colleagues might still see you as the intern you were when you joined
- The market of developer salary have been growing steadily for more than 10 years, but you can only capture that growth by changing jobs
So if you've been working for 10 years, you could do about 3 years at each company and have a 30% increase each time - the point is that 10 years ago you were junior with a 2010 salary but today you're senior with a 2020 salary.
Or course things could change if developers salaries stop growing (or even shrink).
I've gotten 20-30% raises before but I'm not going to go around and tell people that at my current job.
However, if I find a new job and get a big pay bump, I'd be more likely to mention the pay bump (especially if I'm trying to soft-poach them :-) )
plus, margin contribution is basically impossible to determine on an individual level, and wages therefore devolve into fundamentally political arguments (as in, expressions of power and influence).
you're expecting a (more) rational market response, when the labor market is anything but fair, free, and transparent, and coerced into that form over centuries by those in power.
Either the system allows for it, or it does not.
More roles will hopefully become remote.
Why should I have to give up my coworkers, my domain specific knowledge, my job just to get paid what I’m worth?
What I think is a more interesting question is why is there such wide discrepancies between companies regarding a specific employee’s worth?
The reason most companies don't pay FAANG salaries is largely some combination of: 1) they don't have the money; 2) they objectively get less value from those skills; 3) they subjectively don't put as much weight on the skill set (think "sticker shock"); 4) they low-balled their first few engineers and nobody asked for more. I'd bet that last one is more common than you'd expect, especially with junior devs who don't know how much they could be making elsewhere.
I can see how other positions like sales can be more quantitatively measured in terms of contribution but my hunch is that many positions fall into this area of nebulous value estimation.
Or perhaps is more pronounced in software because of the amount of margins these companies work with
There is also the issue that the value of two different knowledge workers, even at the same company, may be wildly different depending on their specific skills and the project they are working on. For instance, someone working on product features at a software company is much more valuable than someone maintaining an internal reporting tool, even at the same company and even if their skills and the type of work are nearly identical.
The point is, there are a ton of variables at play here, most of which can't really be measured, so everyone plays a guessing game to determine what engineers are "worth". The asymmetry of information also doesn't help, because it's hard to know how much you could make if you don't know what anyone else is offering—many people take salaries well below their potential and don't even realize it.
It’s more that I’ve been providing 200% value for 40% of the cost for a while, so they have plenty of space to raise my salary significantly without losing any money.
It doesn’t matter if I am providing 40% more value if I can jump ship and get a job that pays 40% more.
In terms of productivity it would be rational to pay.
But there's a decidedly different quality between paying for an improvement, and paying someone to not make things worse.
But growing personel count on the other is definitely a concrete objective/bonus for someone. That someone will allocate whatever possible budget to get his bonus or praise.
But you interview with another company and you reinvent yourself. They have a problem to solve and you have experience in it. You interview well, now you are a principal engineer with a big raise.
Your new company will offer you a level (and compensation) based on your expected performance in future cycles.
If you're on a growth trajectory, jumping jobs will usually give you a bump because your new company treats you differently than your current company. And it doesn't matter much whether you're coming from company A to B, or from B to A!
Existing employees are just fine getting their 1% to 3%.
I self-promote myself every two years, and if anyone asks "I was looking for an interesting organization taking on interesting projects such as yours"
I've worked at a company where most engineers have been in the team for 2/3+ years, maybe more, some of them first and only job, so far.
Most of them were probably low-ish to medium salaries but they were happy with the team and the company. Had no plans to leave or try to argue for salary raises. confortable Some people simply don't care so much about money and will be happy to have a nice stable environment they're comfortable with.
Companies don't want to pay you more just because there is a perceived value. They will only pay you once you threaten and you are good for it (supply demand) or you change jobs (supply demand again).
I have thought about this hard. Both as an employee back in the day and now for 6+ years as a business owner. As an employee, I thought the same as you but then stopped expecting from current employers. When I was ready to jump, I jumped. Period. No ifs. No negotiations with current company. As a business owner though, I definitely understand why I am not just going to give someone a 30% raise. Now, if you are a small company and there is no a whole lot of management red tape (like my company), I encourage anyone to ask for a 30% raise and be ready to be able to justify it. If you are worth it (capitalism), I would do it. But if you never ask, I absolutely won't give you a 30% raise. Remember, you are not the only one in the company.
employees don't threaten, they simply leave. Why would someone go through the arduous process of finding another job just to 'threaten'. If you 'threaten' they will agree at that point and fire you later.
Capitalism should account for that. So thats not it.
There are internal systems, some significantly older than others....they are trying to adapt the real world to their internal representation of the perceived world.
The value you truly provide vs. the value they believe you provide is lost on them....so you must find/show it. Many enterprises assume 3% bumps for all employees yearly, associate this to overhead, and report back to shareholders. This trickles down to managers as "room to work with their employees." If someone gets rewarded, this means someone else is getting punished. Need an exception....take it to the top.
Now you have a system of incentives and disincentive...want to get more for your people, take from others or take on more work.
You now have potential for lost information at your inability to display value (doing work quietly and not advocating for yourself), your manager (overloaded/ignorant of effort), the process (outdated or accounting for a percentage of unhappiness), and arguably the stock market....
You can get very analytical with game theory here which I think can be very interesting. If you find that interesting you may find Thalers "Guessing Game" and Keynes "Beauty Contest" interesting as well.
My opinion has been the more layers, the more places to lose information. These companies are accounting for external factors/information on the hiring front, once you are inside, it is internal factors/information.
Makes me think of the Einstein quote: "Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas."
At two recent jobs where each time i got approx 40% raise, I was the right person at the right time to fill that specific niche they really needed.
