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Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

neomindlabs.com

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Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#371

Post by s1artibartfast »

ramraj07 wrote: post #143
bluedino wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The optimal solution is for management to not let high-productivity talent from leaving - increase their comp to whatever offers they might get in the open market. >> Investment bank and management consulting figured this out a long time ago. That only works if your business makes piles of money, like investment banks. Or FAANG. The rest of us have a % of money to spend on talent.

The rest of you waste more money hiring 5-10x more mediocre engineers to try to mitigate the bus factor or whatever. And it's still not as good a product as it will be built by a handful of good, over paid and over worked engineers who really know what they're doing.

That is a hypothesis that may be true in some cases. In other cases it may be better to have two redundant engineers at 150K than one at 500k.

The idea that there is a single solution is absurd.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#372

Post by khalilravanna »

hinkley wrote: post #340
khalilravanna wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes: https://www.levels.fyi/

See, I always have trouble with 'stock'. I need more details. Is it a stock grant, or an option grant? Because with a publicly traded company, they'll let anyone buy options. The difference is that I don't have to wait 2 years, but I also don't get to wait three years if things aren't great at 2.

AFAIK it’s a stock grant with a vesting (going to assume 3 year, 1 year cliff) period. So after 4 years at BigCo I own $200k in BigCo stock.

I agree, options would worthless. They only seem valuable for startups where you’re paying pennies against the potential of a $10/share IPO.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#373

Post by giantg2 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #144
giantg2 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the B2B contracts restrict the organizations from hiring each other's employees. This is pretty common. My company has at least two partnerships where these types of conditions are present.

> Sometimes the B2B contracts restrict the organizations from hiring each other's employees. https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-offer-415-million-to-...

That is because they are competitors, so this becomes an anti-trust case.

The scenario I'm talking about when you bring in a company as a partner. For example, we work with TCS and the contract states that we can't hire their employees and that TCS can't hire our employees, at least not to work within the partnership. We partnered with another company and as part of that contract we are transferring people them with the promise that we will not hire them back for a year or two depending on their position.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#374

Post by opportune »

codegeek wrote: post #168
sjburt wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really fail to see the distinction. If someone is willing to pay 600k for something, then the value of that thing on the market is 600k. That is what a market is.

I would argue that FAANGs have the ability to overpay in many cases and still acquire talent which skews market wages. A FAANG can possibly pay 200K to an average developer who would otherwise may be make 120K in a regular company. So now the developer thinks they are worth 200K everywhere.

And then the developer switches jobs 1-3 years later to another FAANG or somewhere that pays in the FAANG range for $260-300k... seems like market rate to me

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#375

Post by s1artibartfast »

sJ646U9k6c6gME9 wrote: post #167
bluedino wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The optimal solution is for management to not let high-productivity talent from leaving - increase their comp to whatever offers they might get in the open market. >> Investment bank and management consulting figured this out a long time ago. That only works if your business makes piles of money, like investment banks. Or FAANG. The rest of us have a % of money to spend on talent.

> The rest of us have a % of money to spend on talent. If the % of money allocated to talent is so low that the business cannot survive, then the business has no intrinsic right to survive. One possible exception to this would be a mission-driven non-profit, but that's not what we're talking about here.

If the business can't turn a profit and pay engineers at the same time, of course they shouldn't survive, but I don't think that is what they were saying.

There are plenty of viable business solutions that don't require paying every engineer 500k+.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#376

Post by atq2119 »

Aunche wrote: post #171
game_the0ry wrote: post #23

I agree with the author's point about using popular tech stacks to alleviate the ramp-up time for new hire productivity, but that is not the optimal solution. The optimal solution is for management to not let high-productivity talent from leaving - increase their comp to whatever offers they might get in the open market. That's how labor economic works - it's a market. Investment bank and management consulting figure…

Not all companies need $500k engineers or can afford them. An optimization at Netflix that improves performance by 1% may save them millions of dollars. The same optimization at a medium-size company may only save them a few thousand. Also, it's much more difficult to quantify the impact of a software engineer compared to investment bankers and consultants. The latter two are directly making money for the firm.

> it's much more difficult to quantify the impact of a software engineer compared to investment bankers and consultants.

This depends to an incredible degree on what kind of "consultant" you're talking about. For the traditional "strategic consulting" type consultants it seems basically as impossible to quantify as for software developers, or rely most other people working in large companies.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#377

Post by Fronzie »

mnm1 wrote: post #182
game_the0ry wrote: post #23

I agree with the author's point about using popular tech stacks to alleviate the ramp-up time for new hire productivity, but that is not the optimal solution. The optimal solution is for management to not let high-productivity talent from leaving - increase their comp to whatever offers they might get in the open market. That's how labor economic works - it's a market. Investment bank and management consulting figure…

You're asking that businesses think about long-term goals, efficiency, and what is best for the business. After having worked at over a couple dozen companies, I've never seen such an attitude from any business. Industry and size are irrelevant. Occasionally things line up by accident and the business does well, but every single business I've ever worked at or seen has a culture of shooting itself in the foot: * No t…

There does seem to be a slight difference between stock-owned and founder/family-owned business, in my experience.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#378

Post by bananaface »

liability wrote: post #285
bananaface wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. It's just succinct and communicates what's happening effectively. There's no grand conspiracy to create some underhanded psychological shift in the workforce at large... God, it's so ridiculous. Business slang like this comes from managers bored out of their minds trying to be concise and make corporate interaction marginally interesting. What other word would you recommend? Lured? Hired? They're not as p…

The only sense in which 'hired' is less precise is that it doesn't communicate that the former employer is bitter about the situation. Otherwise "they hired people who worked for me" and "they poached my employees" describe the same thing. If the bitter attitude is important to express, then it could be phrased as: "They hired people who worked for me and I have a stick up my ass about it."

"Hired" does not communicate that the other employer was the instigator.

"Did the employee reach out, or was he poached?"

I just do not think it's worth getting anal about the terminology. Who gives a shit if your old employer says "poached" when you just got a $50k pay rise?

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#379

Post by ghaff »

jdmichal wrote: post #361
ghaff wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. And again this comes back to the bus factor. If someone disappears off the face of the earth for whatever reason that will hopefully not precipitate a major crisis at any company with more than a handful of people.

I never said anything otherwise? I'm unsure what you're trying to get at. Are we just agreeing with different words?

Yeah, we're agreeing. Hope for the best, expect the worst.

Re: Developer won’t get hit by a bus, they’ll get hired by Netflix

#380

Post by ghaff »

rl3 wrote: post #200

Being on the receiving end of poaching is simply a failure to compete in arenas beyond compensation. Not only must you compensate your talent at the top of the market and then some (including generous equity), but you must give your employees an amazing work environment with excellent work/life balance, while providing something for them to work on that motivates them on an ideological level. When any part of this ae…

>Not only must you compensate your talent at the top of the market and then some (including generous equity)

How is that actionable advice for companies competing with the richest companies in tech? You can indeed (hopefully) do the other things you say but you may simply not be able to afford to compensate them at top of market if that market includes Google or Netflix.

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