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Great developers are raised, not hired

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Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#151

Post by manfredo »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #142
salarycommenter wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an alt specifically for discussing compensation because I know it elicits that reaction and I don't want that associated with my professional identity. I think discussing compensation frankly and openly is very important. People have no idea what is possible. Two people on the same team at the same company can have wildly different compensation. My goal with this alt is to get people to take the biggest slice…

Any advice on learning your true worth? Assume for a minute that Glassdoor is useless, as the "salary range" it displays shows that the maximum is 2-2.5x the minimum.

There is no "true worth" that you can look up on a website. Your salary is your cost in the labor market. And like any market, worth is determined by what people are willing to pay. Go out and interview, get some offer sand see who is willing to compete for you. That's how you get your true worth.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#152

Post by veritas_veritad »

salarycommenter wrote: post #107
luminati wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off topic - but your username and the vast majority of your commenting history is primarily on salaries. Curious - is there some backstory to it? Feel you got severely underpaid? To each and his own, but bay area engineers pissing about making ONLY 300K has always come off as being a bunch of spoilt brats - especially considering the vast majority just gem/npm/pip install this and that and glue all the code together.…

This is an alt specifically for discussing compensation because I know it elicits that reaction and I don't want that associated with my professional identity. I think discussing compensation frankly and openly is very important. People have no idea what is possible. Two people on the same team at the same company can have wildly different compensation. My goal with this alt is to get people to take the biggest slice…

I for one appreciate your pushing so hard. Your increased compensation means that I get to charge more for myself.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#153

Post by [deleted] »

vetinari wrote: post #131
chrisseaton wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you match their pay rise? Or give them projects they're more keen to work on?

Usually, the teaching/mentoring is not free either. So you can a) hire someone who needs training and then train them, or you can b) hire someone who is productive since day 1. The people in a) cannot expect the same salary as b). Otherwise, there would be no point in incurring the costs of training them. Unfortunately, once you train them, someone can snatch them as people in b). You incur the loss, someone else ben…

[deleted]

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#154

Post by wool_gather »

vetinari wrote: post #131
chrisseaton wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you match their pay rise? Or give them projects they're more keen to work on?

Usually, the teaching/mentoring is not free either. So you can a) hire someone who needs training and then train them, or you can b) hire someone who is productive since day 1. The people in a) cannot expect the same salary as b). Otherwise, there would be no point in incurring the costs of training them. Unfortunately, once you train them, someone can snatch them as people in b). You incur the loss, someone else ben…

> Unfortunately, once you train them, someone can snatch them as people in b).

But this "someone" includes the current employer.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#155

Post by neilv »

We're in a labor market in which CS students are focused on drilling for the FAANG-style whiteboard tests. And many will tell you their strategy is to go to Google for 2 years of experience and resume-building, and then leaving rather than grind away and play the promotion game there. And everyone has known for 20 years that you have to job-hop to grow your salary in this industry. And most employees would be naive to think that their employer would take care of them long-term.

In this mercenary environment, loyalty doesn't go very far, so, for retention after mentoring, I assume one would have to pair mentoring/training with substantial growth in compensation. Besides all the non-monetary attractions.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#156

Post by ergothus »

msluyter wrote: post #20

I officially mentored someone at my previous company and helped him move from a support tech role into a software dev position. It was incredibly rewarding. But to play devil's advocate for a moment, isn't there something of a natural disincentive to level up one's employees in such a tight labor market? To follow the author's analogy, by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someon…

> if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted

Not only is this a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you don't invest in your employees, the level of waste is larger.

I recently posted an article on LinkedIn about this very topic: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/most-common-web-dev-hiring-mi...

Note: I shamelessly plug one of my new-developer friends at the end.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#157

Post by IggleSniggle »

luminati wrote: post #88
salarycommenter wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently switching jobs for a personal record 57% increase in total compensation. And I was NOT poorly compensated before. I was already in the 99th percentile for individual income. The harder I push on comp the more I get each time. I am not going to lie and say that it didn't take years to build to this point in terms of skill, work record, professional network, and interview ability. It took three FAANG companie…

Off topic - but your username and the vast majority of your commenting history is primarily on salaries. Curious - is there some backstory to it? Feel you got severely underpaid? To each and his own, but bay area engineers pissing about making ONLY 300K has always come off as being a bunch of spoilt brats - especially considering the vast majority just gem/npm/pip install this and that and glue all the code together.…

I feel for people working in video games and in the space industry. Often they enter those industries because of passion, although I think in aerospace it's more common to stay for longer because you end up working with technologies that just don't apply well to most other industries (lots of DSLs that most businesses don't care about).

As for CRUD glue...hard call about long term labor market. There's a lot of slip-shod working being done to hold up other slip-shod work. I think there's a good analogy in "unregulated construction." You can hire anybody off the street to build you a shed. If you have money to throw at it, though, you still might be willing to pay 15x to hire a well-vetted professional who will make something both beautiful and lasting.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#158

Post by FakeComments »

Roritharr wrote: post #40
techcode wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps msluyter was thinking of big companies that smaller ones can't match on spending power. Either way - if you trained/grown someone to become much more valuable for other companies and still can't create enough value working for you... Then you have a different problem.

This the technically true, but also a very tough starting position. If my six person startup has issues squeezing as much value out of my Dev than FANG companies with all their support structure and research into this, this is only to be expected, imo. So yeah, it's a problem, one on the list of many problems most companies have though, so it's oversimplified to simply say:"Let's just pay for expensive training and h…

I’m not sure I understand your point.

Let’s imagine that I work a job for three years, and a company spends $30,000 training me over that time period, when I then leave because that training helped me reach a better career position.

If they hadn’t paid for that benefit, I would have left after only two years — because the need to transfer for career advancement would happen sooner. This would save them $20,000-30,000 depending on how you count.

So what’s the net difference?

In scenario 1, they received a ROI of 1 year of improved labor, and 1 year of doubly improved labor. Additionally, the fixed costs of hiring are amortized over three years instead of two, and so decrease by 33%.

So for $30,000 they decreased my hiring costs by 33% and received two years of increased quality labor — say 5-10% productivity. Hiring an engineer is 25-50% of their yearly salary, so they’re saving 8-15% of my salary over three years. The productivity of an engineer is going to be like twice their salary, just to pay overhead and profit. So we’re looking at a boost of 10-20% my salary in their revenues.

So they’re looking at ~15-25% of my salary as the return for spending $10k/year. Naively, it seems like that pays off in many cases: it just requires you operate in a trust based manner.

Re: Great developers are raised, not hired

#160

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

wccrawford wrote: post #47
msluyter wrote: post #20

I officially mentored someone at my previous company and helped him move from a support tech role into a software dev position. It was incredibly rewarding. But to play devil's advocate for a moment, isn't there something of a natural disincentive to level up one's employees in such a tight labor market? To follow the author's analogy, by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someon…

>To follow the author's analogy, by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted. Even more curious is that IT culture is basically that if you want to get paid what you're worth, you have to quit and go to another company. So these companies put all this effort into raising a better developer, and then refuse to pay them what…

I think the problem is largely isolated to companies in decline or stagnant -- which unfortunately is most companies.

At a growing company, if you're a growing individual, there's room for you to rise.

At a stagnant or declining company, if you're outperforming your boss, there's a strong incentive for your boss to want to keep you down to keep his/her job.

In a growing company, your boss might be happy to get your promoted to his/her level. Instead of subordinate, now you're a potential ally on the same level. I think in a healthy environment almost anyone would see that as appealing. In a stagnant company, that could be mean your boss loses the job. Almost anyone would see that as unappealing.

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