Have you considered going back to the original place you liked eventually? I speak from experience. A bit less than a year ago I started back at somewhere I worked previously. If you left on good terms, it can be an extremely easy and low-stress transition compared to starting at a new business, and hiring can be easier too, as the company already knows for the most part whether you're a good cultural and skill fit (depending on how similar the job you're applying for is to what you did previously).
> The thing is, my current salary at my original organization isn't unheard of for that level of responsibility at all, the problem is that getting that kind of adjustment is impossible.
Sometimes it's easier to leave and come back later to reset expectations like that. Hiring salaries seem to be completely disconnected from promotion salary adjustments at some locations, or at least engender a different mindset.
I have a friend that noted at a prior place they worked (I believe it was SAP) that they encouraged, or at least maybe accepted and understood, that employees would leave to work at other places, and had programs in place to encourage them to come back with those new experiences and skills. If a company is large enough to have opening often and expects to be around in 10-20 years, it probably makes a lot of sense to have a program like that. As a company, why not take advantage of other companies paying and training your good employees for a few years (when the alternative is to just assume them lost forever)?
Here's something that doesn't get mentioned a lot on HN: That "every time" will eventually come to an end. It will eventually plateau unless you change careers (become a manager or exec or something). I'm a little more than 20 years into my career. My first job change as a fresh grad + 2 years got me about a +50% raise! My next one was about +30%. Every job change I've had since has been less than +10%, and my last job change was pretty much flat +0.5% MAYBE.
This idea that job changes are always/necessarily huge salary increases is largely an artifact of the age demographic here on HN.
EDIT: To put it another way, let's say my first salary as a software engineer in 1998 was $45K (it was!). If I changed jobs every two years and consistently got a +30% raise each time, I'd be making over $800K now, which would put me in what, the top 0.001% of software engineer salaries?
Inertia means that you have to pay someone more to change their life and come work at a new place. You don't have to pay someone very much more each year to have them continue on the same path.
The best thing you can do to improve pay at your workplace is leave. This is the sad truth of the free market.
https://www.payscale.com/compensation-today/2020/05/what-is-...
Inversion is just the extreme. When new employees come in making more than existing employees with the same experience.
Very little of the article says anything about how much to pay engineers. I only found 2 paragraphs about engineering compensation:
> The most comprehensive study, though, is Daniel H. Pink’s Drive, which is summarized in this animation from the RSA. Pink suggests that money isn’t the main driver for highly skilled workers who choose to stay in their jobs. Instead, he identifies a combination of three factors: the ability to be self-directed, getting better at the job, and having a purpose in one’s endeavors. In other words, once a person’s basic financial needs are met, money starts to become less and less relevant as a criterion for job satisfaction, especially compared to purpose, self-improvement and self-direction.
> Unsurprisingly, this conclusion mostly matches my own experience with engineers. Whether companies pay at market level or 20%-30% above market makes very little impact on staff retention. You might stretch retention slightly in the latter case, but the investment is often not worth the net result. Keeping your engineers engaged and motivated makes a much more substantial difference, so that’s what we’re going to look at next.
Even these paragraphs are primarily about how money is not the primary way to keep engineers engaged and motivated.
we need fairer, more transparent and liquid labor markets everywhere, not just in the upper echelons.
Also, if the company makes a bit less money this year vs last year, are you willing to take a pay cut?
It might be impossible to compute, but we still want to compute it.
Or rather, get some agreement. I would say not only it is impossible to compute, the question of relative human pay for different types of work is a meaningless question, like asking, what is more important on a car, tires or engine?
Supply and demand are obviously not the only factors, but they are very important and must be considered when looking at compensation for employment.
Place was great to work, brilliant team, laid back culture. But refusing to give me an annual raise, on top of paying me below market value (and below my peers) for my experience and skill set was precisely what triggered my departure a month later for a nearly 90% raise. Sacrificed other things, but at the end of the day, "thank you's", "good jobs", and a kegerator doesn't feed my family.
Money isn't everything, but competitively compensating engineers is still a big factor for retention imo.
I'm curious - how did you end up accepting that job in the first place that was underpaying by nearly 100% ?
The first company I worked for paid me $36k/yr. Given I don't have a degree, and it was the first offer I received (was my break-into-the-industry offer), I took it. After nearly two years, I was still below $40k/yr. Couldn't afford to rent a two bedroom apartment by myself, let alone support a then pregnant girlfriend.
That's when the next company offered right below market value, but when I started with them, it seemed like a fair offer given I had to learn new frameworks, containerization, etc. After a year, and the value I'd added to the company, I assumed I'd receive a raise.
Low and behold, it didn't happen, so like the previous position, I found somewhere offering a median salary for my region.
Still not where I should be with all the responsibilities and skills I have now, but at least the financial stress isn't nearly as bad as it used to be. Plus, I'm secure in my position, so that's helpful.
as others have pointed out, pay is inextricably tied with perceptions of fairness, so it's a highly relative measure. if programmers are paid 30k on average, then getting 35k seems fair to you. but if the average is 60k, then 35k seems insulting.
Are you doing good work within the context of the duties in the job description? I think a good manager will praise that work but that’s essentially fulfilling your end of the work/pay contract. Expecting continuous raises for meeting agreed upon expectations comes across as entitlement beyond the scope of that labor agreement.
But if you’re consistently doing well beyond your previously agreed upon duties, then there’s grounds for expecting a pay increase because the employer is no longer upholding their end of that bargain
Consider that the people who benefit from convincing engineers that other engineers aren’t motivated by money are those who hoover up that money for themselves.
Or alternatively, managers aren’t “highly skilled”, can’t have it both ways!
You see this in upper management all the time; execs are friendly and graceful with each other because their material success is guaranteed, and promoting collegiality among execs is usually an orgizational goal.
Years ago, these studies were going around saying that people are happier when they make more money up to about $70k, at which point more money doesn't make you happier anymore. I'm sure that has to be adjusted for inflation etc by now, but very few devs make less money than they need to live comfortably by most people's standards.
