This hits home for me so hard. I just left a job after 5 years of playing the loyal soldier. It's been almost 2 years since I got a promotion without a raise. My manager has been constantly working with the HR to get me as much aligned with what I should get but his hands are tied by the corporate bs that he needs to work with. I got an offer from another similar revenue/size company and I was in two minds. The company literally asked me what I wanted and then just gave it to me (nearly twice what I'm earning today). It's a shame that my current company not only didn't keep up with the market, but also dragged its feet for 2 years to keep up with its own internal compensation structure.
Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
251–260 of 515 posts
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#252Earlier 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…
I have a really hard time distinguishing between the idea that companies are entitled to some maximum of an employee's work-quality and effort and the notion that an employee is entitled to compensation amounting to most or all of the marginal value they add to a company through their labor, not just what they can convince the company to give them. Like, I don't get how one can argue for the former and reject the lat…
I think both of those ideas are wrong. A company is usually entitled to hire the most productive employees it can find for the remuneration it’s willing to offer, and an employee is usually entitled to somewhere between 50-90% of the money it can convince an employer to pay them.
Employees are never paid for the marginal value they provide, because for among other reasons, there’s no such thing. You could come up with an infinite number of different ways to calculate that, which could all produce a different value. An employee is either paid something close to the equilibrium price for the labour they’re offering, or something close to the average equilibrium price of all employed union members, if they’re a union member.
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#253I 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 remember my first day at Intel. A guy was putting his stuff in a cardboard box, never to be seen again. It was during a downsizing, and my boss reminded me how lucky I was to be an intern. "The only guy with job security."
Remarkably he's still there, and I still have other friends there, nearly two decades later. One of them writes on FB over and over about how pointless the meetings are, and complains about the stock price.
When I left, I managed to get myself an offer for the management track, via a friend on the same track. I turned it down thinking I'd probably regret it, but I decided during the internship that there was something about this apparent elevator to the C-suite that didn't quite seem right to me. The ease of being at what at the time was an unassailable monopoly perhaps seemed both too good to be true and probably hiding issues down the line, both for the business and in terms of internal competition climbing the greasy pole.
But also changing jobs every now and again has had other liberating effects. I have a lot more confidence that it can be done (since it's been done lol) but also there's a variety in seeing various businesses and people that's hard to get if you stay put. The fact that new jobs generally means more money is a big bonus on top of that. I suppose a lot of firms get a huge saving from people who don't look around much.
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>Another problem is that an employee cannot earn more than his boss, and non-tech managers salaries cap at a certain point. This is only a problem in some places and is made up problem by management. Why can't someone make more then there boss, besides ego?
Some things in life are like the laws of physics. You will simply never make more money than your manager, no matter how many economic productivity arguments you can make.
This is not one of those things:
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-common-for-a-software-engineer-t...
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's a game where you can do the minimum or more and if you do more your boss can pay the minimum or more. If you do the minimumy your boss pays the minimum, it's a zero sum game, if you do more and your boss the minimum, again zero sum because you lost energy and he won more from you but if you both do more then it's a net positive. So the optimal strategy is to do more.
Then like the cops in the prisoners game you are tricking yourself at playing the zero sum game because of trust issues.
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#256To 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…
Something that really helps me at my job is I have 2 primary roles that kind of wax and wane. When I get bored with one, there's always something to do in the other.
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#257Earlier 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.
As long as you don't talk to your manager ahead of time. I watched a colleague tell our manager that the job wasn't in line with what was explained (colleague was right, he wasn't a fit). Instead of the manager moving him into a new roll, my colleague was PIP'd. When my colleague did try to transfer, the PIP blocked it.
If you have a good manager, maybe its fine. But if your manager needs some headcount to cut.... don't trust them.
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#258To answer your question, yes they do.
Ofc this would be dependent on how critical that specific personnel to the group or company overall.
One thing to note though, when the employer is handed over the 2 week notice, for the employee, the process has been at least months in making. I don't think at that point, it is merely a matter of money, sometimes people do want to shake things up.
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#259To 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 is something I love about Facebook, fwiw. Engineers have tremendous liquidity in movement.
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"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? " I didn't say that. I said they should 'do a good job'. As should the other company staffers, execs and the company as a whole.
In an "at will" employment state - which I presume covers the vast majority of US based readers here - the final arbiter of whether someone is doing a "good job" or not is their employer. If they're still paying the employee, they must be doing a good job according to the employer's standards even if by the employee's standard they are doing nothing.