Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

marker.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 515 posts

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

#361

Post by SavantIdiot »

bern4444 wrote: post #350
SavantIdiot wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lu…

> my first mortgage was $600/mo just outside the Bay Area Is that in todays dollars or what it was at the time? If it's in today's dollars that's just incredible.

1990 dollars, $1200 in today's dollars according to this site:

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

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

#362

Post by austinl »

wpietri wrote: post #86
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 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…

I stayed at my previous company for five years, but worked in four different roles across that time:

- 1 year doing iOS frontend/product - 1 year doing low-level iOS systems - 2 years as a PM - 1 year doing backend

I was never bored. I think giving engineers the flexibility to move around (provided they stick with one thing for a year or so) is a great way to retain folks. I can also say my efficiency during year 5 was fairly absurd (I won't necessarily say overall productivity was higher at the very end, since my interest in the company was waning, but I saved a lot of time by knowing exactly who to talk to and how systems across the stack worked).

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

#363

Post by bern4444 »

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 think what this misses, which I saw in another comment, is the take here is an individual one.

If someone leaves and gets a 20% raise, while it may be an isolated incident, I believe it's more often than not an example where the market rate has shifted up and a company is slow to catch on.

While you may find someone new who's willing to accept $x instead of $1.2x, there is likely a large difference between the person being hired and the person leaving which represents the 20% discrepancy. And there's a cost on both sides that's not captured in the 20% differential.

As others have said there's the loss of institutional knowledge and know how. But the new person may also be more junior or is switching domains and so has less experience and thus willing to accept a lower salary.

It also takes a decent amount of time to hire someone new. Usually at least a few weeks. And I'm sure it can take longer. Sometimes 1 person leaving also means you really have to hire 2 people to be as effective as you were before. And of course, the new hire may end up asking for $1.2x anyway if they negotiate.

When all this is said and done, my personal belief is a 20% raise is far cheaper for retention just by the numbers.

There may be several non math based reasons for not offering a 20% raise to retain someone, but purely by the math I think its always going to be cheaper to give a 20% raise.

TLDR: I think this possibility is a false equivalency that just because you can hire a new person at $x means you're in the same spot as before.

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

#364

Post by BackBlast »

salt-thrower wrote: post #341
BackBlast wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 Why is it a character weakness? Why is it bad for you? By putting in low to average effort and switching jobs often, I doubled my salary in 5 years. All the while, I've had tons of time for vacations, hobbies, and having a life outside of work. And I've never gotte…

I didn't say anything about working extra hours, I specifically said low effort during your billable hours.

Sounds like you're talking about the extra time that some places seem to expect. If that's what we're talking about - I totally agree that it's not worth it.

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

#365

Post by salt-thrower »

jollybean wrote: post #275
akiselev wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This doesn't quite work because employee productivity assessment is very grey, and there's a lot of goodwill assumed in the equation. It's difficult to measure employee productivity. Sometimes, managers don't care. Sometimes employees make every effort to hide their lack of productivity. Despite that we might think of companies as 'evil' - most of them are not. We're all human, none of us like laying people off or fi…

You don't have to think of companies as evil. They are not inherently immoral, but they certainly are amoral. They will let you go the moment it is no longer profitable to keep you. Have you been through a layoff before? The executives wring their hands, talk about what a tough decision it was, uproot dozens to thousands of lives - and then get a nice fat bonus when the cost savings reports come in, and the stock value goes up.

Things like that teach me that corporate "good will" is an elaborate show. You are an expense to them, a necessary expense to achieve a certain output. You are paid your market value, not penny more. If they can pay you half your salary to get the same output, they will. If they can lay your team off and get significant cost benefits, they will. You are disposable. That doesn't mean they're bad people, they're just doing what any self-serving profit-seeking bureaucracy would do.

Thus the relationship between an employer and an employee is always transactional, and any feeling otherwise is an illusion. It's not evil - it just is.

The only asterisk to all of this is if you're at a more community-focused organization like a non profit. But the vast majority of companies that employ HN readers are not that.

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

#366

Post by madrox »

vbtemp wrote: post #106

My all-time highest HN comment was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23563997 Basically, why do I get such big raises when I switch companies, but getting a nontrivial raise when at a company is like pulling teeth? How come every company I work for is willing to give me a huge raise and reward me for my achievements at other companies, and not do the same for achievements at that company? The discussion that…

The short answer is that this is how it is in a growth industry with high talent demand. If you were, say, a grocery bagger, you wouldn’t see that kind of salary jump. The moment coding is no longer an in demand talent, this won’t happen anymore. Hope you retire before that happens.

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

#367

Post by salt-thrower »

BackBlast wrote: post #364
salt-thrower wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Why is it a character weakness? Why is it bad for you? By putting in low to average effort and switching jobs often, I doubled my salary in 5 years. All the while, I've had tons of time for vacations, hobbies, and having a life outside of work. And I've never gotte…

I didn't say anything about working extra hours, I specifically said low effort during your billable hours. Sounds like you're talking about the extra time that some places seem to expect. If that's what we're talking about - I totally agree that it's not worth it.

Ignore my last sentence then. All I mean is, I get paid the same whether I put in half effort or full effort. Full effort, which can lead to burnout and stress, is a cost to me. Why would I increase personal cost with no monetary compensation for doing so? They're already paying me for half effort and I keep being told that I'm doing a great job. So I'm not going to go out of my way to do more.

Edit: if I could double my output and know that my salary would double too, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I've never found a company with a comp structure that can actually achieve that. It's far more effective to just go on autopilot for a year or two, then get a 30% raise at a new job. Rinse and repeat.

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

#368

Post by nokya »

The analysis looks very reductive and seems to ignore the scientific knowledge about what motivates employees to quit/stay.

One thing we know for sure: most people don't quit a company, they quit a manager. Companies are traditionally bad at identifying good managers. I think poor loyalty is mostly symptomatic of poor management.

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

#369

Post by majormajor »

bern4444 wrote: post #363
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 think what this misses, which I saw in another comment, is the take here is an individual one. If someone leaves and gets a 20% raise, while it may be an isolated incident, I believe it's more often than not an example where the market rate has shifted up and a company is slow to catch on. While you may find someone new who's willing to accept $x instead of $1.2x, there is likely a large difference between the pers…

This was a growing company making an active effort to pay market rate - I realize this doesn't apply to everywhere.

At the point where the market rate has shifted that much and my employer hasn't caught on, I'm out the door myself. ;)

"Maybe the replacements suck in comparison" is certainly something we would've noticed - happily, it wasn't the case.

But we were hiring basically constantly, since there was no team that had enough people for the work the company wanted to do, even before attrition. So we had a good feel for what we could get for the money. If someone on the team can do better elsewhere, though, more power to them - I would certainly take that opportunity too.

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

#370

Post by bern4444 »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #361
bern4444 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my first mortgage was $600/mo just outside the Bay Area Is that in todays dollars or what it was at the time? If it's in today's dollars that's just incredible.

1990 dollars, $1200 in today's dollars according to this site: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Wow, yeah what a different market. Even with a high paying SWE job, home ownership for me (mid twenties) continually feels like an always increasingly expensive goal that grows more distant of achieving.

Cool to read though about what you posted earlier!

Post reply on HN