It was conducted in 2010, so I wonder if anything would change if it was conducted again today. The current tech industry was in its infancy 10 years ago, and a lot of high paying jobs have been created since.
- To ensure that is true for your life time. (at 4% reasonable return, that would mean $1.75MM in savings) assuming you don't want to bite into the principal.
- Then you want to account for inflation. (Add a buffer to the above)
- Then you want to ensure this is on top of your car, house, child costs. (Depending on where you like to live and your car choice, add anywhere between 200k -> 2MM)
- Then you realize this car/ house kinda bumps into the 70k limit - especially if you went for a giant house because reasons.
And so on. So yes, folks can definitely start to feel 'safe' at 70k, but that's nowhere close to the checkout point. Once you figure out a target number based on above, you will realize you need to make so much more than 70k to get to that comfort state.
> Then you want to account for inflation. (Add a buffer to the above)
A buffer?? Assuming 2% inflation, the "buffer" you're adding is just over 100% of the original amount.
The skill people who go up the ladder have mastered, though, is to be deceitful and to maintain appearances, you might call that being professional at all times (at least to know when to be and when it is OK to be more natural).
Execs might be congenial because at that level, congenial is just how you play the game. It's still cutthroat, but overt backstabbing doesn't get you very far in a tight knit group of execs. But in other groups like a team of devs, IME high pay just attracts the kind of person who wants even higher pay and will do whatever it takes to get it.
Do they though? Quality of Life is not just how much you make, it's relative to what you have to spend. You can't realistically afford a home -even for most of the engineers- with a decent school with a sub 30 minute commute anywhere around one of these companies unless you want to be house poor or you are a dual earning family.
Unless your material needs and desires are to own a superyacht, even "just" $200k/yr starting salary is still far more than enough to satisfy you.
That's still not a small amount of money; and I never claimed that these people are poor; just that these salaries don't satisfy their needs and desires and these salaries certainly do not feel like you make $100k-$250k. Part of that is anchoring our expectations to what those amounts of money mean to when we first really began to understand the concept of money which is usually in our tween-teen stage of life, but it's also that these are in incredibly high COL areas.
I won't say it's "luxury", but it's still better than most people get around the country.
I just went to https://paycheckcity.com and did a gross up calculator. At first I thought you were underestimating how much more I would have to make to make the move worthwhile - with downsizing.
But if we were willing to downsize, I would need to make about $70K - $80K more than the average senior software engineer makes in my area.
I was off. $220K - $240K is about the average range for engineer with 3-5 years of experience in $BigTech so $6500/month is not unreasonable.
I’m not even talking about nice houses btw.
Maybe they rent an apartment and share the rent. That’s the only way I see them coming up with those numbers.
$300k/year isn’t enough for single income families in the Bay Area.
EDIT: I'm curious if you live in the bay area and where you get your notions.
Renting, there are actual luxury condos and apartments ready to rent for $3-4k, again in multiple nice neighborhoods.
>$300k/year isn’t enough for single income families in the Bay Area.
The median household income for SF families is less than $100k, and you're telling me three times that "isn't enough"? That's bullshit.
Responding to your edit: I don't live in SF, but prior to covid I traveled there every week for work, so I am familiar with the city. For a local example, my best friend makes ~$140k/yr, lives in Nob Hill in a gorgeous high rise apartment, and still has thousands to spend every month on fun discretionary activities. Another close friend who makes ~$250k/yr owns a great house in Inner Sunset and they certainly seem like they are able to afford any other desires they want (a boat, all kinds of tech gadgets, trips all the time, etc).
If you want a house, you're not finding a nice house (3+ bedrooms, central air, etc.) and in a nice neighborhood (San Carlos, Hillsborough, Palo Alto, Los Altos, Los Gatos, Menlo Park, etc.) for $4000-5000. I'd love to see the listings... I don't even bother with SF because the prices are even more outlandish for nice neighborhoods.
Familiar with the city and actually paying rent here are different. I've had coworkers who lived with their parents who are wildly out of tune with how much it costs to rent a place. I don't know how your friend affords a high rise on $140k/yr - maybe you should ask what their rent is and if they're sharing it with someone.
You can't buy a house now with $250k/yr in inner sunset. Go to Zillow and find me a nice house you can afford on $250k/yr and won't be house poor in the end with. Do it - prove me wrong.
The general guidance is that 30% of your gross income should be spent on rent. After taxes, that equates to ~40-50% of your take home goes to rent. That's normal for everyone, not just in SF. It is not a "fucked ratio of expenses" at all, and in any case, "thousands" left over after rent is still an extravagant amount of discretionary income.
>I don't know how your friend affords a high rise on $140k/yr - maybe you should ask what their rent is and if they're sharing it with someone.
I'm not going to dox my friend but I just looked up their building and there are 1br apartments for $3-3.3k/mo, and it is a very nice building/apartment. 3k/mo is easily doable on $140k/yr.
>You can't buy a house now with $250k/yr in inner sunset. Go to Zillow and find me a nice house you can afford on $250k/yr and won't be house poor in the end with. Do it - prove me wrong.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1345-16th-Ave-APT-7-San-F...
Literally the first result. Gorgeous 2 bedroom, and at 250k you'd have ~7-8k each month left over after mortgage. 7-8k per month is more money than most people in SF make period, even before paying for their homes. You're not even close to being "poor in the end with it". Also well below the "thirty percent rule" with this condo.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1485-11th-Ave-San-Francis...
Second result. 3 bedrooms, central air, all the amenities. At 250k/yr. At the list price (assuming you can't negotiate lower) with a house note of 5-6k/mo, you are still within the "thirty percent rule" without even stretching your income, and you're still looking at ~6k+ in discretionary spending after paying the house note.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/717-Kirkham-St-San-Franci...
