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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?

#171

Post by diob »

HWR_14 wrote: post #120
diob wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What came first, the chicken or the egg in your scenario? Did they stop doing great work because the rewards didn't match? Or did you stop matching because they stopped doing great work? Always hard to tell.

It's not hard to tell at all. You could just, wait for it, make the rewards match the expected great work and test that way.

I definitely agree. Pay what you expect (great for great work), and if someone isn't cutting it let them know (chance for improvement). Worse case, let them go.

Instead, most companies reward no one and wonder why the good ones leave or burn out ("weird, they don't contribute at the same level anymore").

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

#172

Post by barbazoo »

yupper32 wrote: post #160
barbazoo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Missed opportunity really. That's a year of not having a conversation about something that's bothering you. Sure people can live their lives however they want, but talking about issues, for me, on average resulted in better outcomes than not talking. That applies to romantic relationships as well as professional ones.

Somehow people seem to think it has to be one sided when it comes to professional relationships with your employer. Maybe it's a lack of structured, routine, two sided feedback that makes people not bring up issues around compensation. Maybe employers should ask proactively if the employee is happy with their compensation.

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

#174

Post by [deleted] »

ggggtez wrote: post #31
slibhb wrote: post #26

They don't? I was given an 11% raise (without negotiating) this year because the tech company I work for wants me to stay. I could probably get more by leaving and finding a new job (15-25%) but 11% is more than enough to convince me to stay. Also, there are factors other than money at play, such as not having someone breathing down your neck, having coworkers who are nice, respecting your superiors, and so on. I hav…

Your anecdote proves the point. If your friend was paid more, they might not have left. But in essence what you highlight also shows why companies don't pay to keep people to stay. Instead of paying someone money who hates their job, they might prefer paying less money to a new grad who isn't burnt out on their culture yet.

[deleted]

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

#175

Post by burntoutfire »

WYepQ4dNnG wrote: post #113
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…

Totally agree, that's exactly how it works for me. I join a company, work hard the first year to get a promotion and do the fun stuff, after that, I relax and stick around to vest most of the stocks and leave around the 2nd/3rd year. I have seen so called "architects" at big co that had been there for decades bringing absolutely no value to the table. And always asked myself why would the the company retain, promote…

There are jobs for architects out there.

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

#176

Post by throwawaysleep »

cyb_ wrote: post #141
throwawaysleep wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The objective is to 'do a good job' Nobody has that objective except the very passionate. A company will happily do a shitty job if it will still get paid. See IBM. See Facebook and Google on customer support. > Doing the 'bare minimum' to keep a job is actually generally far under-performing My manager hasn’t seemed to notice that I work a 1/3 of what I used to now.

Or perhaps they have and that is why your performance ratings are flat, you get a lousy annual raise/bonus (if any), and your career is stalled?

Except they aren’t flat. I worked hard the first two quarters. Got a 5/6. Did very little this quarter and also got a 5/6.

So I’m basically just vegetating until I quit.

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

#177

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

errantspark wrote: post #87
b3morales wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not really making an independent measurement here. You see developers "stagnating" and moving on; how do you know that's not caused by lack of pay increases and other things you're doing (letting people pick new projects, for example, to keep them interested)? Maybe if you did "go out of your way to retain employees" you'd have employees who end up making your business even more successful during their longer…

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…

>...I can't help but stop caring about the job I'm doing when it's only real utility to me is that I don't have to put in any effort to keep having it.

Yikes! That's my current situation in a nutshell. My biggest concern is that I don't want to risk jumping ship and landing at a toxic company/team, or landing in a bad work culture.

Don't get me wrong, I've got a nice vision about what I want to do where I am, but I can't get the money to carry it out, so I'm in that "no to low effort" stage.

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

#178

Post by tikhonj »

teawrecks wrote: post #140
wpietri wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would look at inverting the causality there. If your data is accurate, I think it's better to say, "Most companies create developer jobs that get boring for people after 24-36 months." I was chatting with a Trader Joe's cashier Sunday. It turns out they change jobs every hour. That was a surprise to me; when I long ago worked in a grocery store, I was assigned to one position for 8 hours for every shift. Why does T…

That's a great idea on TJ's part. I have also wondered how giving some amount of project ownership to low level employees would help with morale. In grocery stores you see every little thing optimized by a marketing team; from the way products are stacked, to what the cashier is allowed to say to you. But what if some of these jobs were given to the employees? I think we need to let workers be more creative. Give the…

> But what if some of these jobs were given to the employees?

This seems like another thing Trader Joe's does—I've been to their stores in a few places I've lived, and while they always have a similar aesthetic, a lot of the specific decorations seemed to be unique per store with nice local details. Of course, this could still be done in a totally top-down way—hiring local consultants or something—but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of that was done by the store employees.

> And that makes sense when the goal is to make money.

Abstractly, I expect that this isn't the best way to make money. Modern management practices seem to value legibility and control even at the expense of expected income and company resilience. This probably says something fundamental about our culture, philosophy and incentives, but I'm not sure exactly what!

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

#179

Post by cjvirtucio »

wpietri wrote: post #86
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…

I would look at inverting the causality there. If your data is accurate, I think it's better to say, "Most companies create developer jobs that get boring for people after 24-36 months." I was chatting with a Trader Joe's cashier Sunday. It turns out they change jobs every hour. That was a surprise to me; when I long ago worked in a grocery store, I was assigned to one position for 8 hours for every shift. Why does T…

This approach reminds me of the DevOps practice of breaking down information silos: make everyone learn a little bit of everything so that no one becomes a risk.

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

#180

Post by satellite2 »

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…

The only honest and sincere answer gets downvoted to hell. The world is really burning.

I just hope it doesn't mean HN is transforming into Reddit, with all the zero sum game people scaring and demotivating each other.

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