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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

This is just not reasonable though. The primary cost of hiring is the long onboarding process regardless of level. Especially the time cost of existing engineers.

Underpaying a new engineer doesn't solve anything. It's honestly just shortsighted laziness or already having a staff of engineers who aren't good enough at their craft or communication to be good teachers.

If you're paying someone $1000/week you're paying them $50k per year and by your staircase approach you save.... one weeks worth of salary or 2% of the first year which ends up just being an insult to the new engineer and unnecessarily making their lives harder taking money out of their pocket when they need it most (getting a new job having not had a job or having to switch with the gap in income)

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>The primary cost of hitting is the long onboarding process regardless of level.

Sure, but you would imagine the Nth week of onboarding to be more important to improving an engineer's productivity on average than the N+1th week. It may not always hold, but it's certainly what my personal experience has been.

>Underpaying a new engineer doesn't solve anything.

You could always take the money you would "save" during the staircase and offer it as an end of year bonus or some such to those who remain onboard. There's no law saying this has to result in lower pay over the long term.

>unnecessarily making their lives harder taking money out of their pocket when they need it most

It's true that such a plan incentivizes people to have some cash saved up so they can weather the first few weeks better, but even if they don't one would imagine a quality hire would be able to get a short term loan at a very good rate, considering the high likelihood that they would be able to pay it back quickly.

> but even if they don't one would imagine a quality hire would be able to get a short term loan at a very good rate

Instead of just accepting a job that doesn't have weird staircase salary structures? Good luck finding this unicorn quality hire.

Unicorns aren't who benefit from such a structure. The marginal quality hire is - the person who would be good enough if they were offered the job, but who, for one reason or another, are deemed too risky to hire at current market prices.

One only has to browse a place like r/cscareerquestions to get a sense that many people, early career especially, find themselves in this situation - stuck perhaps in the dreaded "can't get hired without experience, can't get experience without getting hired" catch 22.

The natural solution to that problem that eventually develops from your line of thinking is extended unpaid internships. No thanks.

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