Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay? • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by SavantIdiot » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

ctvo wrote: post #193

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?

You're 100% right. I came from a long line of "work till you drop at the same job" men who never took vacation, so it was burned into me. I was loyal out of "because that's what you are supposed to do", which I now view to be an illness. Which is why I left. I was naive thinking the fun of the first decade would last indefinitely.

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

#212

Post by SavantIdiot » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:40 PM UTC

returningfory2 wrote: post #207

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…

> I don't really understand this article, or the current trend of job hopping. The answer is in your comment: your friend who started recently at Intel is getting more than double the salary of the long-timers. What's not to understand?

Good point. I would say the confusion is due to my outdated expectations.

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

#213

Post by N_A_T_E » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

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…

My title is Architect. It can be easy to stagnate. Recently I've had success working on brand new projects. Setting up the skeletons of code bases, CI/CD, database/persistence layers and internal/external dependencies before teams get onboarded. You might think of that like a glorified lead engineer. I stick around for 6-12 months to help the team get up to speed then move onto the next project.

The architect part might come into play in finding engineering economies of scale. At this point I know how many of our internal applications work so I find ways to reuse existing code and services when we start new projects.

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

#214

Post by scarecrowbob » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

I literally had this conversation with my boss yesterday, and I was a bit floored that they don't quite "get" it.

I'm the lead dev at a small co that does work, mostly custom WordPress, for gov / edu / SMB (mostly NGO or trade groups). I'm the senior technical staff... there's a junior dev and a "project manager who codes but doesn't read log files".

I've been working with this company for 7 years and never gotten a raise. We have "unlimited PTO" which really just means I have no idea how many days off I can take. I mostly work with the biz because it used to be quite flexible and was only a 30-hour-a-week commitment. That's become much less flexible as we lost the ability to stack hours without "approval", I've started to be the only person on-call, I now have a junior who more or less reports to me, etc, etc.

I'm looking for work now, mostly because the cost of realestate where I am is outpacing my ability to save for a down payment.

The thing that got me a bit worked up is that when I asked my boss if they'd ever done the math on what it'd cost to replacement (even leaving out the cost of training) and their response was that they were 100% sure I'd make more money at another company-- they are just paying me what they feel like they can afford.

Then they gave me an immediate 5% raise and 1.5% cash bonus.

None of this makes one bit of sense to me... if I leave, they are going to have to find someone (or several someones) who can operate containers in GCP, write WP/Gutenberg blocks, Figma->PHP WP themes from scratch, and write integrations/ imports/ scrapes for these sites they build.

I've been interviewing and know what that kind of work pays, and how much the folks charge for that... but this boss of mine seems prepared to let me quit rather than up my pay. For full disclosure, I'm making 70K/yr+ health insurance and who the hell knows how many vacation days.

It's fun to do job interviews after all this time, and pretty gratifying that folks are so interested to speak with me, but I'm a bit worried how this person is going to get the stuff done that I've been doing at the price they've been selling the work.

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

#215

Post by closeparen » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

t-writescode wrote: post #206

SubuSS wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not what it looks like on levels.fyi. It's regularly: "SDE 1, 110k + 75k stock options", and then levels.fyi will declare that 185, not 110 + 0, 112 + 38, 115 + 19, 120 + 19 edit: and then people will come on here and say "look! Brand new Google employees make 200k!"

That is incorrect, the stock figure on levels.fyi is per year. It does average out over the grant though, ignoring uneven vesting schedules.

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

#216

Post by dml2135 » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:42 PM UTC

SauciestGNU wrote: post #99

shagie wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the question of "could you get into a bidding war with Apple or Netflix for a tenured developer?" Is there a point where another company can pay more than the economic product of the developer at the original company? Yes, hiring and training is expensive... and the loss of domain knowledge is costly too. There are a lot of places that aren't making that much money to be able to get to "market rate". I'd als…

Similarly, there are plenty of companies here in the Midwest who think it's ok to pay devs 50k/yr, and I want to say in the strongest possible terms fuck that. Employers who won't pay an equitable wage for devs don't deserve to hire them.

I'm not really sure that equitable is the right term to use here. $50k a year may very well be in line with what everyone else at a hypothetical midwestern company is making.

I think it's always important to keep in mind that current developer salaries are the result of a constrained market and not because we innately deserve it or something. Yes it is a high-skill job, but there are plenty of high-skill jobs out there that pay much less.

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

#217

Post by mcherm » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

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.

...and that is part of why H1-B employees receive less in the way of salary and salary increases at many firms.

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

#218

Post by JohnWhigham » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

hiram112 wrote: post #29

Maybe in FAANG world, salaries really do increase linearly like the graphs from the blog showed, but in the F500 corporate and contracting world, the slope starts leveling out after 10 years of experience. A decent and ambitious dev can definitely gain 30% salary increases after their first few jumps, but once you're at the "senior" level, it's just not happening. In the first 5-6 years of my career, I jumped about 4…

Is that worth leaving a company where I've earned respect, have a lot of knowledge, know is tolerable, and where I've got "credibility" and a history with senior executives and management?

That's where you make the play of going to whoever controls your salary and saying "I've got an offer that pays much better than here. Can you beat it?" People aren't going to look at you differently for it; it's part of business.

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

#219

Post by simonh » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

ren_engineer wrote: post #159

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…

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

I work, they pay me. As long as they hold up their end, I’ll hold up mine.

What’s the alternative, against their will employment? That sounds like it would suck all around.

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

#220

Post by mcherm » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:47 PM UTC

scarecrowbob wrote: post #214

I literally had this conversation with my boss yesterday, and I was a bit floored that they don't quite "get" it. I'm the lead dev at a small co that does work, mostly custom WordPress, for gov / edu / SMB (mostly NGO or trade groups). I'm the senior technical staff... there's a junior dev and a "project manager who codes but doesn't read log files". I've been working with this company for 7 years and never gotten a…

If this is what they can afford to pay and you move on then they will get to decide whether they can eliminate your position (maybe they can focus on a different part of their business and quit building custom WordPress sites) or pay more. Or get by with someone too junior to be able to do the work but hope that customers won't notice. Or maybe close the company down.