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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?

#261

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…

I personally want to do a good job, but some companies make that hard to employees, albeit sometimes inadvertently. Whether it's by tying people up in politics, having them do busywork, or just failing to reward them.

To give an example, at one of my previous jobs, for several years in a row I was noted by my managers as being a high performer and someone who would be ready for leadership. Despite this, I got an average (you did good but that's it) performance rating, because only a few people could get the higher rating. The first year I had just joined so I was excluded by default, the second/third year other people ranked higher and because that rating only went to about 2 people, I missed out. When after this my manager approached me about a lead role, which was extra responsibility but no extra pay, I was pretty much done.

When I was in my 20s-30s I hated people who seemed like they checked out, but I understand that a lot more now. Again, I'll do a good job regardless and if I don't get rewarded for that, I'll find the door and go elsewhere, but I completely understand why people who don't have that luxury or drive would rather keep their heads down and just go through the motions.

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

#262
post #81

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.

That is really good advice

I am in the same shoe of feeling stagnating this year and trying to figure out how to get out of it. The boringness and familiarness just drags along ...

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

#263
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…

It may well be true, but I doubt it for companies like AWS, which has enormous infrastructure, many implicit and explicit processes, and a peculiar culture to run such processes and leverage such infrastructure effectively. Losing good people means losing guardian of such culture, mavens of the infrastructure, and custodians of the processes.

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

#264

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). 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, an…

Remember that the architecture competency in FAANG exists in the context of a 2-3 year average tenure. And this elides a tendency to change teams internally even more frequently than that. It is unlikely that a senior engineer rated "Exceeds" at design and architecture in Silicon Valley has ever learned from or been evaluated on the consequences of their own decisions at more than 4 years out. Median probably one yea…

An average tenure hides a good number of people with longer tenure than that. I'm personally a counterexample to your point, for instance, and I know quite a number of others on other teams at my company (one of the FAANGs).

Turnover is definitely not uniform and a 12 month architecture lifespan is not, in my experience, either normal or healthy.

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

#265

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…

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

I'd buy that most people want to do a good job. I doubt very much that many care much about doing so, beyond what's necessary or what they expect to gain them greater compensation, at the job they do to earn money to pay the bills. Everyone I know with even a little of that "spark" has had it extinguished by experience. Usually before they're 30. Most reserve their good work for things that pay little or nothing. They care a lot more about that.

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

#266

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…

The big problems you raise are not because employees are not working 100% they are complex and have various causes. Employee productivity isn't in the top 10.

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

#267

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…

I really struggled with this a few years back. I was adamant that I didn't want to "play the salary matching game." My boss insisted they didn't have the budget for a raise. I didn't want to job hunt, then bring my new offer to my boss, etc. I let myself be underpaid for at least 3 years because I was sure that my results should speak for themselves. Then I got really bitter and fed up. I got a job offer that was a 5…

We got bought by Accenture some time back.

After we were on system amd thelr regular processes were in place suddenly a lot of people got a massive raise to match the min amount of money this position at this seniority level has to earn.

So far so good. But imagine the surprise of management when people weren't happy about the raise (10 20+ percent in not few cases) but a lot of resentment was voiced for being paid too little for years stating that there isn't enough money for raises and once big corporate brother rules that there is a minimum salary to be paid the money can be shelled out.

I can totally relate with the colleagues who are currently looking at other options because they feel that they were lied to over the years.

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

#268
It's a sellers market right now, so jumping job to job is beneficial. Companies are willing to pay top dollar and salaries are on the rise.

I like this approach. It incentivizes and rewards. Even if things changed and this turned into a buyer's market, it should help with employee happiness. Buyer's markets tend to drop employee happiness as employees feel trapped.

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

#269
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…

This all just screams of issues with poor tech leadership.

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

#270
post #86
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…

Didn’t know that about Trader Joe’s, it’s really smart. To your point: for many companies out there it may be easier to raise compensation a bit rather than to figure out interesting tasks for their engineering force. Business usually wants its employees to solve specific problems, most of them mundane.
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