3 bed, 3 bath condo. All the amenities. At 250k/yr, this condo would put you at slightly above the thirty percent rule which isn't wise depending on how much you want to be able to save for retirement, but still doable without worrying about money, and certainly still not even close to worrying about being "poor".
And these are three that I picked off of Zillow in literally 10 minutes without any further research. With any actual effort and talking to an agent, the prices and options would likely be even better.
Your second listing has an estimated sale value of nearly $1.7m. Your third is nearly $2mil. Have you ever tried to get a loan for that much at that income with a traditional 20% down? (Assuming you have 350-400k laying around) You will not get approved for a loan on that at $250k/yr. Your monthly cost on that first home is $8,375 after tax (tax is around 1.2-1.6% in CA) + insurance. That's past the maximum 36% of gross monthly income. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/mortgages/how-much-can-i-... Try the calculator. In general, going past 4x yearly income is not going to get approved by a bank. Theoretically, you might find some lender who'd do it but I haven't seen many. Most people buying here are buying homes with cash or really large down payments.
The fact you're even mentioning negotiations on buying homes in the bay area tells me you have no idea how the market here works. There are bidding wars - there aren't negotiations.
At this point - it's obvious that you're completely out of touch. You think spending 50%+ of your take home pay on rent is sustainable and that you can somehow retire with that expense. Maybe lay off the tidepods?
>Your first listing is an apartment. Shouldn't have to explain why that's not a house.
It's not an apartment, it's a condo, which is a form of housing.
>Your second listing has an estimated sale value of nearly $1.7m.
At $1.7m sale price you're still close to the 30% rule and still have more than 5k/mo discretionary spend, which again, is more than most americans make monthly, period, even before paying for a house. The fact that you think this would make you "poor" is absurd and quite frankly, insulting. I'm sure my friend who owns that house in Sunset and has a boat and goes on nice vacations all the time will be bummed to hear that he's apparently "poor". I'll also let my Nob Hill friend know, too. Tell me, do you think commenting on their pic from the St Regis Bora Bora is a good way to break the news to them that they are actually poor?
All of this is also completely ignoring the fact that this is talking about someone making $250k/yr (which is near the beginning of their career for a FAANG engineer) paying for this house by themselves, when in reality the expectation in the entire rest of the world is that you shouldn't be expecting to buy a home like this until your 30s or 40s. There's a reason "starter homes" are a thing, and these listed homes are not that. You have incredibly warped expectations if you think that the target market for these 3br, 3bath homes are 25 year old single people. If you were an engineer in your 30s, you're looking at an income more like 300-400k at a FAANG, and if your spouse also has an income, these houses are trivially affordable.
Again, the median family income in SF is less than $100k, and they seem to be doing fine. For you to sit here and try to argue that "$300k isn't enough" is ludicrous and reeks of ultra privilege. You need a reality check.
> You're not even close to being "poor in the end with it"
> The fact that you think this would make you "poor" is absurd and quite frankly, insulting
"House poor" is a distinct term that describes a home purchase where home expenses (not just mortgage) drain cash flow in a way that prevents hitting other goals - hence this point:
> You shouldn't be spending close to 50% of your take home on RENT. You will never be able to retire and live the same lifestyle.
A very different notion than "poor" alone. Also, you'd have to put at least closer 25-30% down on that home without absolutely perfect credit; jumbo loans have been tightening awhile.
> Again, the median family income in SF is less than $100k, and they seem to be doing fine.
What do you mean by doing fine, exactly? Not to nitpick, but I was under the impression most people buying in SF are not native to the city.
My reference point would be, for a young single person in a "normal" area of the country, $55K and $1250/month rent means you have $2K/month left over. A lot of people don't make this much.
To have the same amount left over after taxes and rent of $2800/month, it appears you'd need to make about $78K. So anything above $80K seems on the face of it to be livable at least for one person.
By the way, I noticed that total income taxes seem to actually be lower than in upstate NY.
Btw, I wouldn't necessarily use the entire bay area as your reference - as we weren't talking about the entire bay area either. Specifically only nicer neighborhoods. The price varies wildly by region. Apartments in south San Jose are much less expensive than in Palo Alto - but both are part of the bay area. There are many places in the bay area where my coworkers wouldn't even want to walk on the street - let alone live there... but there are cheaper housing options there.
You should be using ratios - not absolutes. If someone had $100,000/month rent then by your logic, they'd be just fine if they only had $2,000/month left over. That's very little buffer.
If you scale things up to that extent, then $2K becomes small compared to the possible variance in income or rent. But it's also small compared to the credit you'd have access to.
Without visiting I can't tell for sure, but I can compare apartments to what I'm used to by amenities, square footage, and such. If I had an offer and needed to move there, I'd judge the neighborhood by the housing, not vice versa.
I have heard about things like misaligned incentives (eg launching a chat app to get people promoted and then discontinuing it a year later) but that actually seems like the opposite of ruthless to me (complacent?)
Netflix: https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-workplace-culture-often-ru...
Amazon: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
I remember these articles from when they were posted. I don't know of any specific articles for Apple or Google, but I know that my friends at Google think Google is a brutal place to work for most (Google of early 2010s apparently was much more chill, but not anymore). As for Apple, Steve Jobs and Tim Cook are of course known for their incredibly ruthless management style.
i assume this is some sort of very subtle reductio ad absurdum?
> When people feel like good compensation is difficult to achieve, they put more effort into zero-sum internal politics, maintaining appearances, and so forth.
i was working at a place where the salaries were flat across the board, and set at a perfectly reasonable level, and it still didn't eliminate concern for appearances and bickering.
