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

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

#331

Post by toephu2 » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 10:02 PM UTC

heisgone wrote: post #2

You 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.…

> problem is that an employee cannot earn more than his boss

Actually this is quite common at FAANG companies.

E.g., I make more than my boss.

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

#332

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

satellite2 wrote: post #255

omgwtfbbq wrote: post #196

Earlier 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…

But in this scenario nothing stops the company to disclose the salary only themself.

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

#333

Post by BackBlast » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 10:04 PM UTC

pnutjam wrote: post #226

simonh wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure that’s fair, but I’ve been very fortunate to have worked reasonably or very well paid jobs most of my career. Those jobs also enabled me to develop valuable skills. I think it’s only fair I put in a good effort in return. Yes if business priorities change I could end up out the door, and that happened once, but no hard feelings. I quit all my other jobs anyway and there was nothing malicious either way. The clot…

What if my low effort is better then the other guys on my teams "good effort"? You're also selling yourself short. You paid for all that stuff. Your employer paid for the work you did, and probably took more whenever they could; through on-call, off hours work, etc... I try to comp my time, but I know I put in more then I'm compensated for, even when I was technically "hourly". I'm fine with that, but I expect to tak…

Putting in low effort during your billable hours is a personal character weakness that you are cultivating. You should avoid it because it's bad for you, not just being unfair to your employer. Regardless of your relative effectiveness.

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

#334

Post by light_hue_1 » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 10:04 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…

You're leaving out some serious costs incurred by your company and team. The loss of institutional knowledge, the loss of expertise, business process knowledge, personal relationships that could make hard changes much easier. Sure, you hired someone for $X instead of $X*1.2 but in terms of work done you probably missed out on a lot and came out way behind.

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

#335

Post by the_gipsy » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 10:05 PM UTC

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…

Self-fulfilling prophecy?

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

#336

Post by mmarq » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 10:06 PM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #104

errantspark wrote: post #87

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…

Actually working more than the bare minimum in an environment where hard work is not rewarded, is the second most sensible thing to do, after leaving. Should you work hard so some shareholders can buy a yacht? It is the job of management to reward and incentivise hard work, and not the job of individual contributors.

Fighting over surpluses is a very healthy dynamic, it’s a mechanism for individuals and organisations to understand the importance of each other’s contribution, produce price signals and improve the efficiency of the system. Instead pretending that a salary negotiated 10 years ago still matches the value of my contribution produces all sorts of distortions (eg productive employees being blocked in less productive organisations).

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

#337

Post by salt-thrower » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #104

errantspark wrote: post #87

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…

If a company can make twice the profit for half the effort, they will. Why should I behave differently?

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

#338

Post by walshemj » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 10:09 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.

It would take several weeks to get to grips with a new team / project - must be very hard to get much work out of a team member before they are off.

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

#339

Post by SavantIdiot » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #320

jimsimmons wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your view. The thing is people are constantly resume building these days. And that resume is never done. You get a good job? Wouldn’t it be great if you got your name on a couple of cool things in your new place? After that returns start diminishing and people are quick to leverage and move on. I came to CA hoping to find mad coders lost in thought of their projects. All I see are career athletes

The problem is that his view has cost him millions of dollars. Not job hopping is a multi million dollar error his the part of them and their colleagues.

Eh, but I'm at the end of my career: in hindsight, what would I have done with that extra salary? Bought a new BMW every year, or owned a "premium beige" McMansion with a pool? Or two McMansions?

I'm not a status-shower, and the salary increase wouldn't have been enough to be filthy rich (e.g., buy an island). I can't complain though: I ended up about to retire a multimillionaire despite not job-hopping. But I was lucky, I guess, my first mortgage was $600/mo just outside the Bay Area and I sold for ~8x what I paid after living in it for decades. Plus early in life I was forced to pick cheap hobbies that I stuck with: reading and backpacking. :)

My only regret is not taking better care of my back cuz now I can't sleep on a Thermorest+eggshell anymore, and all the fiat currency in the world can't fix that. Feh!

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

#340

Post by majormajor » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

light_hue_1 wrote: post #334

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…

You're leaving out some serious costs incurred by your company and team. The loss of institutional knowledge, the loss of expertise, business process knowledge, personal relationships that could make hard changes much easier. Sure, you hired someone for $X instead of $X*1.2 but in terms of work done you probably missed out on a lot and came out way behind.

I think you're both overestimating those costs and also underestimating the difficulty of just being able to suddenly pay 1.2X for people.

Re: institutional knowledge and expertise, etc - we tried to avoid too much concentration. If all the institutional knowledge for system X is tied up in person Z, what if they want to take on to a new roll, or I want to ask them to work on a different system or a new project? I like people who focus on what they can do next, not solely what they've already done. Otherwise it's a bad place for the company to be even if someone doesn't leave. Change is a constant, flexibility is good.

Re: personal relationships - morale is always something to keep an eye on, but someone having an exciting new opportunity never seemed to hurt the rest of the team's morale that much.

I think you're also making an unspoken assumption that the new hire wouldn't be superior to the person who left in some areas! The most common case of this was "generalist who built a ton of stuff in an earlier phase of the company leaves, replacement is more experienced in the specialized area that that generalist was currently working on since the company was larger now and they couldn't contribute to everything as easily," but that's hardly the only way.

And lastly, as I alluded to about budgeting more to keep the top two performers than the third - I think you're overestimating the amount of effort and/or success put into by the average developer at becoming the go-to expert on specific techs or business processes. If I tell my manager "I know the second most about React, the third most about Node, and the second most about the plugin system business logic" I'm not going to expect them to find me irreplaceable.