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What you need is a new job where they don't treat your skill as a cost center

“directly supports the main revenue-generating operations of the organization so there is real $$$ lost by having this position empty”

How companies consider that a cost center is beyond me. But I’ve seen them do it.

Oh golly, how right you are.

> How companies consider that a cost center is beyond me. But I’ve seen them do it.

I may have an answer: Because of our fetish with metrics. It is possible to measure the cost of an engineer or computer programmer. This can be assigned a cost which is arbitrarily precise. Calculating teh benefit is usually not so easy. So the decision makers (rational beings, just mislead by an intellectually bankrupt management philosophy) concentrate on what they can count.

This is McNamara's fallacy

There's also a tendency for humans to over optimise the wrong things.

John Sturman has a business game to illustrate this called the Beer Game[1].

It's supposed to illustrate shocks to a supply chain with limited knowledge of how the rest of the system is behaving.

The players in charge of their part of the system try to reduce costs to get a better score but in doing so often catastrophically open themselves up to shocks in the system.

IMHO the same thing is true for managers and accountants trying to reduce costs in their development teams. If you get it wrong you can get a short term gain and long term problem that kills the company.

1. https://web.mit.edu/jsterman/www/SDG/beergame.html

Might be as simple as the decision maker assuming they won’t be around for the catastrophe. Or outright malice, for any number of reasons. “Hate of job” is a widespread phenomenon that people don’t even think they have to justify.

It’s simple. If you’re in operations it’s all about increasing operating margin (omx). The simplest way to do that is to cut op expenses until you scrape bottom and op revenue dips. Then you adjust, firefight, and find other op expenses to cut.

Or hire contractors like they do here in Europe. So you go from spending up to 150kCHF for a lambda software engineering to paying 250kCHF to a consultancy. But the company "invest". Doesn't matter if that contractor will end up working there for 4 years or more, that's call investment in the finance book or Switzerland is a at will country (but with notice period). Just madness.

Fortunately my boss doesn't treat it as a cost center, she knows her division is the revenue provider in both acquiring & preventing churn.

She's fighting that battle now to make the chief boss understand that too, but it's a slog.

This may change soon. Meta and Netflix reportedly have hiring freezes in place now. Other companies are cutting staff. The later half of 2022 may bring significant changes to the job market(along with many other things).

Thanks for posting the heads-up re: Meta and Netflix; in the latter case I’m not surprised (or maybe they could just reduce the obscenely high salaries they overpay so they can feel superior to other members of FAANG, which doesn’t really fool anyone about their engineering prowess (they’re a content company, not an engineering/product/big-cloud company like the others, and everyone knows it). That would also allow them to get rid of this let-a-person-go-after-a-few-months-but-don’t-worry-there’s-warmth-and-respect BS.

Regarding your 2nd statement: “Other companies are cutting staff”; you mean in big tech already? Who?

Uber

I hope you tell who you eventually hire it's a shitty salary because it sounds they would only take the job if they don't know what they're worth.

I'm very upfront when I schedule the interview, give them a range when we set the time and if they're still interested we proceed. It's education analytics, so there's a little bit of "doing it for the mission" that gets people who are willing to make a little less because the job really has a very direct impact on students' success and lives. My work reduces student debt and increases success rates and identifies those individuals most at risk of having difficulties so others can make proper targeted interventions.

The work environment is laid back, 40 hour weeks & rarely any expectation of going over that so there can be a very good work/life balance. Benefits are pretty good too: very good retirement plan matching contributions, above average health insurance, 37 days PTO each year. So I need to find the right candidate that appreciates those things even if they could easily get 30%+ salary somewhere else. TCP where I work isn't to far off from other opportunities if the candidate considers & values those other benefits.

And again I am very upfront about that, and even explain these factors to them before interviews. I want people who know what they're signing up for, and not waste each other's time. It's a position that will give them lots of hands on experience to easily get the next step up in their career after doing this job for 3 years or so. They can grown from a basic analyst as described above into creating more sophisticated predictive modeling, bringing them up closer to my level. I view my role as managing someone as 1) to keep away from them as much as possible so they can do their work and I can do mine instead of sitting in meetings. And 2) to prepare them for their next job, their next step in their career. Because that's what a good manager does, and because by preparing them that way it means their last year working for me will be at a very high level of productivity, making my life easier as well.

But the candidate really has to be the right sort of person at the right stage in their life, someone looking for these things. And if my organization would ease up & recognize the job market requires at least a 15% increase in base salary I'd probably not have so much difficulty finding such a person.

> The work environment is laid back, 40 hour weeks & rarely any expectation of going over that so there can be a very good work/life balance

There are quite some countries where Jo Average would see 40h working week as monsterous. Or were 40h workweek might even be outlawed.

Isn't that just France? And French people think basically everything is monstrous and worth rioting over.

Good luck to work just 35 or 40h in France in IT.

37.5 is standard in UK as well.

Any expectation of going over the paid amount of work time is not laid back.

It's an 8 hour day but 1 hour lunch, so technically 35 hours of work. Where are such things outlawed?