It's kind of petty on my part, but I'm not the type that wins arguments. So I decided, despite loving the people I worked with, that I was not in the right job. Now I design and develop software mostly individually and I'm infinitely happier. Someone who is competitive and enjoys confrontation would thrive in that role though.
Point is, people have lots of different reasons for changing jobs. And something that makes one group happy may make another miserable. I also hate traveling to conferences, but that's the nature of the job sometimes.
Ah like the place I worked at where some one spent 10 person years of effort to replace a perl system with the corporate standard Oracle one.
No value to the share holders but they ticked the boxes for probation managed a teem of eight or more and a budget of "1 million pounds"
You don't sound fun to work with.
Sounds like parent didn't have a reasonable structure in place to generate consensus amongst the org about stylistic preferences vs tech debt, and where developer priorities should lie.
There's some ego in both of your comments as well. Async is nicer looking that promise chains, but there risk in changing working code, no? Growing with an org means letting go of your old code but joining an org requires empathy and understanding for the old timers and their code babies as well!
We all want to look at good things. Promise chains were bad things. When I see bad things, I am willing to make the change. So should you. And we should ask before we change. GP was caught off-guard. That is not what we want.
We good?
> corporate tone
oof, maybe not wrong though.
I don't look at things for a living, I trade time for money with the expectation that my time has a multiplier on revenue, profit, and team health/productivity. I guess I've seen enough legacy code at this point that I don't have any desire to change it just because there's something better, changing stuff that works has to be a reasonable balance between tech debt/maintenance/quality of life things, vs features/uptime/performance. Of all those things, features make the most money right? So why would I want to spend time refactoring things when I could make measurable, incremental improvements somewhere else? Spend all day in the same system? Sure. Drive by refactorings? Absolutely not.
Ironically, a team is probably more likely to lose competent people in such a scenario because they are the ones with many opportunities. A former manager of mine was more than happy to fast track my hiring to my current role.
Hearing this tells me three things: you don't respect my work, you're publicly demonstrating that you're better than me, and that you're entitled to something from me for putting me in my place. Microaggressions like these are difficult to work with, no matter how much you're paid.
I'm sure you're a great developer, you've probably been promoted a lot, lead a big team and are generally well liked (at least on the surface). However, there are lots of developers and engineers that have been put down their entire lives and never really developed the social skills to stand up for themselves. Somehow, even over the internet, people like you can hone in on this and leverage it.
Other product within the company had a more formal code ownership structure, but this project was only two years old. So there were no owners, other than for infrastructure.
More often than not I would not touch code written with promises because it doesn't matter anyways since code using it can still use async/await + sometimes it makes some patterns easier to deal with (f.e. using a dependency written with callbacks and calling resolve from within the callback function)
This is an oft misunderstood tactic, but in action means: 1) Yearly, employees are asked to seek evidence for their top of market compensation. 2) employees do two things as a follow up - They either interview elsewhere to get competing offers to establish ‘top of market,’ or they feel fairly paid and do nothing.
Having worked at a few large tech companies that practice the typical equity grant and vesting structure designed to maximize retention, Ive never seen a more effective tactic to completely remove the concern of ‘am I paid enough’ from the employee. As a result:
1) The really high impact people are paid extremely well, as Netflix always overbids. 2) The average performers either go elsewhere or retain without jockeying for greater comp and ownership.
The proactive seeking top of market is a good feedback loop to pay for/reward impact and to build trust with your team, and is something I still practice with my teams outside of Netflix.
This was back in 2015, so some things may have changed. Regardless, the net to the business has compounding returns. At an average company:
1) Most employees do not pay for their salary in business impact. 2) Top performers drive outsized impact relative to their compensation.
If you find a way to mitigate 1), you can pass the savings into 2), protecting and retaining your highest value employees.
While other factors do obviously matter, and comp isn’t everything - removing comp from the hierarchy of needs entirely dramatically changes the mindset towards ownership of work and outcome.
My motive was exactly this. If you remove the "am i paid enough" concern, it allows talented engineers to focus at the job at hand and deliver really impactful outcomes
You'll either waste your time, or get buyer's remorse. Very little upside.
Probably wouldn't do it for long, the first day would be amazing - that buys a great house. The rest of the week and I'm set for a very comfortable retirement.
The problem then comes down to defining good person vs bad person, which in the real world is very tricky.
I knew someone who changed their bash prompt to (price * unvested count / days left). He said at the time it was the only thing that kept him from quitting or punching his manager.
Publicly-quoted companies issuing options is just a weird form of deferred bonus with a favourable tax treatment.
In the last year or so, my company has had a culture shift leading to down-to-the minute micromanagement and I've lost all autonomy - every decision requires approval of multiple managers. There's no realistic engineering salary they could pay me to continue putting up with this and I can't get out quick enough. Covid has made that a bit tough though.
With my previous boss, I spent 90% of my intellectual effort managing up. Despite his best efforts, the project was delivered above spec and on time (saving his ass), but I burnt so many political bridges making it happen that I ended up moving teams.
Since 95% of people have been working from home (and no plans for most to go back this year), they won't allow people to take unused monitors back because they might end up lost. These are £80 monitors.
It's these pathetic nickle-and-diming that is far more likely to make me look for another job than not paying a £200 a year pay rise.
Someone sees "£80 times 20,000 staff, that's over £1m, we can't risk that!"
from what I hear of our management Slack's enterprise sales folk are a bit shit w.r.t working out deals and the like. 10 quid per person, for context, is roughly the price of all the MS software stack if you're a decent size.
So for 10-bob you get email, word, excel, teams and exchange/AzureAD -- or a chat app.
So that's the context that they're dealing with; but I fucking hate teams with white hot passion. So I still get annoyed.
And yes, these nickle and dime tactics are rife everywhere, we buy 3k computers for people but our budget for a monitor is 70gbp and it is supposed to last 6 years. :|
And the people making these decisions use word, excel, teams and exchange a hell of a lot in ways to try to work out how to save some money.
