Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Compensation as a Reflection of Values

oxide.computer

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 96 posts

Re: Compensation as a Reflection of Values

#41

Post by bcantrill »

petr_tik wrote: post #33
bcantrill wrote: post #29

If folks are interested (and in the spirit of keeping things positive), I'm happy to answer any questions here about our comp philosophy or about Oxide more generally.

Unrelated to comp. I have seen several of your talks and I cannot wait to hear you speak at a rust conference of some kind. On that note, how involved will Oxide be in the rust foundation?

Yes! We love everything that's happening with the Rust Foundation and want to find a way to be involved that's helpful to them -- and in fact you're reminding me that I have an e-mail to follow up on! ;)

Re: Compensation as a Reflection of Values

#42

Post by darkr »

smasher164 wrote: post #15
vecplane wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an employee's impact is more valuable, why shouldn't that employee demand to be paid more? If a job or position is less valuable, why shouldn't that position be paid less?

The question could be flipped around as "why should they be paid more/less?" The goal is to treat the salary as a necessary (evil?) for "what you need to feed your family, buy a house, etc..." and not as the primary motive for work. An employee who makes a valuable impact does so because they want to see the company/product succeed.

If you’re paying salary based on financial needs of the employee rather than value added, then this is also something that varies massively - the debt-free happy-go-lucky 24 year old who lives in a house share, who had college paid for by her parents has wildly different income needs to the 35 year old still paying off college debts, whilst supporting a mortgage and a family of 6.

Re: Compensation as a Reflection of Values

#43

Post by sokoloff »

gfodor wrote: post #27

The big question of this is if it's creating "culture debt" that carries interest or not. Specifically, when the time comes to introduce varying comp, will there be blowback and possibly worse dynamics than if it had been that way from the beginning? Will anyone ever make less than $175k? I think unless you are certain you want to maintain this forever (and it doesn't sound like Oxide does, they see this as probably…

If I think as a leader who has seen an org policy change or ten, I predict that they’ll make that change slightly too late, such that it will be obvious to everyone why it’s practically mandatory to do so.

If it’s done from a position of strength and obvious need (“we’re growing so fast that we need to bring on a commissioned sales team!” or “we now have thousands of customers who need support but aren’t willing to pay their share of then-$200K to get basic support questions answered” or “we’re expanding into a new office compound where we have to have a security team patrolling to keep the campus safe and we’ve decided to make them employees and give them equity so that they can share in the upside of our company!”), then it will be totally fine.

If it’s done from weakness and spiraling downwards, well, it’s just one more bummer speedbump along that road, but it’s the road that sucks not that particular speedbump.

Re: Compensation as a Reflection of Values

#44

Post by bcantrill »

fhrow4484 wrote: post #39
bcantrill wrote: post #29

If folks are interested (and in the spirit of keeping things positive), I'm happy to answer any questions here about our comp philosophy or about Oxide more generally.

I understand your desire for employees meeting more-than-basic needs, while the company equity is currently monopoly money. Is "commitment to excellence" not a value? If one were to join Oxide but was mediocre, they would surely get fired. But on flip side, if they use their unique combination of skills & discipline, potentially at the expense of some personal sacrifice to bring a ton of value to the company, while s…

Well, as a clarification: one doesn't join Oxide, but rather gets hired by Oxide -- and we have a deliberate hiring process that is designed to assess candidates with respect to their fit for our mission and values. This leads to a deeply intrinsically motivated team, which addresses some of your concerns.

As for potential upside: yes, everyone has an equity component; if we succeed together, there is more than enough upside for everyone.

Edit: grammar.

Re: Compensation as a Reflection of Values

#45

Post by bcantrill »

dvnguyen wrote: post #35
bcantrill wrote: post #29

If folks are interested (and in the spirit of keeping things positive), I'm happy to answer any questions here about our comp philosophy or about Oxide more generally.

Thank you for sharing. I’m curious if you include equity as a part of the compensation package?

Yes, it's essential to us that everyone has a stake in Oxide's success. (The blog entry hits on this; apologies if that was unclear.)

