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Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
281–290 of 515 posts
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#282Earlier 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.
Changing projects is only half of it, though. Let's say I want a new project. I can search for a new team internally, find a mutual match, sign on, start and.....keep my current salary. Or I can search for a new team externally, find a mutual match, sign on, and get (in most cases) a significant raise and a new sign-on bonus. Even at a company I like, there's a significant incentive to leave.
Only difference would be, that in current company it is more easy to get an understanding if new project management sucks.
> People hire at companies, bbut leave their boss.
In my anecdata thus rings true.
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#283You have to see this from the point of view of a middle-manager whose main concern is his own career and salary. First, it's much easier to manage junior than seniors, more so when you are not an engineer yourself. Also, it's more likely you get a better salary when managing a large team of junior than a small team of senior. Even better, you can become a manager of managers if there is a bunch of juniors to manage.…
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Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#284Strictly if they aren't pro-actively paying competitively, they either won't honestly match and or if they belatedly do, you shouldn't trust them because they will repeat it again.
This isn't just for programmers or engineers - it's any job.
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It seems like the optimal strategy would be to do the minimum and then job hop since the pay increase is greater and getting a raise for working hard is not certain.
I personally have not seen much correlation between pay working hard and getting pay raises, it seems about as likely as getting one for doing the minimum, and the effort to dollars ratio is usually not worth while. I don't want to put in 50% more effort only to get a 5-10% raise. Plus, as stated before, switching jobs results in much bigger pay increases making the raises irrelevant.
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#286Earlier 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.
Changing projects is only half of it, though. Let's say I want a new project. I can search for a new team internally, find a mutual match, sign on, start and.....keep my current salary. Or I can search for a new team externally, find a mutual match, sign on, and get (in most cases) a significant raise and a new sign-on bonus. Even at a company I like, there's a significant incentive to leave.
This is true in many cases but internal transfers can still make sense.
Searching costs are a lot lower internally (no leetcoding needed in most cases, hopefully) and you are more likely to be able to land something outside of your current skillset, increasing your long term compensation and job security.
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#287Many 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…
Especially for younger engineers (I'm thinking of software engineers in this case), it isn't just about money, but also experience. It is really easy to get type-cast into a specific role in the company and it can be hard to break out. One developer I interviewed spent 10 years maintaining one pearl script. Just one. He wondered why he was having trouble finding a job. Don't be that guy. But it is also about the mone…
20% used to be good. These days, it’s something like 35-80%, it seems, according to Blind. My last job swap resulted in a 100% pay increase (10 YoE).
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#288Earlier 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 made about $50k/y at a two different midwestern companies. I was getting paid about 2x the per capita income. I was able to buy a house with a double lot with a nice fenced lawn for $60k (no typo there, yes, $60k).
I was reasonably paid for the area. Sure, I could have been making more if I was to go to a different company (challenging in '09). I'm making more now for a different employer in the midwest.
The thing is that there are companies that don't make $100k/y revenue for the work that the devs do. There are also devs who are willing to work for $50k/y in the rural midwest (which is better than other jobs in the area pay).
To assume that those devs should be paid the same as one in SF would have ultimately meant a loss of jobs in the area as the business wouldn't be able to afford to do that.
There are plenty of places that are not the mid west that are paying more.
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#289Many companies do pay for people to stay, but its debatable if its worth it. The last company I worked for gave me significant golden handcuffs. Probably 30-40% more than I could get elsewhere. They had a "cost of replacement player" policy, where they count the cost of hiring, sourcing, training over the years, etc, and come up with a number thats almost always way above market rate for people who have been around a…
Devs also leave after completing all the meaningful, interesting work and finding there is none left. It feels good to build and launch a product - or even add features that can have an impact on the bottom line. It is something very different to work on a list of features that you know very few people, if anyone at all, are going to use. Same goes for maintenance.
Exactly why I left a job and abandoned a $10k retention bonus. The work was interesting and fun, but approaching zero users.
Re: Why don't tech companies pay their engineers to stay?
#290To 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…
A year to learn, a year to earn, a year to yearn is how I’ve heard the cycle explained.