I for one don't need that. I need jira, confluence, slack.
Accounting uses excel so everyone who interacts with accounting needs excel.
Then those who interact with accounting (HR, Purchasing) use excel so everyone they come into contact with needs excel.
There's is a metric which is called "Cost per head" used in my company, and it goes like;
1 Person:
* 1 Windows license
* 1 Office license
* 1 Visio license
* 1 Swarm license
* 1 Perforce license
* 1 Jetbrains license (optional)
* 1 Slack license
* 1 jira license
* 1 confluence license
* 1 gitlab license
* 1 Terraform Enterprise license (optional)
* 1 headcount in some HR software
and that's just what I can remember.
Controversial hot-take from one of our IT directors:
<user> Just wondering why can't we just use slack and not use Teams at all :thinking_face: Slack seems so much better.
<itDirector> So, just to put this out there, I started this Slack originally. So it's a topic close to my heart.
<itDirector> But ultimately right now, Teams is eating the fuck out of Slack's lunch.
<itDirector> Teams is included within our M365 license, for all users, at a fraction of the price of Slack.
<itDirector> Likewise, all of the integrations, SSO, features, etc., come bundled in the existing license.
<itDirector> For Slack, they continue to push Enterprise Grid licensing costs of over 300 USD per user per year
<itDirector> Additionally, there are more people now starting to push us to formally drop Slack than Teams. Some studios are mandating the usage of Teams over Slack, as well as some projects.
<itDirector> Personally, I see several features still missing before such a conversation can hold weight. Teams will have private channels added in November, and I'm hoping they address file permissions, non-threaded channel chat and lifting of the 250 user limit in individual chats.
<itDirector> But once that happens, it's going to be extremely difficult for Slack to compete.
<itDirector> So, to manage expectations - I would not anticipate a future where Slack is chosen over Teams. It's probably best to start acclimating to that reality now.
All to save 0.2% of the cost of a person
Now in our specific company the latest hotness only lasts about 2 years, from messanger to lync to skype to zoom to teams. Each is massively disruptive and comes as a major project for a team of project managers.
(They are also trying to downgrade us to office 365, which for our purposes removes archived emails more than 3 years old)
Now for a beancounter it may seem that spending £6k a month on someone, then pissing them off by making a £10 a month saving, it worthwhile. That's because the beancounter doesn't factor in the cost of pissing people off.
As for the monitors, that may be COVID19 related. If the office is locked up, there are almost always physical/security procedures that must be followed in order to allow non-essential staff into the office...and that doesn't include any cleaning or sanitation that might be required by any COVID19 rules. This means that you need to have someone physically come to the office to open it up. On top of that, you need someone knowledgeable about the hardware (i.e., IT) to come in to make sure any employee taking a monitor home doesn't mess up anyone else's setup.
So you're risking exposing at least two lower-paid employees to COVID19 for the convenience of one higher-paid employee who could just buy his own goddamn monitor for £80 if he cares about the screen real estate that much.
And the "£1.6m a month" view is the problem -- if you are spending £5k a month, or 40p a minute, on the costs of keeping an employee (probably more with the cost of office space), an extra £10 a month is neither here nor there. If it costs just 1 minute extra a day, you're losing.
Also, your units are wrong. 1.6M is the total amount being risked. There is no realistic risk of losing that much every month unless you think that every employee is going to lose their monitor every month.
For the first ~7-10 years of my career I strongly believed that everything was about salary. I picked jobs solely based on the comp package, and the work I did was motivated by bonuses and promotions. I'm sure that's still the case for a large chunk of engineers, but for me, with more experience under my belt, I now think more and more about stuff like fulfillment, ownership, real world impact of my work etc.
While not true of everyone, people in tech fields tend to have a more comfortable financial cushion as they get older, and at least modest differences in pay don't matter as much as other factors.
Most "things" are not fulfilling however. So, once our income satisfies all of those wants, then we feel more comfortable. When our income far exceeds our basic needs, we have the luxury to work (or hobby work) for things beyond paying the bills... fulfillment, positive change for self/family/community/world, achieving non-monetary goals, health, etc.
I have straight-up told managers that I'd be willing to take a pay cut in exchange for more autonomy. Haven't found a taker yet :)
It is so frustrating to repeatedly demonstrate value, endlessly repeat the story about how "gmail was the result of 20% time", yet be forever told "nah, we just need you to stick to grinding tickets".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_Ab...
I got very lucky and they kept pace with what I could have gotten elsewhere for about 5 years. At that point, I stopped getting raises and about a year later, switched jobs for that 40% raise.
It's pretty much the norm for IT until you get to your pay level. It's complex, but I think it's mainly that it's hard to justify pay raises beyond what a job is worth and actual promotions are hard to swallow for management, especially if they don't need someone at that level.
When you left each job, they probably filled it with someone making about what you were when you left, but the new job you got was more demanding and better-paying.
I think for the first part of your career, aiming for pay is the right choice. After a while, the pay is fairly settled and you can look for other compensation instead.
Yes, at some point most people can end up "satisfied", but part of the reason you got there in the first place was the choices you made along the way.
It still is about salary. Except now you can self-actualize since you got the more base pleasures out of your system earlier.
They start off with a valid argument, that if you treat engineers better than everyone else it creates resentment in other parts of the company and that makes sense.
If that weren’t enough, all of this “special treatment” towards engineers can create resentment throughout the rest of the company. Such negativity hurts performance and retention in other business units where employees might feel that they’re treated unfairly.
I've actually experienced this myself as the new guy, even within the engineering department. Then 5 paragraphs later this is what they write:
Maybe instead of offering free lunches on Fridays, you can provide funding to attend Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC, once that’s hosted in real life again) or a Coursera subscription. If you’re in the mobile apps space, you might offer to buy the newest iPhone or Android device for your engineers annually on a “yours to keep” basis.
