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

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

#321

Post by tayo42 » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:51 PM UTC

abrokenpipe wrote: post #285

satellite2 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm still waiting to get a cut of those millions I keep saving the company with these projects lol

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

#322

Post by hellisothers » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:52 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #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…

I hadn’t looked at it this way before, this is a good lens, thanks.

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

#323

Post by jjav » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

yupper32 wrote: post #117

paul_f wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineers especially can take on side projects to supplement their income. Maybe a bit less focus on the day job to reflect the below market pay. Keeps things in balance.

I don't know. How much time do people put into side projects that make money? 15-20 hours/week? I work 40 hours/week at a Big-N, but if I put another 15-20 hours per week into my current job I'd get promoted extremely quickly, and get a bigger raise from that promotion than any "side project" I could come up with. I don't want to do any of that, and moving companies is still probably the easiest way to get a large ra…

> if I put another 15-20 hours per week into my current job I'd get promoted extremely quickly

That'd be a very rare circumstance.

In most jobs working 15-20 hours overtime each week only gets you 15-20 hours less for living your own life, nothing else.

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

#324

Post by hiq » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

hiram112 wrote: post #50

hiq wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in the F500 corporate and contracting world Why are you stuck with this world if there's a clear ceiling? > at best I'm going to get a salary offer of maybe $180K If you get a $20k increase every 2 years starting from $160k by hopping jobs, that's way more than your yearly 2%. If you're in the right location, the only risk is to quit a job 2 months in because it's actually not what you expected and come back to a c…

> If you get a $20k increase every 2 years starting from $160k by hopping jobs, that's way more than your yearly 2%. This isn't how it works. The $180K is the max I could get in my industry, and that's because the previous max in 2014 or so of $140K (which I did get) is basically tied to inflation or about 2.5%-3%. So while I've been getting 1.5%-2% raises for 7-8 years, I've been missing out on that extra 1.5%, whic…

> The $180K is the max I could get in my industry

How do you know that for a fact? I think you hint at this a bit in your previous comments, but if your city / field are small to the point that every employer is like any other and that there's no variance in compensation, you're SOL. One way to solve this is remote work, if applicable to your field.

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

#325

Post by randomdata » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #135

suifbwish wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t surprising. 3 years is about the length of time it takes most humans to become bored with monogamous relationships. There is a very high rate of breakups and divorces in non arranged relationships by the 4th year.

The divorce rate for the first 5 years is less than 20% in the the US. The US has a higher divorce rate than many countries so, in general, this is untrue.

I'm not sure you've shown that. I would be surprised if any meaningful number of (non-arranged) marriages are established in year zero of the relationship. A quick Google search suggests to me that the average relationship is established five years before getting married.

The original assertion was that relationships tend to break down in year four, meaning that they aren't likely to make it to marriage in the typical case. Marriage data is only relevant to the outliers who married early, and as far as that goes they could all be found in that 20% quite easily, I'm sure. The data provided is not sufficient to know.

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

#326

Post by the_rectifier » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

hunter321 wrote: post #236

wkimeria wrote: post #223

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.

False. In many teams half of the engineers are randomly put on pip and cannot switch team.

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

#327

Post by cletus » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

There are several factors:

1. Organizations will often see bumping up an employee's pay to match another offer as some variant of extortion and it's they view this as disloyal. Never mind that the other offer clearly shows they're now below market. I didn't say it makes sense;

2. There is friction in changing jobs and companies and people will generally have a threshold for making that jump (eg they won't switch for less than a 20% raise). So over the entire pool of employees it's cheaper to let a few go than give everyone a raise when many wouldn't leave;

3. Companies have a philosophy that you do the job you get promoted to first and then you get promoted to it and paid subsequently. Worse, often it takes time for things like equity to catch up. You may get a discretionary grant when you get promoted or you might not. And it can take years of annual refreshes to get to the total comp off a new hire at the same level;

4. Organizations seem to make the standards higher for existing rather than new employees. I think this is in part to avoid level and compensation inflation;

5. Up to a certain point there is an expectation of growth. Some of this is formal (eg up to T5 at Google). Some of it is more informal. They make the determination that even though you're at a terminal level and that's fine, if you've been there for years you're probably not going any higher so you won't be one of their future leaders or stars; and

6. Diversity. Tech companies have explicit goals around having certain minorities essentially over-represented compared to the demographics of, say, CS graduates. I guarantee you such explicit goals create perverse incentives that extend to how they handle retention.

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

#328

Post by toephu2 » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:58 PM UTC

modeless wrote: post #73

mensetmanusman wrote: post #17

The flaw with this argument is the assumption that the value add of a given skillset is approximately equivalent in different environments. We see this for example on a larger scale in OLED tech, where a key OLED engineer in South Korea might be worth $250k to the Korean Economy but worth $2.5M to the Chinese economy, which is why poaching was halted by classifying the job as a national security interest. The profit/…

Valuable tech employees at FAANG absolutely make seven figures.

Per year? Usually only director and higher levels make $1m+/yearly (not accounting for stock appreciation).

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

#329

Post by alain94040 » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 9:59 PM UTC

munchbunny wrote: post #22

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…

I'm not fully convinced that this is just about the devs. 2-3 years is also about how long it takes for a nascent project to transition into a mature one, and when that happens the culture and energy of the team tends to shift. The same dev that thrives in one setting might end up out of place in the other.

randsinrepose has a great article on that concept, called the old guard. Definitely worth a read. How an engineer goes from an exciting new project to maintenance mode over time. It's the natural state of things.

https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-old-guard/

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

#330

Post by toast0 » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 10:01 PM UTC

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #188

bookofsand wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of companies ask for a 'we own everything you breathe' agreement as a prerequisite for employment. The vast majority of employed software engineers don't have the luxury to work on side projects, unless they relinquish the IP to their employer for no additional compenstation, which renders monetization moot.

It depends on your country/jurisdiction. Most countries I worked in, anything done after hours, not using company resources, and not in the competition space of the employer is simply allowed. No company would be able to enforce that. In fact (I have had that happen) if the contract tries to over reach, in particular regarding IP, then that clause could just be made void in court.

If you work for a big company, there's not much out there to work on that's not in the competition space of the employer.