Maybe you need to re-pitch this role as a contract and hire a remote contractor. I think you would get plenty of interest from experienced analysts if you could hire nationally. I might even be interested with that generous PTO policy, but on-site is like going back to the stone age for me. Whatever metro area you are in that salary must be a show stopper. Many younger people are stuck with incredibly high housing costs without the benefit of being grandfathered into rent control or mortgage payments from 7 years ago.

Unfortunately we don't like to hire contractors much, and when we do it's only for a 6 month period, has to be reviewed and reapproved every months. So I could lose someone just as they're starting to learn the intricacies of our system, because a lot aren't renewed as they're only supposed to be short term. I've got catch 22's all around me.

this sounds like your own resume should be in play, you have your exit interview already written out

Yeah, I could probably get +50% if I went job hopping, but the non salary benefits are very good, work is not stressful-- 40 hours, rarely the expectations of more than that, though it does happen maybe one a month. Very good PTO, 5 minute commute... So it's all an extremely good work life balance, which has always been the most of mportant factor for me if the money is otherwise sufficient to cover things.

I get paid very well for 36 hour weeks (half-day Fridays) in a low stress atmosphere with no expectation of over time. All I'm saying is that there is no harm looking around as there are plenty of jobs like that out there.

Good point... I'm very comfortable where I am and really like the work & mission of my organization, so I haven't looked around much. Maybe I should, maybe my situation isn't as unique as I though it was....

I work 20 hours a week now, fully remote, making (a little bit) more than I used to doing 40. Granted, it's a machine learning gig and I took the pandemic to brush up on these skills, but it's definitely achievable in this market to have a good work/life balance.

Contract work?

Yes, path to full-time plus benefits is available, but I very much need the extra time to get back to 100% these days.

You should resync with HR on that salary. If it's below market, the company is losing money while it's vacant, and your not able to fill it then you have proof the salary or other benefits are too low. Sort of an efficient market theory: if it was a good offer, someone would take it.

Yeah, I tried that, there's a small amount of wiggle room but not much, because they said "it wouldn't be fair to our current workers in that classification that aren't making as much". A poor answer. Ignores market conditions and says they know they're underpaying other people too, many of whom are probably looking for a new job as a result. I'm embedded in an operational division, but we've lost a very significant % of our core IT folks as well.

> It's spec'ed for 3 years of experience but salary is about the median for a new graduate w/o professional experience.

How does the company's revenue per employee compare to the offered salary?

Back of the envelope, the offered salary is roughly $5000-$10,000 less than the average revenue per employee.

I'm not familiar with thinking about salaries in these terms though, how is this relevant?

I’m surprised such a company isn’t going out of business. That’s a very low amount to make per-head for software engineers. Do they make up for it in volume?

Not a software dev or inherently tech-base business. Vast majority of employees are not in a tech related positions.

I'm in Higher Ed analytics, embedded at a high level in an operational division at a university. So, maximizing revenue isn't a primary goal. It's certainly a secondary concern, some amount of "profit" is necessary to plow back into resources for students & researchers and capex, but if we're making a ton of profit it would kind of mean we're charging students more than we need to and putting a higher debt burden on them. Some schools, unfortunately, take that path but not where I work. We are honestly very focused on doing what's best for the student, even at the cost of leaving some easy money on the table.

Minimizing student debt burden is a primary target metric for the university. Of course it's much more complicated than that though, countless variables and interlocking & sometimes competing goals & requirements.

And while Higher Ed isn't perfect and could use some disruption, quality instruction doesn't have much economy of scale. Sure, a very self-motivated person can plow through self-paced college courses without a lot of handholding or overhead costs to get them through, but that's not the majority of students. For most students the ability to get quality help along the way is inversely proportional to class size and directly proportional to support resources. So, high labor costs. Though again, some amount of disruption could probably improve things. As would the realization that not everyone needs to go to a traditional 4-year college, that for many people learning a skilled trade is both a faster path to financial self-sufficiency and better suited to their interests. But that's all a bit off topic so I'll end it there.

From the company's perspective it rarely makes sense to pay an regular employee more than the amount that the company makes per employee.

Yes, there are variations and management can go a bit on the higher side of that number - though also note that that is revenue and doesn't take into account operational costs, taxes, and the like.

In many cases, the company just can't reasonably pay what the "market" suggests the role should get. In these cases, it is a question of trying to point out that the value that the role brings is much more than what they're paying and that the company, upon recognizing that, should offer more.

The other alternative for the company is that they aren't losing money compared to the current set of accounting books. They may be leaving money on the table that they could get from expanding, but that's a risk.

Speaking of risk, there are a lot of risky candidates out there. It is far too easy to hire a person who fails to perform at the expected level or to train the person up for a few months in the tech stack and domain only for them to leave for a different company.

As it is, an unfilled role that has what is perceived as low compensation, to the company, is the less risky than a role filled with someone who is paid more but may not be performing - or even if they are performing aren't bringing the value to the organization compared to the revenue that is needed to justify that role.