I'm sorry for the negativity, I just don't think I can trust the judgement of the author on this issue after reading that. Also as a mobile developer, shouldn't you be aiming for your app to perform well on low to midrange devices first, thus targeting the largest ammount of potential users? If you're styling for the iphone x/11 notch you're gonna be doing that in the simulator first regardless.
Don't create a culture where I am a doer but not allowed to be a decider. I will eventually walk away from asymmetric power structures.
If you don't/can't trust me, I probably won't trust you. I prefer relationships of trust.
I want to learn and improve. Use your extra money to do that and act is if it matters to you.
If you must use pay as your sole means of appeasing me, pay me LOTS. So very much that I'm willing to put up with the bureaucratic shitshow that is your company, spending all my drone-ish non-innovative 9 to 5 day thinking about the rush I'm going to experience doing cool things with all of the excess cash you're giving me.
For much of my career, I was the only income earner in a family of 6. Making ends meet was sometimes a challenge, which made me very salary-sensitive and averse to the risk of income disruption.
My family finances have somewhat improved in recent years, letting me unclinch a little regarding money. This lets me put more weight on other factors relating to job satisfaction and feeling of purpose.
This. I think a large chunk of society forgets that after you get past 25 and actually have a life and responsibilities, that a meager $100k in a particular region is barely enough to cover base expenses, childcare, car/home loans, etc.
Out of curiosity, how long were you the sole earner before getting to a better state of financial security?
I've worked at places specifically didn't want to send employees to conferences because they think everyone uses them as farming tools (whether that's true or not, some engineers just want to go learn and it's pretty upsetting if you have a SME in some subject and don't allow them to attend a con while plenty of other $leaders go).
I've also worked for tech places where a boss would come in and fire you on Monday then call you up and offer you $1k to return on Tuesday, me being about 21 at my first sysadmin job kept me around for that abuse.
It's really, really not a good feeling to feel untrusted or like you're constantly being tested by your employer.
I do this a lot for a few foss projects I contribute to because even though I'm always hired as the SME for my niche leadership will only give me tickets/flights to conferences if they have extras and none of their drinking buddies want to go. Typically what happens is I'll start at a company, ask about going to $mybigcon when a training budget is brought up, that training budget is always slashed, not real or goes somewhere else then I'll never ask again and I'll find my own way to get tickets (from conf partners, etc).
The funny thing, when I have to do this not only am I really bothered that my company wouldn't spend the $1000 ($200 plane, $800 ticket) but I go out of my way to not focus on ANYTHING that will benefit my company but instead I have a good time and learn things I'm interested in and mingle with every other company/partner I can.
I've actually had companies expect me to get tickets myself from the projects or from gold partners that I know. I don't have that much clout by any means and even asking partners for tickets makes me feel terrible because they're limited too.
Consulting with companies on productivity I can’t express how much devs not feeling like they have representation/a voice at the exec level negates comp effectiveness.
What I’m referring to is that period where engineers want to stay vs being heavily comp’d to stay. You can see people throughout this thread saying pay me a large amount and I’ll stare at a wall. If you want engineers not to fully optimize comp (read as $$$$$) against the market they need to feel represented and like they have a say in day to day decisions in the company.
What we're saying is that coders are often willing to pay for "a seat at the table". But maybe management can sell them a placebo.
It's not clear-cut that management ignoring coders will always turn out for the worse, even though management that always ignores coders probably has, historically. Maybe sometimes their voice matters and sometimes not.
Companies for whom engineering is key need to (at least to some extent) organise themselves around engineering. The strategic decisions need to take into account the needs and capabilities of engineering and engineers. If they don't then they won't be good at it. They'll be staffed with mediocre people who generate mediocre output very slowly.
That part of the article really struck a cord with me. From my experience, I think that a big factor in whether engineers start looking for another job is how much the manager acts as a filter for the unrealistic expectations of the rest of the company. Engineers should not be too isolated, after all some interaction is good to get feedback and it feels good to directly see people benefit from your work, but managers have to be able to shield their engineers from the mood swings of the CEO or the pie-in-the-sky promises from marketing. I think this is a big component of a "good working environment" and is often worth more than pay or promotions.
And on the other hand, you can offer enough above-market and people will do any job, as evidenced by the other thread I saw yesterday where people were making crazy salaries to implement unethical, deceptive practices against their users.
Generally by the time engineers start thinking about money you've already lost them.
My rule of thumb has always been that when I start thinking "I'm not getting paid enough to put up with this", it's time to move on whatever happens.
In one of my previous jobs, I asked people in my team to make a survey to identify their motivational and hygienic factors. The surprising result for me was how much variation there was among different people. (e. g. for somebody salary was a motivational factor, for anybody hygienic one). Anyway, understanding these factors for individual team members made me much more effective manager.
Often I have no interest in the work itself either, but if the team is good I'm happy. They could make us shovel snow all day, I'd still come to work.
If you want people to stay, your options are to give them money, prestige, or stability.
- Money includes salary, bonus, commissions and contingent comp, stock options and perks and even vacation time.
- Prestige is conferences, publications, exposure to high profile brand clients and stakeholders, airline points hotel and travel rewards, charity sponsorship and matching, committee memberships, media and public facing representation, and leadership options.
- Stability includes things like investing in training, giving them headcount, bringing them into the strategic fold, partnerships, responsibility for key client or stakeholder relationships, etc.
Evaluate your total comp using the triad of Money, Stability, Prestige. Chances are you are weighted toward one, and there is a role out there with a different balance. I think HR salary bands are a wishfull opposite of market rates, and personally I think they're stupid for any company that is still growing and not just optimizing an established long term revenue stream. If you are a bank or institution, sure, but your entire business is an optimization problem not a growth problem. If there is any upside volatility in your revenue and you are making something new that people want, pay for value, because I'd argue you can't afford not to.
