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Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

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Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#151

Post by wobbly_bush »

lakevieew wrote: post #91
ukoki wrote: post #3

> The hard truth that many companies struggle to wrap their heads around is that they should be paying their long-tenured engineers above market rate. From an ethical point of view, maybe. From a rational point of view, maybe not. Jobs are "sticky" — it's a pain to apply for jobs, arrange interviews, deal with the possibility of getting rejected. And if you do get an offer and accept you will be leaving colleagues th…

People here on work visa (H1-B) have to go through renewal of their work visa application as it is tied to their employer. This step while being fairly straightforward can add to the inertia in switching jobs.

> This step while being fairly straightforward

Gone are those days when this was straightforward.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#152

Post by BoxOfRain »

jollybean wrote: post #104
errantspark wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. Honestly if I can get a 20% pay raise by switching jobs, my job is to do the absolute minimum amount I can do to stay under the radar, why would I try? If I wanted to try I would go work somewhere else. There's just a complete mismatch in how much the company I work for values the experience and skill I gain over time and how much everyone else values it. Over time recruiters come to me with opportunitie…

"my job is to do the absolute minimum amount I can do to stay under the radar, why would I try?" Because it's a form of systematic corruption, maybe the biggest kind of corruption in the White Collar world. The objective is to 'do a good job' , not the minimum, in every endeavour. Doing the 'bare minimum' to keep a job is actually generally far under-performing, as most companies won't generally let people go. It's h…

How come in your mind there's an onus on the employee to work as hard as they can but not on the company to pay that effort what it's actually worth? Unless there's a genuine emotional reason that transcends your salary (such as in community/nonprofit work) the relationship between an employer and company should be transactional in my opinion.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#153

Post by justicezyx »

Kranar wrote: post #11

To chime in with my own anecdotal opinion that is likely to anger some people... in my experience most developers do their best work after about 6-8 months of starting a job at a new company, and that comes to an end after about 24-36 months of working at the same company. After that the vast majority of people just stagnate, get complacent, the job stops being interesting to them and they move on. After observing th…

Developer stagnant?

I was in Amazon and Google, I never saw a case where the developer stagnant before the product/management went into stagnant.

Developers just write code, and they just accumulate more knowledgeable and skills with the stuff they work on. How can they stagnant is something not obvious to me at all...

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#154

Post by SavantIdiot »

I don't really understand this article, or the current trend of job hopping. I'm from the generation where you have one job, maybe two, and that's it: I've had 7, but I really only ever wanted one good job.

For some perspective: when I left Intel circa 2010, I was a Senior Staff Engineer fighting to get promoted to Principal Engineer (followed by Senoir Principal, then Fellow, then Senior Fellow, hahaha). FYI I loved Intel for the first 10 years, and hated the last 12.

I made $130k base salary, $70k typical bonus (EB+ECBP), and stock options (most of which were worthless). This was after over two decades there, started in '88.

Recently, a friend (12 years younger than me) was hired by Intel to work in one of the ML groups. He asked if the starting salary was fair: they offered him $400k. I was angry, jealous, and shocked. I have friends that are STILL there, grinding away at sub-200k base salary after nearly 30 years, and they are too scared to leave.

So this idea of coders flitting from job to job just seems so alien to me. I'm obviously from a different generation. I don't even know what I would ask for pay if I ever left consulting. Headscratcher.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#155

Post by austincheney »

The most important phrase in that whole link:

    in proportion to their impact
Perhaps if software teams didn't write such shitty software it would be easier to qualify things like profit sharing and equity. I would certainly prefer to have half the salary if that means I were earning a nice slice of the quarterly profit.

Unless you are selling software to a customer software is always a cost center. It is a tool, a means to end, which may enable business down the road but at any moment is just a money sink. That said it is generally lower risk for all parties to allow developers to write shitty software than attempt to connect software releases to revenue change.

In the world of web most developers I have worked with over my nearly 2 decades toil in configurations and composition. There is little or no application creation, and the application creation that does occur does so by a few internally trusted individuals irrespective of their pay or title.

