Live data from Hacker News

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

marker.medium.com

241–250 of 515 posts

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

#241

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 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.

"Nobody has that objective except the very passionate."

This is very cynical and pretty much wrong.

I would put that attitude probably in the bottom 20%. I think most people want to do a good job.

It's also kind of toxic because unfortunately it spreads.

'Doing a good job' frankly, often does not even mean working harder, from a lower-performing perspective it usually just means actually paying more attention and being more conscientious.

And yes - in a large corporate situation, it's very often sometimes to feel the impact, be recognized etc. etc. - but that shouldn't dissuade from basic professionalism.

If you're truly only 1/3 as productive, your manager surely notices, but there's probably little they can do about it. It may not be to their benefit to even try to fix it.

This is what I mean by systematic decline - this is how bridges never get built, and they go 10x over budget.

This is why NASA spends $200 Billion on only a few launches.

It's why Ford/GM can't innovate.

What Space X and Tesla are doing is in some ways spectacular, but in other ways, they are just doing what they are supposed to, and they can, because people are just doing their jobs.

Life is a giant Prisoner's Dilemma. We can all spend our time trying to do the minimum, or even taking the cream off the top while nobody is looking, in which case, when everyone starts doing that it all comes down - or - we can try to be consistently conscientious.

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

#242
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…

I worked with an engineer. She told me that when working at her previous company they permitted you to switch teams every 2 years. Every 2 years she would take that opportunity and got to work on a huge variety of projects with lots of different people. Some of them good, some of them not. It kept her there for 12 years or so.

Interesting. Not for developers, but essentially the same thing happens in the UK civil service.

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

#243
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…

Seeking that band sounds to me like an optimization trap as it wrongfully assumes the cost of churn from gambling it is less than the cost of turnover and growing salaries. It sounds a bit like deciding where we really need to cut costs are deep sea oil rig gaskets.

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

#244
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…

I worked with an engineer. She told me that when working at her previous company they permitted you to switch teams every 2 years. Every 2 years she would take that opportunity and got to work on a huge variety of projects with lots of different people. Some of them good, some of them not. It kept her there for 12 years or so.

I've worked at a (giant well known) company/bank in New York that basically mandated that people switch jobs internally every 18 to 24 months. It was part of the expectations. I was there for 4 years. I had 3 different roles in 3 different teams.

It helped a lot in fact in doing quality work. Thinking that you will inherit things you didn't do. That some other people will inherit your work / decisions. And always learning new things / keeping best practices in mind.

It's something I've kept in mind everywhere I've been.

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

#245
> we intend to create a formula that takes into account title, years of tenure, and performance to create a compensation graph that scales with company impact as closely as possible. By making it predictable...

Performance is hard to measure. It is highly dependent on the biases of the person measuring. So despite having a "formula", the outcome is not at a all predictable.

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is your expectation something along the lines of, "if you are loyal to the company, the company will be loyal to you"?

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

#247
There was an interesting paradox last time I was a people manager.

Sometimes people would leave and get a bigger raise than we'd budgeted for them for that year. But at the same time, we never took long to hire a replacement at the same budget we'd been paying them. This required us to be diligent at doing market adjustments when necessary, but also led me to some other thoughts on compensation: if we think employee A is worth $X, and they get a job offer for $X*1.2, neither company has to be wrong. Maybe there's a bigger need at the moment in the other company. Maybe they're going to be working on something more valuable to that company than they were working on here. Maybe to us they've been a solid but non-exceptional performer, but the other company sees potential for them to do more in the interview. Maybe the other company just has more to spend. Maybe they're the third best-performer on the team, and we chose to allocate more to the top two people, so can't do as much to keep them as they'd like.

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

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect there is a correlation between companies that have a culture of letting engineers change roles/departments (and a clear process for doing so) and retention/average tenure.

As much as everyone hates on Amazon, no manager can block a internal transfer, maximum they can do is keep you for 4 weeks (with a very, very good reason). The average tenure on many, many teams is 6 months. Does help starve off the boredom.

That's untrue, a manager can put their employee into a performance improvement program (without even needing to inform them) which would block them from any internal transfers.

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

#249

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.

"Nobody has that objective except the very passionate." This is very cynical and pretty much wrong. I would put that attitude probably in the bottom 20%. I think most people want to do a good job. It's also kind of toxic because unfortunately it spreads. 'Doing a good job' frankly, often does not even mean working harder, from a lower-performing perspective it usually just means actually paying more attention and bei…

Won't somebody think about the poor bridges that never got built!?

For real, If there is any single problem with the world its people doing too much. The oceans didn't fill with plastic from people sleeping in. The air didn't fill with CO2 because people clocked out early on Fridays.

Take a step back and look at life. Why should it even be work? Do birds sow seeds? Are monkeys bad programmers? Or, are they just monkeys?

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

#250
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as everyone hates on Amazon, no manager can block a internal transfer, maximum they can do is keep you for 4 weeks (with a very, very good reason). The average tenure on many, many teams is 6 months. Does help starve off the boredom.

That's untrue, a manager can put their employee into a performance improvement program (without even needing to inform them) which would block them from any internal transfers.

How does a pip effect improved performance when the employee isn't even aware they're in one? Is trying to switch teams the only way to discover that, or are there other indirect ways?
Post reply on HN