I've watched companies lose key engineers that delayed major product releases over a $10-20k salary bump while flying their marginalized director of special projects around in business class, and my conclusion is that compensation is arbitrary and a negotiations power game. Don't spend too much time reasoning about it.
The companies that retain people are the ones who figure out the Stability and Prestige elements of the triad.
My employees stay because they want to. They enjoy the work, domain, colleagues. The salary is competitive and fair. They can thrive in this environment.
But I am under no illusions about creating some special environment that can prevent them from getting poached. You can throw cash, stocks, options all you want but if Big Tech wants them, they will outbid you.
Just assume that at any moment they can and will get poached and ensure that the business can continue if people leave. Keep the stack simple, stick to standards, minimize NIH etc.
True, but your team members aren't getting any offers from FAANG/Big Tech unless the team members put in some effort. At least, they have to do a series of interviews.
FAANG positions are notoriously coveted, at least here on HN, and most people have to work hard, including preparation, to get into them.
So the question comes, what does it take to make your engineers comfortable enough they don't think it's worth going through the process to get those other offers.
Engineers don't just leave for no reason. They leave because they're either forced out or there's something that really sucks about the company: most of the time it's the work life balance that really sucks.
And articles like this make me think about institutional knowledge and how there are no standards what so ever in software, and so long as new frameworks, languages, and not invented here syndrome persist there will always be a need to keep your engineering staff around.
/end ramble thoughts
I need shelter but it only costs so much to full-fill need. Then if I'm get paid sufficient salary to cover all my needs then wants decides the utility of the next marginal dollar. If the value doesn't align with my want then I don't care. As you get older you realize your time is finite and you want to enjoy what you do if you have the opportunity to make such a decision.
So if a job pays 20% more but requires more overtime or more stress then I'll pass.
Compensation is important but if they are golden handcuffs, your organization (and employee) will suffer.
A further question is whether these coders are actually better for the org -- the Henry Ford efficiency wage-type incentive may keep them at consistent pace and quality, whereas rockstars with physics PhD may have parallel agendas to make the project more fun to work with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
OTOH maybe quality exists as a qualitative concept but can't be measured -- then you just do pass/fail (like colleges have dropped letter-grades during the Zoomdemic).
What I'm saying is that "shallower" coders, who are motivated by the extra pay, may be more willing to align their concept of quality with the interests of the organization, while self-motivated coders will have their idiosyncratic or fashionable ideas.
When shopping around for a team to make a web app for my startup -- no technical requirements, we were feeling the market for price first -- we got a $$$ proposal for using PHP and Laravel, and a $ proposal for using AngularJS. I regret that decision; it cost us at least a year of time-to-market.
The original team quit (they worked for a trusted friend of our "business cofounder") because they weren't really experienced in web dev and their opportunity cost was off the roof - they were crack coders that did all kinds of different projects. Then we decided to hire someone (with good references) as a consultant and manage him ourselves. Dude was apparently capable but couldn't be screamed into using off-the-shelf components rather than rewriting and refactoring constantly. He eventually flaked on us, got too many projects and we weren't fun anymore I guess. Finally we found a small company online. By all appearances the new team hates being around computers but can be managed by Trello and feature branches. Web dev is a bore, but it's a living, and not everyone manages to make a living out of their surfing passion.
Problem solving is as important as the compensation.
A great environment to solve problems, and to be able to work with other smart, conscientious people, while pursuing new levels of mastery is a really good sell.
People who are driven solely, or primarily by money can't be paid enough and will on that mindset, tend to move on.
Investing in engineer's productivity, and paying them what they're worth, turns out that's all it takes.
If every job listing on Indeed had a salary/compensation range, it would be very straightforward to see what the going rate is for that particular skillset, and it would push employers to be competitive on salary.
I am Shocked Shocked I tell you, can you smell gas :-)
Whilst pay isn't every thing people do tend to lie when asked about what important to them - the same way you slowdown when the time and motion team are monitoring you
Midwest company so YMMV.
* non-functional requirements - great culture.
"great" - is a variable here. People define it to their own understanding and advantage.
I'm also doing uni part time, and taking half a day off every week is a tough proposition for employees. Despite the chaos, I do like the work I do, and as it's a Greenfield project, I want to see it reach some level of exposure to core clients before I can consider it a job well done.
What about you?
Couldn't disagree more. Pay me.
You might ask yourself these questions after compensation was not a determining factor:
What if the company I worked for offered a competitive salary that was agreeable for both parties. What other benefits am I looking for outside of monetary compensation?
My job probably doesn't pay me absolutely the maximum that I could make anywhere. If the work environment turns sour, I can hopefully make an approximately lateral move - not significantly more or less money, but a better environment.
I once worked for a medical device manufacturer. We failed an FDA audit. As a result, our procedures became much more stringent, and life turned into a huge amount of paperwork. I couldn't take it. It didn't take a raise to get me out of there.
Anecdotally, the place where people are uncertain of their future are highly stressful, even when the work is not heavy.
Maybe I’m atypical, but at a certain point all the other factors just don’t cut it. If you’re trying to pay me $400k/yr total comp and I can get $600k/yr elsewhere, the disparities in culture or whatever have to be pretty significant to dominate.
But that aside, a lot of people would care less about the delta between $400K and $600K than the delta between $50K and $75K.
For example, it can mean whether your spouse has the option to stay home to spend more quality time with the children, without having to sacrifice expenses due to income reduction; or it can mean how well (or not) you can take care of aging parents.
But in general percentage salary increments affect lifestyle more at the low end than they do at the high end. (And, of course, the absolute differences matter far more at the low end.