To be very clear shitty software decisions almost always come down to a single question: Is a given decision primarily focused on business goals or developer preferences. For example is Spring MVC, Angular, or whatever a consideration because it will save the company $10 million over the next 2 years or is it because the company is more invested in hiring developers than internally training them?

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#156

Post by Dunedan »

cproctor wrote: post #102

What if a company actively encouraged its employees to interview at competitors, and to welcome, even expect, external offers as part of discussions around professional growth, roles, and compensation? They could call it "peer review." The company would offload the work of finding market rates onto its competitors while potentially gaining insights into competitors' operational logic. And as a machiavellian bonus, th…

That's what Netflix does: https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-encourages-employees... (version without paywall: https://archive.is/mdMr9).

Also check out their culture document, which is quite interesting as well: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#157

Post by smueller1234 »

paxys wrote: post #107
modeless wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valuable tech employees at FAANG absolutely make seven figures.

That's a stretch. A staff/senior staff engineer (or equivalent) at FAANG will top out at mid-six figures annually, maybe more than that if there was a lot of stock appreciation since it was granted.

Nitpick: From the PoV of the (public tech) employers, they typically look at compensation not including appreciation of the restricted stock. It's typically "base + bonus + new stock grant value" or sometimes "base + bonus + value of the restricted stock that vests this year, but using the value at GRANT time, not at VEST time".

More specifically as an employee, I think any incremental value from holding the stock is not compensation FROM the company, since the employee equally has to carry the risk of stock prices going down.

Of course, practically, one's cash flow in any given year is "base + bonus + actual value of the stock that vests in the given year" and can be vastly different from how the company does compensation planning. And this is also what determines income taxes (unless I'm bizarrely mistaken about how income taxes work in some jurisdictions).

Having been a manager at multiple public tech companies, I'll say that this has led to very many 'interesting' comp conversations and not everyone comprehends the distinctions here -- regardless of what's arguably more 'correct'.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#158

Post by closeparen »

nostrademons wrote: post #147
closeparen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's specifically a disease of the frontend community to believe that nothing you knew about programming 3 years ago is relevant anymore.

Nah, not really. My second example has to do with internal frameworks inside a FAANG, where the average half-life of code is about a year (i.e. half your code is deprecated or deleted a year after you write it). I've observed similar technology shifts with backend code (where MySQL was hot in 2003, PostGres in 2006, MongoDB in 2009, Cassandra in 2011, PostGres again in 2015, and now there's this huge explosion of sto…

I don't think workers' entire skillsets are obsoleted by any of those changes, unless you specialized in trend-chasing (obvious risk) and maybe if you refused to board the NoSQL train. But even now those 2003 RDBMS skills have a place again! High scalability companies are back to using traditional DBs where it makes sense.

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#159

Post by ren_engineer »

jollybean wrote: post #104
errantspark wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. Honestly if I can get a 20% pay raise by switching jobs, my job is to do the absolute minimum amount I can do to stay under the radar, why would I try? If I wanted to try I would go work somewhere else. There's just a complete mismatch in how much the company I work for values the experience and skill I gain over time and how much everyone else values it. Over time recruiters come to me with opportunitie…

"my job is to do the absolute minimum amount I can do to stay under the radar, why would I try?" Because it's a form of systematic corruption, maybe the biggest kind of corruption in the White Collar world. The objective is to 'do a good job' , not the minimum, in every endeavour. Doing the 'bare minimum' to keep a job is actually generally far under-performing, as most companies won't generally let people go. It's h…

in a world of at-will employment, why would anybody go the extra mile for an employer?

Trust and loyalty are 2 way streets, the social contract has been broken by corporations

Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?

#160

Post by yupper32 »

barbazoo wrote: post #146
yupper32 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day you were underpaying them, so I'm not sure putting the "blame" on the employee is the right way to frame this.

It's like being in a relationship and breaking up because one is unhappy but refusing to talk to the other person about it. If you're unhappy with your pay and that's the only reason you're thinking about quitting, bring it up, what's the worst that could happen? To the people that say "retaliation", I find that highly unlikely. Every single place I've worked at, at least tried to accommodate me.

It's more like: you realize your SO for the past year has been putting in the bare minimum effort into the relationship and decide it's not even worth the conversation.
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