Re: Compensation as a Reflection of Values

#46

Post by sokoloff »

dataangel wrote: post #8

I think one unlisted negative of this is leaving people feeling like they can't voluntarily choose to work less. I have seen many people make the conscious decision to take a smaller workload with the expectation of a smaller bonus. I would anticipate in such a workplace that although fewer people will be motivated to work themselves to the bone, that inevitably there will be some people who will anyway either becaus…

Over long periods of time, I’d prefer my very valuable engineers and product leads limit their work to 20 hours of the deepest possible thinking and work they can do per week (maybe in 4 or 5 4-5 hour chunks) and then stop, attend to the inevitable non-product, shallow-thinking-OK busywork that also comes with a company or large team structure.

I believe I’ll get more out of teams and individuals working in that model than I will from teams grinding out 60 hours a week of keyboard pounding with hands and foreheads.

My job as an engineering leader is not to get that 20 hours of focused work up to 30. It’s to get the busywork from 20 (or 30!) down to 12 so my teams can crush it while working only 32 hours per week.

Re: Compensation as a Reflection of Values

#47

Post by 0xB31B1B »

bcantrill wrote: post #29

If folks are interested (and in the spirit of keeping things positive), I'm happy to answer any questions here about our comp philosophy or about Oxide more generally.

What type of research did you do before you made this compensation choice? I understand lawfirms have a similar comp model for associates (7 years of lockstep pay increases before partner). Did you find any other industries that gravitate to this structure? If so, what did they have in common? What benefits do they see from this choice and what are the drawbacks?

Re: Compensation as a Reflection of Values

#48

Post by sokoloff »

majormajor wrote: post #34
smasher164 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question could be flipped around as "why should they be paid more/less?" The goal is to treat the salary as a necessary (evil?) for "what you need to feed your family, buy a house, etc..." and not as the primary motive for work. An employee who makes a valuable impact does so because they want to see the company/product succeed.

> The goal is to treat the salary as a necessary (evil?) for "what you need to feed your family, buy a house, etc..." and not as the primary motive for work. This seems shortsighted. Even after your immediate needs are covered, you can be a long way away from being comfortably able to feed your family next year, in ten years, in twenty years, even if things change. An employee who demands as high a salary as they can…

Presumably at Oxide’s stage, the equity is the towards financial independence vehicle and the salary is covering the bills until that lottery ticket is scratched off and its value determined.

In this case, you are being paid $15K per month to work to make that ticket pay off.

Re: Compensation as a Reflection of Values

#49

Post by sokoloff »

wwww4alll wrote: post #28

Compensation is simply what people ask for and accept as fair. Too many developers do not negotiate and simply accept lower compensation. If your are a software engineer with a job offer, ALWAYS negotiate for higher salary. Most likely, you will get increase from first offer. If not, go find a company that will offer the higher increase.

There are companies who will offer you $X - $10K and negotiate up to $X if you fight them for it. There are other companies who will offer you $X + $5K and never negotiate.

For multiple reasons, it’s nicer to work at the second, but your algorithm ensures you’ll always choose the first type.

Re: Compensation as a Reflection of Values

#50

Post by bcantrill »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #47
bcantrill wrote: post #29

If folks are interested (and in the spirit of keeping things positive), I'm happy to answer any questions here about our comp philosophy or about Oxide more generally.

What type of research did you do before you made this compensation choice? I understand lawfirms have a similar comp model for associates (7 years of lockstep pay increases before partner). Did you find any other industries that gravitate to this structure? If so, what did they have in common? What benefits do they see from this choice and what are the drawbacks?

Honestly, none -- it really just came out of our own experience (e.g., I have always been a believer in not paying people differently by geography), and it evolved exactly the way I described in the blog entry.

And indeed, we had no intention of writing about this at all, but when asking for how we could improve our hiring process, one of the consistent pieces of feedback was that we didn't specify the pay -- and that we were unclear about our policies with respect to remote work. This was kind of a "well, should we tell 'em?" moment inside of Oxide -- and there was a broadly shared belief within the company that this was something we needed to be talking about. And here we are! ;)

Post reply on HN