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Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

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171–180 of 218 posts

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#171

This is fairly coming financial technology except less base and more bonus. I've seen plenty of $500-800k base with 4x bonus (and more especially if you are close to the money or on the front desk). I think it is very healthy. It creates tiers in the profession because some developers are that much better. Being good glueing together frameworks isn't going to command that salary.

Sorry, where?

In the UK at least, you're talking about the top couple of dozen in any of the major investment banks. Only a couple of hundred in any given bank make more than a million total comp.

https://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/159654/everything-y...

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#172
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 80-90% of it is in stock / options with vesting (as I'd suspect it is based on that article) it is likely only true after the targets / target dates are hit.

> If 80-90% of it is in stock / options with vesting (as I'd suspect it is based on that article) it is likely only true after the targets / target dates are hit. My initial reaction was: Does anyone actually do this? If someone says "salary" package, I'd assume all of it is cash. but then I took a peek. > Top performers can make $1 million in salary and bonus a year, plus options, according to people familiar with i…

Because each of those data scientists are a billion+ dollar per year lottery ticket. $3mm per year is a steal when you look at it that way.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM did some tests and they found about a 15% improvement and this was across the board so no change between average and high performers

I'd love to read that study if you can find a reference.

steve mcconnell rapid development mentions the study where I found the 15% figure quoted.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#174
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first problem there is monetizing it. If nobody can pay for it, nobody is going to get together to make it.

Maybe we should get rid of capitalism, then. It's obviously not doing the job of allocating resources to beneficial goods or raising productivity.

Now you're actually striking at the root of the problem.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#175
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked as a contractor for a while at a company that was pretty much entirely great developers, but they had one guy who had more experience than nearly everybody else put together (he was in his 50s, and had worked on all sorts of cool things in his career), who was also more productive than anyone else. The founders of the company knew he was their top producer, and so they gave him whatever he wanted (within the…

I think you've got Facebook and Google reversed. Facebook is famously all open-plan. Google has a mix of open plan areas and mini 4-person offices with doors, along with other configurations.

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Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, our buildings at MS are transitioning to open space. We now have a large room for each team. Everyone has a height-adjustable desk that can be moved around within the room and a pair of good quality headphones. Each room has its own small meeting room for devs to have long design discussions, and a larger conference room that is shared with the room next door. For making phone calls, there are really nice phone…

That's discouraging. MS did a study to determine offices improved productivity, so what happened?

Open office = more dense work areas = profit

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#177
post #119
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally love working close with my team in an open-setting. That's the reason I go to office every day even though my employer offers WFH. I just prefer turning around and asking a question or have a quick discussion. If everyone is working from home or in their personal offices, I hate having to get on a call or schedule a meeting to gather everyone to a meeting room for a quick discussion. Sure, at times it ca…

I think people need to state what kind of work they do when offering their preferences in these discussion. Some complicated development tasks require 100% uninterrupted concentration for several minutes at a time. You're sitting there trying to build and maintain an extremely complicated model in your head, involving many complex parts, and their interactions along a time line, introducing permutations of that model…

Many complicated development tasks also require a high level of collaboration -- because there's simply too much for one person to be an expert in all of it.

I'd imagine that most highly-paid engineers are effective at both.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use some judgement when asking. If getting the answer in one minute saves you one hour, it is obviously good for the company to "waste" the other person's time. You should definitely be careful not to waste the time of your coworkers. Just don't waste your own time either!

If everyone used their judgment this way, in a team of six, there are five others trying to save their own time and punishing the person who's worked to build up some knowledge. This has to be fixed by ensuring that the bus factor improves and the knowledge is spread around more. I disagree that the solution is to let everyone interrupt the one who is trying to get stuff done.

> punishing the person who's worked to build up some knowledge. ... I disagree that the solution is to let everyone interrupt the one who is trying to get stuff done.

In essence we are talking about training new people and so this opinion seems selfish and unethical with respect to one's obligation to the firm.

The senior person should sacrifice some productivity until the new people are up to speed so that eventually the team has 5 senior people instead of one. If the new people are forced to figure out everything on their own, they might be only 5% as productive as they could be for perhaps their first 1-2 years. If the senior person simply gave up 20% of his time in order to answer questions for the first couple months, these 5 new guys likely would be closer to 80% productivity, representing a huge net gain in aggregate.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#180
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh" Google? Facebook?

Channeling that old quote: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

Yeah, I could have done things much more important. But this is what I do to make money. sigh...
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