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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?

#191

Post by SubuSS »

t-writescode wrote: post #181
smueller1234 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you. I’ve gotten a bit tired of hearing people talk about their absurd compensation as though it’s their yearly earning and that everyone should get it, only to ignore the part about it vesting quarterly starting 1 year after reception, over 4 years.

When people talk about comp, they usually talk about the # of $$ they took home last year - anything else is magic money so to speak.

For the same reason a manager isn't going to value a $10MM grant in company that ended up being a penny stock, he isn't going to downgrade a company that resurrected from the pits either. Money in hand last year is the best measure possible/available.

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

#192

Post by odiroot »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #103

Many engineers are on their way out when they announce their departure. If they said: "hey, I'm thinking about joining this other company for a better compensation", that would be a topic of discussion. Most engineers instead tell me: "hey, I signed a contract with this other company. This is my last day". The other point is that money is not the only motivator (esp. in our industry). People just like change, either…

> Last, signing bonuses are quite large...

Is it a US-specific thing? Never heard of anyone getting it.

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

#193

Post by ctvo »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #154

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…

There's a lot of implicit loyalty here. You're very loyal to Intel even when they didn't treat you the best. Why? What happens when you underperform, will they show you the same loyalty?

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

#194

Post by yawaworht1978 »

Unless the engineer doesn't provide some business value way beyond expectations and a promotion is done, it will all come down to the cfo and HR, that's the reality. That pair has financial objectives and they have data and experience to know if hiring new(with all costs involved) or increase a salary makes more sense to their bottom line.

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

#195

Post by munchbunny »

closeparen wrote: post #158
nostrademons wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with this. While the flavor of the year frontend stack might change, since 2008 when I started dabbling in frontend, the fundamentals really haven't changed: understanding DOM, understanding the JavaScript execution model, understanding the layout models, understanding the complexities of dealing with data binding over asynchronous events and simultaneous users, and so on. jQuery didn't change any of that (although it drastically improved ergonomics). Angular didn't. React didn't either.

My experience has been that paradigms and tools can move fast and are relatively straightforward to pick up. Deep understanding of the underlying problem domain and the systems underneath the abstractions is harder to pick up, but the concepts move more slowly.

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

#196

Post by omgwtfbbq »

satellite2 wrote: post #180
jollybean wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

This is a braindead opinion. Why would anyone work as hard as possible when there are 0 incentives to do so? When at any moment you could be fired without warning in a mass layoff and when even the highest performers only get 5-10% raises per year when jumping ship gives you 20%+ . You want good work then create the incentives for it, currently there are none.

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

#197

Post by mikepurvis »

vsareto wrote: post #81
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…

I don't think pay increase will help stagnation. Maybe picking projects will if the company has enough variety. The best cure for stagnation I've found is to take long breaks and get into something else.

Agree. I've been at my place for 11 years now, and have had four very distinct roles over that time. Each change gave that revitalizing jolt of fresh challenges, technologies, etc, but with the benefit that I got to keep my seniority, influence, expertise with the in-house systems, and so on.

Have I given up potential pay bumps by not going external? Sure, probably. But I have enough to be comfortable and my company has treated me well, both monetarily and in facilitating these kinds of changes when I've wanted them.

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

#198

Post by quanticle »

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…

> 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).

That's exactly the same web-dev mindset, only applied to backend code. I find it remarkable that you take a half-life of 12 months to be a given, rather than a screaming red flag.

Yes, the world changes, and code needs to change along with it, but it doesn't change that much. Replacing 50% of your codebase every 12 months, year after year, indicates to me that the organization is just replacing poorly architected code with different poorly architected code, not better code. The codebase is on a random walk, and any forward progress it makes is due to chance and evolutionary pressure, rather than reason and design.

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

#199

Post by simonh »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #152
jollybean wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Sure that’s fair, but I’ve been very fortunate to have worked reasonably or very well paid jobs most of my career. Those jobs also enabled me to develop valuable skills. I think it’s only fair I put in a good effort in return.

Yes if business priorities change I could end up out the door, and that happened once, but no hard feelings. I quit all my other jobs anyway and there was nothing malicious either way.

The clothes on my back, and those if my children, the house we live in, the car we drive all were paid for by my employers. Yes it was a transaction, but a beneficial one on both sides. It’s all good.

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

#200

Post by ryandrake »

vbtemp wrote: post #106

My all-time highest HN comment was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23563997 Basically, why do I get such big raises when I switch companies, but getting a nontrivial raise when at a company is like pulling teeth? How come every company I work for is willing to give me a huge raise and reward me for my achievements at other companies, and not do the same for achievements at that company? The discussion that…

I remember that thread (and replied to it!).

It's important to remember the whole "30-40% raise when you switch jobs" only really happens at the beginning of your career. Your next job switch will maybe be 20-30%, your next one 10-20%, etc. until you reach the inevitable compensation plateau. I'm over 20 years into my career and my last job change was for +1% or so. No company would offer more.

If one could actually get a 40% bump every job change perpetually through their entire career, someone who starts at $100K would only have to change jobs seven times to reach >$1M. No way on earth that is happening for the vast, vast, vast majority of tech workers who job hop.

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