Hacker News Reader

Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

The white hot market for developers has been going on for over a year and besides Amazon raising its salary cap, I have yet to hear of a single retention initiative, even outside of tech.

I have spoken to more former colleagues just today (well, yesterday) who did not get meaningful raises this year while the new hires got 30% more.

View on HN

Yeah, it’s especially frustrating in Europe where developers are not « rich » like in the US. We sure make some decent money but we can still suffer from inflation if we don’t fight for raises. Still, new hires get 20 to 30% more than existing developers.

Sure we can easily switch jobs but it’s really tiring, especially when you are in a great place. You have to weight the money against the comfort and it’s a shame because it have an enormous impact on the whole team motivation.

"Switch jobs to increase income" seems to have been folk wisdom for as long as I can remember, yet nothing changes. Recruitment costs are enormous, so I can only surmise that the cost savings to business by underpaying staff are even more enormous.

Or there are systematic mistakes being made. Or maybe both.

If there are systemic mistakes being made they appear almost universal. I am not opposed to the notion of this particular issue being part of the human condition, but it does seem suspiciously ubiquitous, which leads me to believe instead that it is profitable. This seems more likely.

I agree it's more likely. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a bit of both in the end though.

> so I can only surmise that the cost savings to business by underpaying staff are even more enormous.

I think this is what is going on. "Switch jobs to increase income" _is_ the folk wisdom, but not enough people actually "walk the walk" for it to be worth it for companies to change their strategy. As I mentioned in replying to another comment, this way companies get to retain for very cheap talent that:

* finds job interviews exhausting

* hates negotiating

* has good relationships with colleagues they don't want to lose

* has a comfortable commute or WFH arrangement they don't want to change

* is proud of becoming an expert / go-to-person in some part of the business and doesn't want to lose that source of social capital

* is proud of product or service they have made a big contribution to and wants to "see it through to the end"

* is generally impresionable and does what management want without too much complaint

Yup, changing job is still the best way to get a raise — rinse and repeat.

It seems "all dev can do everything, all manager can manage everything" means "we can replace any cog by any other cog since they're all the same". Yeah, well, no. I don't understand why, when they have a good fit, they don't fight for it. I even have seen some senior replace by out of school grad "because that's we can find".

It's because big companies are optimised specifically for this. The entire enterprise dev culture is built around it.

If you have to actually code, some devs are going to 10x other ones. But if you stack in as many dependencies as you can to the point where everyone is just reading documentation trying to get caught up, and the entire measure of productivity is whether you've used a library before so you come into a project with it's API pre-memorised, all devs look the same. Any dipshit can look at a few code examples and copy the basic patterns out of them.

It's literally impossible to gain any real expertise in these codebases. I've been using React since 2015. I've got more specific experience in React front-ends than basically anyone I've ever worked with. I've run into virtually every NPM library in the ecosystem at least once over that time. It doesn't matter. I've forgotten 90% of the interesting details in all of them except for a small handful that I truly believe are quality. I can write some basic code using whatever from memory, but as soon as you hit anything with any real complexity it's back to the docs and back to trawling Github issues for everything that's not in the docs. You're in the same boat as everyone else, grinding out a scrap of knowledge just to abandon it at the start of the next project when you find out that there's a new set of fad dependencies you need to learn the internals of because their abstractions leak like a sieve.

This works for big companies because they can afford the severe productivity hit with their momentum and market dominance. It's a death sentence for startups though. That's why everyone hires 20 year olds to run their startups. You might leave a ton of great experienced candidates on the table, but you dodge all their colleagues that have spent 20 years learning how to fuck everything up and get away with it because their individual contribution has always been indistinguishable in the company's revenue.

Despite all the hype, this is my and seemingly the experience of everyone else since records began. Everyone has seen the hire on 30%/40%+++ more or hire 2 people to do the job of the person who left - on 30% more because a 5% pay increase would throw out the budget or they were sure the person would never actually leave.

Companies wont pay till people are out the door; by then its too late, too little or it goes to the incoming hire.

>I have yet to hear of a single retention initiative

A large number of big tech companies have had unusual retention initiatives, including Robinhood issuing ad-hoc stock grants after a stock drop, Apple issuing $180k stock grants out of cycle and others.

Apple was considered on the lower end of FAANG-tier salaries, so the grants which were outside of the normal process are unusual.

This isn't an isolated incident. Even companies that pay mid-tier salaries ($300-350k for a senior in the Bay Area) are experiencing above normal attrition.

Attrition is a real problem right now. Hiring is fierce. If you're a senior or staff level engineer, it's a buyer's market.

Just for anyone outside of the USA reading this, 300k is actually 99th percentile for American developers, regardless of what happens at a select few Bay Area companies.

Most Fortune 500 companies do not even have a procedure to pay that much.

Maybe, but there are a lot of Bay Area companies, and almost all of them are hiring right now. Basically if you’re a good SWE in US you should have no problem getting $300k total comp. Just make sure to warm up your leetcode skills.

"No problem" in HN parlance usually means "Rare staff+ leadership role at outlier FAANG company." Are there actually non-FAANG companies paying that much to non-leveled employees, without massively broken work cultures (we all know who these places are)? Is anyone willing to name one?

Verizon, American Express. There's plenty. One of those listed below is even in Arizona.

As for the "leveled employees" thing, being at terminal level in any FAANG or similar company isn't exactly rocket science. Do you think these people are working on rocket trajectories all day? Nope, they're copy/pasting protobuf specifications and writing a few test suites. Just like working for Verizon or another non-FAANG.

https://www.levels.fyi/offer.html?id=b5f5f5ac-9949-516b-bae1...

https://www.levels.fyi/offer.html?id=b0d24426-d95b-57c8-a0f8...

While Verizon may (or may not) have offered one developer $300k, it’s certainly not the norm: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Verizon/salaries/Software-Eng...

It’s not for AmEx either: https://www.levels.fyi/company/American-Express/salaries/Sof...

False. Even these dubious claims do not suggest that they were comp packages that were offered at hiring (0 years with company). If you refer to these at a hiring negotiation with Verizon or AmEx they will surely pass to the next candidate who will accept 200k or whatever the real maximum is.

You claimed F500s do not ever pay that much. The fact an ancient prehistoric company like Verizon is paying garden variety senior developers $300k disputes that statement. I didn't even have to fish very far to find those examples.

>real maximum

Clearly the real maximum isn't the real maximum if $300k offers are possible. In Arizona, no less.

FAANG currently is in a totally different ball park https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1447997574556880902

Sure, it might be hard to believe people who are just like me make this much for the same type of work, but just 3 years ago I didn't believe people made as much as I do now (in a small startup).

$180k over four years, which was the top end of the grant, is a $45k raise. It’s definitely nice to have, but not massive, especially as it was only given to certain high performers. I guess they got to go through the equivalent of two comp cycles this year.

>Attrition is a real problem right now. Hiring is fierce. If you're a senior or staff level engineer, it's a buyer's market.

I believe that should be seller's market, I am selling my services?

I have seen the opposite. Managers and executives are bending over backwards to offer stock grants, spot bonuses, flexible work options and more to key employees who are at risk of leaving or simply ask to renegotiate their comp package. In my experience people who are complaining simply didn't bother to make the effort and expected huge raises to fall into their laps. And management knows that these same employees will continue to complain but not actually quit.

This has happened to me. I am pretty sure my company set up a 'who is a risk to lose' list that I am on. Had more stock / bonuses and pay rises in the past year then ever before.

Amazon seemingly contacts me and everyone I know several times a year. I have assumed to this point that they have been operating on the churn for so long that they won’t be able to replace that approach for a long time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com